
Ask HN: Autonomous Vehicles and Lidar? - jppope
So I watched the Tesla speeches yesterday, and I was surprised by the lidar assessment by Elon Musk. The main reason why I was caught off guard is that Waymo seems to be run by some really sharp people and yet they went with lidar technology. Does anyone understand the technologies to explain why Elon believes lidar to be significantly inferior?
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salty_biscuits
I'd say that the only rational reason would be cost, I can't speak for
whatever elon actually thinks. There is a significant difference in product
between waymo and tesla, i.e. taxi fleet versus consumer product that surely
influences these decisions. Waymo are automating a paid driver away, which
justifies spending more on sensors. Tesla are going for an incremental path of
replacing the driver over time, so that constrains the cost of the deployed
hardware. Saying lidar is inferior is just strange. If money, packaging and
development budgets weren't a thing then why wouldn't you have it bristling
with sensors. In fact you should probably just put beacons in the road
everywhere and in every vehicle (maybe on pedestrians and bikes too), then you
could solve autonomous driving with very old tech.

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julienreszka
He said it's expensive and bulky. Enough to make it really ugly in his eyes.

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cromwellian
Which is not a reason not to use it for a safety feature like L5 autonomy.

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julienreszka
It's also unnecessary when you have both camera vison and radar according to
him. Vision could be enough, radar just helps a bit.

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cromwellian
Vision can't see through obstacles at blind intersections like side radars
can.

