It’s also possible that they were so far behind Waymo in the journey to FSD that they weren’t yet at a point where multiple sensors would make a significant difference.
Just my interpretation, but it felt to me like a hail mary because they were fully committed to being the first mover. Waiting around for LiDAR prices to come down would have meant that Waymo would have beat them.
Unlike Waymo who doesn't care about selling cars to people to drive daily. No one going to care that the taxi they are taking looks ugly as long as it get them to the place they are going for cheaper. The cost is also a less of a factor due to them being able to produce an income by charging people to ride in them.
Why not? There are production cars with lidar now that isn't the big spinning thing on top of the car.
As someone who drives a Tesla with the FSD beta, the vehicle has been getting progressively better since 2018.
It’s drives smoother and brakes more predictably dive they stopped using the front radar.
As someone who owned a 2019 Tesla and who owns a 2023 Tesla, the older car had better autopilot. It was starting to degrade in 2020. The new one is worse. Phantom braking was quite rare in 2019. The very first night I drove home the new car, it phantom braked on a lonely, empty stretch of I-5.
I want the radar back.
The thing they need to improve and are doing so rapidly is actual trajectory policy calculations.
And that’s not going to get better with more sensors seeing the same things it already sees.
Essentially that trying to utilize multiple sensors cripples any progress (given that resources will never be infinite).
For example, if your lidar sensor is 99.999% percent sure there is an obstacle in front of you, surely it's helpful to take that information into account, even if it is a tiny bit uncertain/noisy.
More data in any situation where bandwidth is already maximized will lead to entropy and noise. However, if the capabilities were there to process all of that data in low latency scenarios with headroom to spare, surely adding additional sensors and data points would lead to a more complete model of spatial awareness for the car.
That's all hypothetical and reliant on ignoring the realities of running a business and tech development lol
Fusion is hard. As hard as getting humans to agree. Been there. In both situations.
And of course you can concentrate on improving one echo chamber, err single sensor. But you can never come past its fundamental limitations.
Point stands that the ones being put in the cars aren't.
The eye is an incredible piece of machinery, specifically for dynamic processing like this.
And agreed that eyes are impressive.
Someone else said it here on HN, and I think they're absolutely right -- Tesla is all about vertical integration, and this is preventing them from excelling at anything other than saving pennies. A good part of why the new EV competition is doing everything better is they didn't roll their own tech. They bought packaged solutions from companies that only do one thing, but do it well.
I have even earned the dubious honor of having been pulled over for suspected drunk driving because I used AP on a trip home from my MIL's house after Thanksgiving dinner. I was amused by how much trouble AP was having with mild corners on I-5, the state trooper behind me was less amused. Well, at least until he established that I was sober, then we had a good laugh about autopilot and he gave my kids sticker badges. A happy ending for everyone but I didn't activate AP again that night.
Maybe the problem was that it was clear and dry? Ya think it would have been better with some road spray on the cameras?
Subsequent to that, I ended up abandoning AP altogether because it was so jarring when it would decide an overpass looked like something it should slow down for. My wife suggested that she'd be happier if I just used my foot for the accelerator. For some reason we still ended up buying another one, but after the phantom braking on day one (empty freeway, overpass, apparently this is very much now "a thing"), I guess I'll just skip AP before even starting. I wonder if I could ask Tesla to deactivate AP altogether so I could have traditional cruise control?
It’s not FSD, but if you use it as a driver assist, it takes a giant amount of burden off of driving in traffic. Even on a busy highway that’s going somewhat fast, it’ll just follow the car in front of you. And truly, it’s never once been dangerous.
Only catch is that it can’t “see” very long distance — if you’re going 70mph and there’s a stopped car in your lane, it probably won’t stop (at least, I wouldn’t test it!). But again, it’s driver-assist and not FSD, so you’re still expected to notice that. And within its limitations, it is really exceptional.
This is like saying we need to get to the moon using steam power and ONLY THEN we can improve by using rockets. What if it's completely infeasible to solely use vision for FSD?
Even humans use audio processing to augment the vision.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/12/12/tesla-...
I got out of a ticket once because I didn't see a "no through traffic" sign against a bright sunset. No chance that same cop gives a self-driving car a pass, nor should he.