
Elon Musk: “Anyone relying on Lidar is doomed.” Experts: Maybe not - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverless-cars-dont-need-lidar-experts-arent-so-sure/
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derek_frome
The take home point here is this:

"But if Tesla ultimately succeeds, it won't be because it's easier to achieve
full autonomy without lidar than with it. It will simply be because Tesla
began large-scale data collection from cameras long before other carmakers.

In short, the fact that Tesla backed itself into a corner by promising
customers full autonomy without lidar doesn't prove that other companies won't
find lidar helpful to their own self-driving efforts."

A great summary. The only thing it misses is that lidar is getting more and
more like a depth camera. SPADs can sense ambient light and create 2D images
that are perfectly correlated to 3D images, making it possible to apply 2D
algorithms to 3D data [1].

[1] [https://www.ouster.io/blog-posts/2018/8/31/the-camera-is-
in-...](https://www.ouster.io/blog-posts/2018/8/31/the-camera-is-in-the-lidar)

