https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...
Meanwhile visible light based tech is going up in price due to competing with ai on the extra gpu need while lidar gets the range/depth side of things for free.
Ideally cars use both but if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar. Musk made an ill timed decision to go vision only.
So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.
Even ignoring various current issues with Lidar systems that aren’t fundamental limitations, large amounts of road infrastructure is just designed around vision and will continue to be for at least another few decades. Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way.
Personally I don’t buy the argument that it has to be one or the other as Tesla have claimed, but between the two, vision is the only one that captures all the data sufficient to drive a car.
> So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.
They could be going for a Tesla-esque approach, in that by equipping every car in the fleet with lidar, they maximise the data captured to help train their models.
With vision you rely on external source or flood light. Its also how our civilization is designed to function in first place.
Anyway, the whole self driving obsession is ridiculous because being driven around in a bad traffic isn’t that much better than driving in bad traffic. It’s cool but can’t beat a the public infrastructure since you can’t make the car dissipated when not in use.
IMHO, connectivity to simulate public transport can be the real sweet spot, regardless of sensor types. Coordinated cars can solve traffic and pretend to be trains.
Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.
This is basically what we have (for reasonable definitions of full).
Whoever was in control. This isn’t some weird legal quagmire anymore, these cars are on the road.
If you charged car makers $20m per pedestrian killed by their cars regardless of fault you'd probably see much safer designs.
This is an extremely optimistic view on how companies work
A big reason car companies don't worry much about killing pedestrians at the moment is it costs them ~$0.
If there are single bulbs displaying red, green and yellow please give clear examples.
Potentially as extraneous as range to a surface that a camera can’t tell apart from background.
More to the point, everyone but Tesla is doing cameras plus Lidar. It’s increasingly looking like the correct bet.
-- but I'm not sure how to get data on ex. how much Tesla is charged for a Nvidia whatever or what compute Waymo has --
My personal take is Waymo uses cameras too so maybe we have to assume the worst case, +full cost of lidar / +$130
The problem with Tesla is, that they need to combine the outputs of those camera's into a 3d view, what takes a LOT more processing power to judge distances. As in needing more heavy models > more GPU power, more memory needed etc. And still has issues like a low handing sun + white truck = lets ram into that because we do not see it.
And the more edge cases you try to filter out with cameras only setups, the more your GPU power needs increase! As a programmer, you can make something darn efficient but its those edge cases that can really hurt your programs efficiency. And its not uncommon to get 5 to 10x performance drops, ... Now imagine that with LLM image recognition models.
Tesla's camera only approach works great ... under ideal situations. The issue is those edge cases and not ideal situations. Lidar deals with a ton of edge cases and removes a lot of the progressing needed for ideal situations.
Joking aside, this BYD Seagull, or Atto 1 in Australia (AUD$24K) and Dolphin Surf in Europe (￡18K in the UK), is one the cheapest EV cars in the world and selling at around ￡6K in China. It's priced double in Australia and triple in the UK compared to its original price in China. It's also one of China best selling EV cars with 60K unit sold per month on average.
Most of the countries scrambling to block its sales to protect their own car industry or increase the tariff considerably.
It's a game changing car and it really deserve the place in EV car world Hall of Fame, as one of the legendary cars similar Austin 7, the father of modern ICE car including BMW Dixi and Datsun Type 11.
[1] BYD_Seagull:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Seagull
[2] Austin 7:
For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be assumed to remain the case forever.
What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs.
Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing the issue (removing the mural) and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift
Is this a joke? Graffiti is now punishable and enforced by whom exactly? Who decides what constitutes an illegal image? How do you catch them? What if vision-only FSD sees a city-sanctioned brick building's mural as an actual sunset?
So you agree that all we need is AGI and human-equal sensors for Tesla-style FSD, but wait... plus some "swift" enforcement force for illegal murals? I love this, I have had heath issues recently, and I have not laughed this hard for a while. Thank you.
Hell, at the last "Tesla AI Day," Musk himself said ~"FSD basically requires AGI" - so he is well aware.
LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference.
Like GPS, LIDAR can be jammed or spoofed by intentional actors, of course. That part's not so easy to hand-wave away, but someone who wants to screw with road traffic will certainly have easier ways to do it.
For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer to 2-4 ns for more modern systems. With laser diode currents in the tens of amps range, producing a gaussian pulse this width is already a challenging inductance-minimization problem -- think GaN, thin PCBs, wire-bonded LDs etc to get loop area down. And an inductance-limited pulse is inherently gaussian. To play any anti-interference games means being able to modulate the pulse more finely than that, without increasing the effective pulse width enough to make you uncompetitive on range. This is hard.
Large numbers of bits per unit of time are what it takes to make two sequences correlate (or not), and large numbers of bits per unit of time are not a problem in this business. Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.
I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses, as opposed to by shaping individual pulses. (I've seen systems that introduce random jitter across multiple pulses to de-correlate interference, but that's a bit different.) The issue is you really do get a hell of a lot of data out of a single pulse, and for interesting objects (thin poles, power lines) there's not a lot of correlation between adjacent pulses -- you can't always assume properties across multiple pulses without having to throw away data from single data-carrying pulses.
Edit: Another way of saying this -- your revisit rate to a specific point of interference is around 20 Hz. That's just not a lot of bits per unit time.
> Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.
I can believe this is true for FMCW lidar, but I know it to be untrue for pulsed lidar. Perhaps we're discussing different systems?
My naive assumption would be that they would do exactly that. In fact, offhand, I don't know how else I'd go about it. When emitting pulses every X ns, I'd envision using a long LFSR whose low-order bit specifies whether to skip the next X-ns time slot or not. Every car gets its own lidar seed, just like it gets its own key fob seed now.
Then, when listening for returned pulses, the receiver would correlate against the same sequence. Echoes from fixed objects would be represented by a constant lag, while those from moving ones would be "Doppler-shifted" in time and show up at varying lags.
So yes, you'd lose some energy due to dead time that you'd otherwise fill with a constant pulse train, but the processing gain from the correlator would presumably make up for that and then some. Why wouldn't existing systems do something like this?
I've never designed a lidar, but I can't believe there's anything to it that wasn't already well-known in the 1970s. What else needs to be invented, other than implementation and integration details?
And your stats comparing to waymo are made up and debunked in the very reddit thread they came from
If you're just getting me mixed up with another poster, I got my stats from an electrek article supplemented by Waymo's releases: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
Tesla's tech is also marketed as a full self driving autopilot, not just basic driver assistance like adaptive cruise control.
That's how they're doing the autonomous robotaxis and the cross country drives without anyone touching the steering wheel.
So Tesla is in a weird state right now. Tesla's highway assist is shit, it's worse than Mercedes previous generation assist after Tesla switched to the end-to-end neural networks. The new MB.Drive Assist Pro is apparently even better.
FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even in simple city conditions. If I try to turn it on, it attempts to kill me at least once on my route from my office to my home. So other car makers quite sensibly avoided it, until they perfected the technology.
I used the latest FSD and Waymo in December. FSD still needs to be supervised. It’s impressive and better than what my Subaru’s lane-keeping software can do. But I can confidently nap in a Waymo. These are totally different products and technology stacks.
Tesla FSD gives up with the red-hands-of-death panic at this spot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Cfe9LBzaCLpGSAr99 (edit: fixed the location)
It also misinterprets this signal: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhZsQtN5LKy59Mpv6 It doesn't have enough resolution to resolve the red left arrow, especially when it's even mildly rainy.
At this intersection, it just gets confused and I have to take over to finish the turn: https://maps.app.goo.gl/DHeBmwpe3pfD6AXc6
You're welcome to try these locations.
In cities, it's just shit. If you're using it without paying attention, your driving license has to be revoked and you should never be allowed to drive.
Just too much real world data.
(i.e. scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+)
Robotaxi is a separate product. They are fantastic at driving but until they remove supervisors it’s a moot comparison
FSD is here, it wasn't 3 or 4 years ago when I first bought a Tesla, but today it's incredible.
The US car manufacturers are cooked.
And somehow US consumers feel comfortable paying more for worse cars.
We saw that during the 80-s, with the Japanese cars.
I wouldn't want to own it in a very dense city, but there are only a couple of those in the US. Most US cities even at their densest locations are fine with a half ton.
I don't know what the real barrier to success will be, but I don't think it will be blindness. It may be difficulty competing on labor cost, but that's a good case for carefully applied tariffs to keep competition fair.
Tariffs alone can't keep out cheap foreign products.
Edit: Holden Spark.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Spark#Discontinuatio...
For the model 3 it’s USD$8000 cheaper like for like.
Biden put a 100% tariff on Chinese cars and then Trump added tariffs on inputs.
Americans are getting screwed!
Once FSD, we will make rules about the software that will have the effect of excluding Chinese companies. I seriously doubt that I'll see Chinese cars here in my lifetime.
If these cars are to be sold in western markets, there needs to be strong regulation. Absolutely no digital data connections, for starters.
https://www.carscoops.com/2025/11/volvo-says-sayonara-to-lid...
> In a statement, a Volvo Cars USA spokesperson added the decision was made “to limit the company’s supply chain risk exposure, and it is a direct result of Luminar’s failure to meet its contractual obligations to Volvo Cars.”
For SUVs, maybe it could be blended in with a roof air scoop, like on some off-road trucks. Or a light bar.
Where is the LiDAR on the Atto 1? In the grille? How much worse is the field of view?
American product design is obsessed with appearance and finish. Products end up costing 3 times more and functionality is degraded.
We're going to look so backwards and "soviet" after a while.
Under that model, LIDAR training data is easy to generate. Create situations in a lab or take recordings from real drives, label them with the high-level information contained in them and train your models to extract it. Making use of that information is the next step but doesn't fundamentally change with your sensor choice, apart from the amount of information available at different speeds, distances and driving conditions
If the tech industry has taught us anything, it's that big money is still as irresponsible and greedy as ever.
I suppose that one small bit of hope is that one of the most obvious bad actors in general happened to be opposed to Lidar, and might like to screw competitors with a scandal. So the news might come out, after much tragic damage is done.
Everyone is accustomed to cars malfunctioning, in numerous ways.
An intuition from an analogy that should be recognizable to HN...
Everyone is accustomed to data breaches of everything, and thinks it's just something you have to live with. But the engineers in a position to warn that a given system is almost guaranteed to have data breaches... don't warn. And don't even think that it's something to warn about. And if they did warn, they'd be fired or suppressed. And their coworkers would wonder what was wrong with them, torpedoing their career over something that's SOP, and that other engineers will make happen anyway. Any security effort is on reactive mitigation, theatre, CYA, and regulatory capture to escape liability.
I'd like to think that automotive engineers are much more ethical than tech industry, but two things going on:
(1) we're seeing a lot of sketchy tech in cars, like surveillance, and unsafe use of touchscreens;
(2) anything "AI" in a car is presumably getting culture influence from tech industry.
So I wouldn't trust automakers on anything intersecting with tech industry.