[consumer451]

The surprising thing to me is when you look at Starlink, there was a very expensive blocker there: consumer phased array. Prior to Starlink, I think the cheapest consumer unit was around $50k. That did not stop Musk from charging ahead.

Is there some technological thing about LiDAR that would prevent similar cost reductions? Or, is it just the philosophical difference over pre-mapping, and not doing so?

[xnx]

LIDAR has seen many cost reductions as capabilities continue to increase. I don't know the area well enough to speculate how much optimization might be left.

> Or, is it just the philosophical difference over pre-mapping, and not doing so?

It seems to be a "burn the ships" style bet that the Tesla engineers will get to camera-only self driving first without having ever relied on LIDAR. It's equally as likely (or moreso) that Waymo could get there first with better ground truth data from the LIDAR.

[tim333]

>A LiDAR unit, for instance, used to cost 30,000 yuan (about $4,100), but now it costs only around 1,000 yuan (about $138) — a dramatic decrease, said Li. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...

at $138 I'm not sure there's much need to go cheaper.

[BobaFloutist]

I think it's that with Tesla he had hardware to sell (and maybe already sold?) to existing customers with the contractual promise that they'd get self-driving as soon as TESLA cracked it. Retrofitting LIDAR into all those already sold cars would have been pretty expensive at the time, and the more he doubles down the more monstrously expensive it'll get.

With Starlink, there was no baseline consumer product to sell before getting it working.

[consumer451]

Yeah, that makes perfectly rational sense to me. But, still disappointing as Musk is one of the few CEOs in a position to admit miscalculations, and pivot. The only thing I am left with is uncharitable, and it involves online ego.