This is 100% true. Lidar improves accuracy by millimeters up close, inches at 10-50 feet away and feet beyond that. That accuracy is more than sufficient. Recognition and classification of objects is not improved at all (that part that matters). And, like parent post said, tesla classifies everything very very well, the real issue is that the planner acts completely crazy all the time and is scary.

Presumably object classification is easier if you have a higher resolution image of the object.

There are two decisions when driving: go ahead around an obstacle or stop. Even as a human I do not need super high resolution to identify the objects asround, as long as I can identify if is in my path or not.

While our eyes can do that pretty reliable, we are organics and get tired - how many hours one can drive until this becomes almost imposible? I had a situation where I would hallucinate and and start believing something is in the street do I did a full stop - nothing happened, but was quite intense. Imagine the other way around - not stopping and hitting something.

A normal radar + some low level ASIC programming would do that without geting tired. My Audi from 2014 is quite good at that and I actually rely on this feature all the time.

Exactly, FSD Beta is currently driving me around 90% of the time, and none of the problems are sensor/vision related, but decision related.

Updates are happening around once a month and the decision making is getting noticeably better.

Yes, and those remaining percent needs to be dealt with but only a small subset of those would be meaningfully helped by LiDAR. FSD is already superior to others when it comes to predicting obstructed geometry and vehicles, and super human at detecting vehicle distance etc. The difference in safety between something like Waymo and FSD is mainly due to HD maps, limiting driving to easy routes and more compute for planning, and perhaps a more mature planning stack.

I think this misses the point.

The full system for humans is “vision + brain” and for self-driving its “sensors + planner”.

The Waymo/Cruise philosophy is that since we don’t know how to make the planner human-brain-level, we should shift as much of the load as possible to the sensors, where we have the ability to use things that humans don’t have, like lidar and radar.

To me, Tesla FSD going vision-only is a bet on the progress of AI planning models. If the planner reaches a human-equivalent level, then human-equivalent sensors are fine. Time will tell if this is a good bet, but so far it’s not.