True, true. We may see a change of heart for them if solid state LiDAR ever actually hits the market, but last I checked Velodyne/Ouster keep announcing things and then letting them disappear. I did see them saying they have samples available for 2025 model years cars so perhaps Tesla could be testing with that now. I don’t see them deploying mechanical LiDAR but solid state is similar enough to a camera they may do it.
Edit: then again for such a critical component Tesla might want to make their own solid state LiDAR, or at least license someone’s technology so they can produce them on their own terms.
LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.
Well they currently devote a lot of compute power to building a 3D occupancy map of the world from cameras so it’s possible that fusion with LiDAR could be done with less compute. Also their computers keep getting more powerful. But generally you’re correct, we don’t know how it would go.
Lidar only works to a certain subset of distances, so you need cameras anyway to infer long distances beyond the scope. Also, since distance alone isn’t sufficient, you need cameras anyway for inference of other things.
Lidar works up to 300 meters. That’s plenty for highway driving. Everyone using lidar also use multiple cameras so they are getting best of both worlds (using sensor fusion).
Compute for full self driving hasn’t been solved, I hope it is, and I don’t know which strategy will work. It’s entirely possible LiDaR makes it work better but requires more GPUs on vehicle :)
Debatable.
So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.