Is "staged" the right description here? I was worried we were looking at a Nikola type event, but that's not what this is.
Just because the route was mapped with lidar, etc. doesn't make this a non-self-driving car. It drove itself under the supplied conditions. It wasn't like they had plotted the route with the stops and starts, etc. From what I understand the system just had prior knowledge of the route. This is in comparison to any other self-driving which MUST have prior understanding of the route, vs Tesla's current product which apparently can make all decisions on the fly.
Don’t know if staged is the right word, but it’s a little sketchy at least that the car drove using a method they’ve mocked other companies for using and have stated they have no intention to ever use in their consumer product.
Lidar would increase car cost so much that most people would die of sticker shock. The strongest candidate for proving lidar AV tech is Waymo, which to me means it has a relatively low chance in the consumer space in the 2020s; and unit cost needs to come down dramatically. The cost and complexity starts making more sense in vehicles with very high uptime.
In addition to being prohibitively expensive, lidar units are large, ugly, have moving parts (which should worry any engineer), and increase drag.
Tesla's current Autopilot tech is a bet on the promise of computer vision, and the intuition that if sight is good enough for humans, it's good enough for Autopilot. I think it's a smart bet.
That was true when Tesla wanted to start selling “fsd-ready” cars, but it’s getting cheaper all the time. Luminar has $500 lidar, Huawei says they’ll be selling $100 sensors soon.
I think the allegation is that Tesla’s current product cannot actually make all decisions on the fly, but they have been claiming it can—which is exaggeration at the very least.
Just because the route was mapped with lidar, etc. doesn't make this a non-self-driving car. It drove itself under the supplied conditions. It wasn't like they had plotted the route with the stops and starts, etc. From what I understand the system just had prior knowledge of the route. This is in comparison to any other self-driving which MUST have prior understanding of the route, vs Tesla's current product which apparently can make all decisions on the fly.