I’ve heard that lidar is somewhat unfavorable because it’s so susceptible to becoming useless due to misalignments from something as simple as a pothole. Radar and other options though are absolutely worth using, I think musk is just trying to cut costs. Their S/X are using radar with the new FSD HW4
And electric, while it might not be as meaningful right now due to starting costs, the reduction in maintenance and operating costs might make the model more viable. And it certainly adds some appeal to environmentally conscious investors for them to be reducing the emissions in India which we know has many areas of poor air quality
There’s also the fact that we shouldn’t be thinking about problems the way they used to be solved - not that we shouldn’t be considering database calls and network, but because compute/memory/storage are cheaper than they used to be, we’re able to make more tradeoffs to save developer time or to improve experience. Back when the option was to further optimize how many registers your assembly is using or to leave an application in a virtually unusable state, you didn’t really have a choice. You optimized the small details
Oh, compute and storage are cheap alright, until they are not.
At many jobs I had to deal with the all-hands-on-deck, code red emergency "our AWS bill got too damn high, what can we cut" situation. I can guarantee you a ton of companies are going through this exercise right now.
Some software engineers purposefully develop using fewer resources to force themselves to reason about efficiency.
Abundance leads to complacency and laziness, and those resources are no longer cheap if you are abusing them.
I believe Tesla does overlay its routing onto google maps, but the actual navigation is coming from OSM ultimately. I’ve noticed Tesla making some really distinct navigation choices vs what appears on my phone in the past, and not in a good way. But it’s been improving over time, and one perk that’s been noted is that because OSM can be populated with data by your average person, Tesla owners have gone in to add intersections/roads etc in the past and improved their own navigation results locally
