7 ms·
Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-li
by jellojello 7mo ago
Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. If you've ever driven a Tesla, it gives daily messages "the left side camera is blocked" etc.. cameras+weather don't mix either.
- verelo 7mo agoYeah its absurd. As a Tesla driver, I have to say the autopilot model really does feel like what someone who's never driven a car before thinks it's like. Using vision only is so ignorant of what driving is all about: sound, vibration, vision, heat, cold...these are all clues on road condition. If the car isn't feeling all these things as part of the model, you're handicapping it. In a brilliant way Lidar is the missing piece of information a car needs without relying on multiple sensors, it's probably superior to what a human can do, where as vision only is clearly inferior.
- ASalazarMX 7mo agoMaybe vision-only can work with much better cameras, with a wider spectrum (so they can see thru fog, for example), and self-cleaning/zero upkeep (so you don't have to pull over to wipe a speck of mud from them). Nevertheless, LIDAR still seems like the best choice overall.
- smallmancontrov 7mo agoThe inputs to FSD are: 7 cameras x 36fps x 5Mpx x 30s 48kHz audio Nav maps and route for next few miles 100Hz kinematics (speed, IMU, odometry, etc) Source: https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=571 https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=571
- ambicapter 7mo agoSo if they’re already “fusioning” all these things, why would LIDAR be any different?
- smallmancontrov 7mo agoTesla went nothing-but-nets (making fusion easy) and Chinese LIDAR became cheap around 2023, but monocular depth estimation was spectacularly good by 2021. By the time unit cost and integration effort came down, LIDAR had very little to offer a vision stack that no longer struggled to perceive the 3D world around it. Also, integration effort went down but it never disappeared. Meanwhile, opportunity cost skyrocketed when vision started working. Which layers would you carve resources away from to make room? How far back would you be willing to send the training + validation schedule to accommodate the change? If you saw your vision-only stack take off and blow past human performance on the march of 9s, would you land the plane just because red paint became available and you wanted to paint it red? I wouldn't completely discount ego either, but IMO there's more ego in the "LIDAR is necessary" case than the "LIDAR isn't necessary" at this point. FWIW, I used to be an outspoken LIDAR-head before 2021 when monocular depth estimation became a solved problem. It was funny watching everyone around me convert in the opposite direction at around the same time, probably driven by politics. I get it, I hate Elon's politics too, I just try very hard to keep his shitty behavior from influencing my opinions on machine learning.
- kanbara 7mo agodepth estimation is but one part of the problem— atmospheric and other conditions which blind optical visible spectrum sensors, lack of ambient (sunlight) and more. lidar simply outperforms (performs at all?) in these conditions. and provides hardware back distance maps, not software calculated estimation
- verelo 7mo agoBetter than I expected. So this was 3 days ago, is this for all previously models or is there a cut off date here?
- ChicagoDave 7mo agoFog, heavy rain, heavy snow, people running between cars or from an obstructed view… None of these technologies can ever be 100%, so we’re basically accepting a level of needless death. Musk has even shrugged off FSD related deaths as, “progress”.
- smallmancontrov 7mo agoHumans: 70 deaths in 7 billion miles FSD: 2 deaths in 7 billion miles Looks like FSD saves lives by a margin so fat it can probably survive most statistical games.
- hn_acc1 7mo agoIs that the official Tesla stat? I've heard of way more Tesla fatalities than that..
- ChicagoDave 7mo agoThis is absolutely a Musk defender. FSD and Tesla related deaths are much higher. https://www.tesladeaths.com/index-amp.html https://www.tesladeaths.com/index-amp.html
- smallmancontrov 7mo agoAutopilot is the shitty lane assist. FSD is the SOTA neural net. Your link agrees with me: > 2 fatalities involving the use of FSD
- ChicagoDave 7mo agoTesla sales are dead across the world. Cybertruck is a failure. Chinese EVs are demonstrably better. No one wants these crappy cars anymore.
- Fricken 7mo agoI don't know what he's on about. Here's a better list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes#:~:text=There%20have%20been%20multiple%20fatal,instance%2C%20the%20motorcyclist%20was%20killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
- iknowstuff 7mo agoAutopilot hasn’t been updated in years and is nothing like FSD. FSD does use all of those cues.
- verelo 7mo agoI misspoke, i'm using Hardware 3 FSD.
- torginus 7mo agoI quickly googled Lidar limitations, and this article came up: https://www.yellowscan.com/knowledge/how-weather-really-affects-lidar-performance/ https://www.yellowscan.com/knowledge/how-weather-really-affe... Seeing how its by a lidar vendor, I don't think they're biased against it. It seems Lidar is not a panacea - it struggles with heavy rain, snow, much more than cameras do and is affected by cold weather or any contamination on the sensor. So lidar will only get you so far. I'm far more interested in mmwave radar, which while much worse in spatial resolution, isn't affected by light conditions, weather, can directly measure stuff on the thing its illuminating, like material properties, the speed its moving, the thickness. Fun fact: mmWave based presence sensors can measure your hearbeat, as the micro-movements show up as a frequency component. So I'd guess it would have a very good chance to detect a human. I'm pretty sure even with much more rudimentary processing, it'll be able to tell if its looking at a living being. By the way: what happened to the idea that self-driving cars will be able to talk to each other and combine each other's sensor data, so if there are multiple ones looking at the same spot, you'd get a much improved chance of not making a mistake.
- dham 7mo agoLidar is a moot point. You can't drive with just Lidar, no matter what. That's what people don't understand. The most common one I hear: "What if the camera gets mud on it", ok then you have to get out and clean it, or it needs an auto cleaning system.
- ASalazarMX 7mo agoAt first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended up spreading HTML5. Now I just think he refused LIDAR on purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.
- ciberado 7mo agoThat one was motivated by the need of controlling the app distribution channel, just like they keep the web as a second class citizen in their ecosystem nowadays.
- iamtheworstdev 7mo agohe didn't refuse it. MobileEye or whoever cut Tesla off because they were using the lidar sensors in a way he didn't approve. From there he got mad and said "no more lidar!"
- iknowstuff 7mo agoFalse. Mobileye never used lidar. Lmao where do you all come up with this
- agildehaus 7mo agohttps://www.mobileye.com/news/mobileye-to-end-internal-lidar-development/ https://www.mobileye.com/news/mobileye-to-end-internal-lidar... Um, yes they did. No idea if it had any relation to Tesla though.
- iknowstuff 7mo agoDid not
- nerdsniper 7mo agoI think Elon announced Tesla was ditching LIDAR in 2019.[0] This was before Mobileye offered LIDAR. Mobileye has used LIDAR from Luminar Technologies around 2022-2025. [1][2] They were developing their own lidar, but cancelled it. [3] They chose Innoviz Technologies as their LIDAR partner going forward for future product lines. [4] 0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is-doomed-elon-musk-says/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is... 1: https://static.mobileye.com/website/corporate/media/radar-lidar-fact-sheet.pdf https://static.mobileye.com/website/corporate/media/radar-li... 2: https://www.luminartech.com/updates/luminar-accelerates-commercial-momentum-with-mobileye-design-win https://www.luminartech.com/updates/luminar-accelerates-comm... 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvg9heQObyQ&t=48s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvg9heQObyQ&t=48s 4: https://ir.innoviz.tech/news-events/press-releases/detail/135/mobileye-to-use-innoviz-lidars-for-its-mobileye-drive-av https://ir.innoviz.tech/news-events/press-releases/detail/13...
- 0xfaded 7mo agoI have HW3, but FSD reliably disengages at this time of year with sunrise and sunset during commute hours.
- jellojello 7mo agoYep, and won't activate until any morning dew is off the sensors.. or when it rains too hard.. or if it's blinded by a shiny building/window/vehicle. I will never trust 2d camera-only, it can be covered or blocked physically and when it happens FSD fails. As cheap as LIDAR has gotten, adding it to every new tesla seems to be the best way out of this idiotic position. Sadly I think Elon got bored with cars and moved on.
- dham 7mo agoIf the camera is covered or blocked, you can't drive plain and simple, as you can't drive a car (at least on Earth) with just Lidar. The roads are made for eyes. Maybe on Rocky's homeworld you can have a Lidar only system for traveling.
- iknowstuff 7mo agoFSD14 on hw4 does not. Its dynamic range is equivalent or better than human.
- DoctorOetker 7mo agoThis will considerably skew the statistics, a low sun dramatically increases accident rates on humans too.
- kypro 7mo agoFrom the perspective of viewing FSD as an engineering problem that needs solving I tend to think Elon is on to something with the camera-only approach – although I would agree the current hardware has problems with weather, etc. The issue with lidar is that many of the difficult edge-cases of FSD are all visible-light vision problems. Lidar might be able to tell you there's a car up front, but it can't tell you that the car has it's hazard lights on and a flat tire. Lidar might see a human shaped thing in the road, but it cannot tell whether it's a mannequin leaning against a bin or a human about to cross the road. Lidar gets you most of the way there when it comes to spatial awareness on the road, but you need cameras for most of the edge-cases because cameras provide the color data needed to understand the world. You could never have FSD with just lidar, but you could have FSD with just cameras if you can overcome all of the hardware and software challenges with accurate 3D perception. Given Lidar adds cost and complexity, and most edge cases in FSD are camera problems, I think camera-only probably helps to force engineers to focus their efforts in the right place rather than hitting bottlenecks from over depending on Lidar data. This isn't an argument for camera-only FSD, but from Tesla's perspective it does down costs and allows them to continue to produce appealing cars – which is obviously important if you're coming at FSD from the perspective of an auto marker trying to sell cars. Finally, adding lidar as a redundancy once you've "solved" FSD with cameras isn't impossible. I personally suspect Tesla will eventually do this with their robotaxis. That said, I have no real experience with self-driving cars. I've only worked on vision problems and while lidar is great if you need to measure distances and not hit things, it's the wrong tool if you need to comprehend the world around you.
- senordevnyc 7mo agoThis is so wild to read when Waymo is currently doing like 500,000 paid rides every week, all over the country, with no one in the driver's seat. Meanwhile Tesla seems to have a handful of robotaxis in Austin, and it's unclear if any of them are actually driverless. But the Tesla engineers are "in the right place rather than hitting bottlenecks from over depending on Lidar data"? What?
- smallmancontrov 7mo ago
- gambiting 7mo ago>>The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. I thought it was the Nazi salutes on stage and backing neo-nazi groups everywhere around the world, but you know, I guess the lidar thing too.
- jeron 7mo agomaybe it's better to say it was the biggest L of his engineering career instead of his political career