Sub-$200 Lidar Could Reshuffle Auto Sensor Economics

Re:Sub-$200 Lidar Could Reshuffle Auto Sensor Economics by julianeon on Monday February 23, 2026 @12:53PM (#47125913)

I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I, with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0.

And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.

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Re:Sub-$200 Lidar Could Reshuffle Auto Sensor Economics by yayitswei on Monday February 23, 2026 @01:03PM (#47126086)

I think of Tesla autopilot as sophisticated cruise control. Can perform most driving tasks better than I can, saves a lot of cognitive work, still needs close of my 100% attention.

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Re:Sub-$200 Lidar Could Reshuffle Auto Sensor Economics by shireham on Monday February 23, 2026 @12:59PM (#47126012)

Is this comment from 2010? Maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems you would be shocked by what modern cars are capable of.

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Re:Sub-$200 Lidar Could Reshuffle Auto Sensor Economics by julianeon on Monday February 23, 2026 @01:31PM (#47126576)

The intention of my comment (possibly unclear) was to say: I know we can do self-driving very well very expensively. But what can we do extremely cheaply?

Like the difference between "what can do we with an LLM on my maxxed-out laptop with an RTX 5090 card" vs. "what can we do with a mac mini." Self-driving car version.

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