Putting capital into something that can only be extracted years later is a poor investment.
The sooner you can get the benefits of an investment, the sooner you can invest in the next thing, and the less return the investment has to give to be competitive.
His aversion to Lidar seems to have more to do with the cost implications on a vehicle that doesn't have a lot of room to raise the price or cut into the margins.
Tesla put two visible light cameras in their cars, but didn't configure them to parallax and instead rely on radar that has noise problems and ultrasound which only works at close range. It was a mistake that has had consequences.
While I agree that it would be better to be using a multi-camera system for depth estimation, and there's no reason not to (because cameras are cheap and easy to build into bodywork of a vehicle), it shouldn't necessarily be needed.
Otherwise, you'd have one-eye sighted people, who drive, running into the same obstacles, right? But they don't - so how do they do it?
Probably motion cues, depth-from-motion, etc - something the brain does. From a cost-savings perspective, eliminating that extra camera will likely be looked at being done at some point, because over millions of cars manufactured, not installing that extra camera and wiring will save a ton of money and increase profitability.
But Tesla isn't quite there yet, and probably shouldn't eliminate it...
Furthermore, I'm not sure even LIDAR should be eliminated; the more sensors and sensor types, the better, ultimately. The problem is finding a LIDAR unit that has enough resolution and can be fitted to a vehicle (and doesn't look like a giant spinning top). Flash LIDAR units will probably be the solution, but they are still fairly expensive, and I don't know if they have the resolution needed yet, either.
Tesla's system has massively more users than all the other systems. They should get some benefit out of that data. I do worry that telsa will fail to make the software work well enough and get sued by all their existing customers (I'm a customer, but I want it to work :-)).
Most of the self-driving cars you see in bay area with lidars on top actually use those lidars to produce labeled data for vision-based distance estimator networks
(no that's not a typo)
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
IMO's autopilot'ss scariest incident is where it drove into a barrier between the exit lane and the highway. https://gizmodo.com/tesla-autopilot-malfunction-caused-crash...
Other drivers were able to reproduce the same behavior, in which the car appears to think that the space between the exit and the highway is a traffic lane that it should follow. This will dump you straight into a wall at highway speeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY&feature=youtu.be...
Tesla fixed it. Then six months later the same behavior is back: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_bac...
How do you trust a system like this when any software update could turn the car suicidal with you in it? Yeah, it's also incidents where it saved drivers from a collision with faster than human reflexes, which is great. But you still need hands on the wheel and constant attentiveness or it might kill you in a situation that would be obvious to a human driver. The full self driving dream is further off than Musk will admit.
So maybe I should move my statement around a bit. Ford is the fastest growing automaker over its first 20 years of existence (clearly). But Ford also built cars in its first year.
Who was the fastest from the first car off the line to the 11 year mark (Tesla's current state)? Hmm, its really close, with both at ~300k for the trailing twelve months, if I'm not mistaken (Ford in 1914). And the following year, Ford did about 500k, which is remarkably close to Tesla's goal for the next year.
I've been thinking for a while now that history was repeating itself in more ways than people realize and this kind of confirms it for me. This is all really interesting stuff. Thanks for pointing out my error! :)
Weren't the 3, X, and S ranked 1, 2, and 3 in the United States? I can only find a 2013 Model S ranking in the European site.
We are hyper-aware of Tesla because the CEO speaks out boisterously and (in my opinion intentionally) misleads people about autopilot's capabilities. Tesla deserves their place on the list of bad actors along with the rest.
They've also managed to build out an entire supply chain for building more electric cars yearly than any of their competitors. That doesn't appear to be a feat that will be matched for at least a couple of years, even if Tesla were relatively stagnant. Instead Tesla is aiming to continue 50+% average annual growth for another couple of years at least.
Continue? Yep, their growth story is faster than that of any American car company in the world's history. I'm not sure if there are any worldwide that would compare, but it seems doubtful.
Of course, there are plenty of things wrong too, just as there were when the automotive industry was born and the Durant types ran the industry. But what they've done is absolutely remarkable.