I don't believe that. He ultimately has to be anti-LiDAR because putting LiDAR on every Tesla is simply not feasible nor compatible with his plan to mass gather training data, so he has to justify it somehow.
What you're missing is that it's all moot if your self-driving car does not have a 0% failure rate, or close enough to 0% that it rounds down to 0 accidents. As soon as you have real accidents, you are done. Look at Uber. The one death completely ended their self driving unit.
So yes, it may seem cool to just go with the flow and rush things, but I get the feeling that this will be like the tortoise and the hare. Eventually LiDAR will be cheap, and Tesla will be stuck with years of useless training data.
To me, the revolution that actually mattered the most was the cell phone supply chain revolution (if you can call it that). That is what allowed these companies to equip their vehicles with cheap cameras, radar, and eventually LiDAR.
> I don't believe that. He ultimately has to be anti-LiDAR because putting LiDAR on every Tesla is simply not feasible nor compatible with his plan to mass gather training data, so he has to justify it somehow.
Why is using Lidar not compatible with mass gather training data?
Also he recently said they wouldn't use Lidar even if it's free. He didn't leave the door open for when the price goes down sufficiently. He could be wrong obviously, but I don't think he is in denial.
https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-computer
I suppose they wouldn't have any problem asking for Lidar installation if that were to be required?
2. Solve the easiest problems first, as opposed to what? Even the easy problems are hard to solve, trying to solve everything at once is going to be floundering around with nothing to show. Is an automated vehicle that can only do the easy parts super useful? Not really, but it's somewhat useful. In a model with human controls, this is tractable, assuming there's a safe handover --- either directly with appropriate advance notification and acceptance, or by parking and switching; without a safe handover or human controls, it's pretty limiting, but some areas would have most of the year coverage, and some areas have tourist populations that overlap with fair weather, so it's something.
3. I don't think this is a big problem, if the vehicles are driving the routes, they can update the mapping. The road map is finite, and most places don't change that often. Again, safe handoff is critical, though.
4. Yep, it's expensive. But mass produced, less expensive lidar is plausible. Given this thing is still several years from mass deployment, constraining to today's inexpensive tech is too limiting. Figure out if you can do it, and figure out how you can do it with unlimited budget, and then figure out how to make a working system with less.
P.S. I can't believe I'm defending Waymo here. Usually I'm the staunch negative against automous vehicles. On the other hand, Waymo's serious errors have been more amusing than dangerous (let's try to merge into a bus at low speed, cause it'll certainly move out of out way)
If your mental model of how the world works is "Elon Musk always tells the truth" then this is compelling evidence, but if you have a different mental model I don't know why you would take it seriously.
The important point is that he is CEO and its well within his power to develop his own lidar system, or sign a contract for lidar. Or to do research on the topic. Yet he has not done that or shown any interest in that.
At some point you have to ask yourself, is somebody engadging in 4D chess over 10 years or is it simply his opinion.
2. Arizona doesn't always have nice weather. Haboobs, fog during the winter mornings/nights, monsoon season with heavy rain and hail. There are plenty of weather conditions in Arizona. And if building the visual recognition is the easy part, what is the hard part?
3. Fair, but that is already something their parent company does as another business; Maps/Earth. There is nothing to suggest they CAN'T do this on roads they haven't seen before, but it's obviously far safer to do this on roads they know.
4. They partnered with Daimler to make self driving trucks who couldn't use Uber to move shipments. They aren't competing with Uber necessarily.
As for Tesla, there is nothing to suggest they are doing it the right way. They have had numerous self driving failures.
They just raised $3bn (the vast majority of which is presumably not spent), and piecing together other sources indicates Google put in a couple billion of their own.
This article claims they've spent $3bn on R&D:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30857661/autonomous-car-s...
Google's approach requires a lot of mapping, yes. But they mapped damn near every road in the important markets to pursue maps, an opportunity two orders of magnitude smaller than self driving.
If their cars and software are both ready, the mapping won't be more than a small roadbump.
3. Sure, they use maps.
But do we know that part of their algorithm there aren't map-free techniques ?
1. They are 10s of billions deep in a hole and make no profit (or revenue) and will not for multiple years. To ever pay back that investment they basically need to become Uber. And to get there, they need many more 10s of billions of capx. Uber is not even making a profit yet.
2. Waymo approach is the classic 'solve the easiest problem first' mistake. They started and have driven most of their miles, in literally the easiest place to do AV in the world. They have created incredibly complex high resolution maps on one small and simple region in Arizona where the streets are wide, the weather is always nice, and the general upkeep of the infrastructure is done very well.
3. Reliance on hd mapping for localization is fragile approach, and it essentially requires you to continuously map the whole global road system to have a real generalized driving solution. When will they have cars that can just drive on roads they have never seen before, something that human drivers often do. Seems to me this is the wrong approach to take.
4. Waymo still needs highly specialized vehicles, even with lidar becoming cheaper, their whole stack is still a very high cost low volume stack. How they will compete against an Uber driver in a cheap mass produced car anytime soon is totally dubious to me.
Tesla clearly does not want Lidar. Elon Musk even said he wouldn't use Lidar if it was free. What they are actually doing is using next generation radar and likely next generation sonar as well. See: https://electrek.co/2020/10/22/tesla-4d-radar-twice-range-se...