Lidar's are excellent at verifying that the 3d model map is correct. E.g. a perpendicular semitruck with trailer on the road.

For item recognition the resolution gets low quick though with range.

You're right, that's something LIDAR is definitely ideal for, but again, Tesla's vision stack is doing just fine here, when observing other people's use of FSD beta.

> Lidar's are excellent at verifying that the 3d model map is correct.

IIRC Tesla does use LIDAR in their test vehicles to measure the ground truth of their 3D model maps. They just don't do that with every single car on the road.

Examples:

https://twitter.com/gbrulte/status/1395356317410287617

https://electrek.co/2020/06/29/tesla-spotted-testing-prototy...

Wouldn't LIDAR be useful to help it not occasionally drive into objects?

Waymo talks about using LIDAR on their gesture recognition system: https://blog.wing.comhttps//blog.waymo.com/2022/02/utilizing...

Is this the same vision stack that was pulling up ahead of stop signs in some places because the signs were bigger than it expected?

If it can't make sense of something as simple as that, why would I trust it with hazards?

https://www.thedrive.com/news/teslas-can-be-tricked-into-sto...

Certainly that is the current Tesla PR spin that their vision stack is good enough to not need it, but it is hard to see why LIDAR wouldn't be useful for defense in depth against the situations like people tricking Teslas into painted tunnels like Wile E. Coyote. Especially when we all know the reality is that LIDAR is extremely patent protected and expensive to buy because of that and Tesla dropping LIDAR was pure cost cutting.

(Self-driving seems to me to be somewhere you absolutely want as much defense in depth and redundant sensors as possible.)

I'd like to see someone exposing a Tesla to a intricately produced Wile E. Coyote tunnel. I would predict that it would stop, because the vision stack leans heavily on motion vectors to map out drivable space. And even if it didn't, the tunnel could only be painted to have the correct perspective at one point along the road. Moving closer would result in the model seeing the road get narrower, causing the car to slow down (narrower roads necessitate slower speed) until it gets within a few car lengths — at which point the painted road would appear so narrow as to be literally undriveable.

If Tesla hasn't already tested this in simulation, I'd be astounded.

Also if a false tunnel good enough to fool FSD beta, I'd suspect it'd also be good enough to fool a decent proportion of human drivers too.

Certainly there is some hyperbole there, but not by much: https://screenrant.com/stop-tesla-autopilot-fsd-self-driving...