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I've been a Electrek reader for almost a decade. It's interesting to see its editor Fred Lambert from super pro-Telsa/Musk when fighting EV vs. ICE cars to anti
by devy 1mo ago
I've been a Electrek reader for almost a decade. It's interesting to see its editor Fred Lambert from super pro-Telsa/Musk when fighting EV vs. ICE cars to anti-Telsa/Musk when Musk got into politics.
Of course Musk knew multi-modality would win true Level 4 autonomous driving. It was a calculated tradeoff to work on vision first when LiDAR (components cost 10s of thousands and unreliable for continuous functioning) and Radar (components cost thousands) when Telsa was battling production hell and has real threat of not making it.
Millions of Tesla on the road and 100s of thousands supercharging stations later, LiDAR becomes more reliable and affordable (just like how Tesla made the lithium batteries affordable).
Could Tesla re-incorporate LiDAR + Radar into their sensing stack in the future. I think so! After all, just a few short years ago, Telsa threw away of their 300k+ lines of C++ initial AI software stack based of MobileEye OEM in opting in their own Deep Learning based neural network model. Now, they might still there are still room for camera/vision only assisted driving technology.
Waymo's modified Jaguar model costs $150k-$200k apiece fully loaded with 3 modalities. Tesla Cybercab production cost is below $30k. They are on DIFFERENT segment. Comparing them is like comparing Toyota Corolla vs. Feferrari for their engine output, absurd!
So, this article feels like another emotional biased hit piece of Lambert jabbing at Musk which is daily occurrence now at Electrek.
- gamblor956 1mo agoTesla did not make Lidar affordable. They don't even use lidar. They also did not make lithium batteries affordable. Panasonic and CATL did that. Tesla was simply the first to exploit that bew affordability.
- Harvesterify 1mo agoHe did not say that Tesla made the LiDAR afforadable though.
- xnx 1mo agoThe general approach to pioneering work like self-driving is: 1) Make it work 2) Make it right 3) Make it cheap For no good reason, Elon tried to solve step 3 before the other two. This is extra strange since SpaceX has done much better at pioneering work.
- bryanlarsen 1mo agoLambert became anti-Tesla when Tesla told him that they weren't going to give him the 2 Roadsters he earned through referral fees. Waymo's Zeekr and Hyundai based next gen platforms cost less than twice as much as the Cybercab and hold more than twice as many people. And have Lidar. Tesla could add Lidar to their models, but it would cost them an extra couple of years. They're already well behind Waymo, in two years time Waymo will probably be available to the majority of the US population...
- BLKNSLVR 1mo agoI'm hoping Tesla reincorporate Lidar (and Radar) because it will mean that they are able to put reality ahead of politics. Musk being who he is, however, I'm not holding my breath for that outcome.