I think Tesla not waiting for Lidars to get cheaper is the right decision. They can always integrate Lidar once they cheaper in the new models. Right now, no production car ships with a scanning Lidar that I know of.
Waymo cars are really expensive because of that and they cant scale because Velodyne can't make Lidars that quickly.
You also consider the fact that Lidars are literally beams of light being emitted and reflections measured. If you have every car with a Lidar, you get interference and its not the gold standard of measurement anymore.
Tesla conquering the problem with algorithms is the right approach. Remember our brains use algorithms and two cameras to drive too. So its technically possible.
Nvidia keeps on pumping out faster GPU's, cameras keep on getting better. Teslas getting more and more data. They just need better algos while they wait for cheaper sensors that scale.
That's a very wise business move while everyone else waits for a magic bullet.
> If you have every car with a Lidar, you get interference and its not the gold standard of measurement anymore.
I had people working on these things that told me that interference is not an issue. Take this with a grain of salt but I would love to see some technical analysis about the possible impact of interference before dismissing LIDAR as susceptible to interference and the impact the interfecene it makes relative to the inference of positioning and spatial estimation.
I've found this: http://sci-hub.io/10.1109/ivs.2015.7225724 but it seems that while interference exist, from what I'm reading from the paper, they are not critical in the sense that they can't be worked around.
And if that is so, if you believe LIDAR is going to dominate the field, it's even more critical working with LIDAR early on so you have the know-how to fix the issues that might arise.
Waymo cars are really expensive because of that and they cant scale because Velodyne can't make Lidars that quickly.
You also consider the fact that Lidars are literally beams of light being emitted and reflections measured. If you have every car with a Lidar, you get interference and its not the gold standard of measurement anymore.
Tesla conquering the problem with algorithms is the right approach. Remember our brains use algorithms and two cameras to drive too. So its technically possible.
Nvidia keeps on pumping out faster GPU's, cameras keep on getting better. Teslas getting more and more data. They just need better algos while they wait for cheaper sensors that scale.
That's a very wise business move while everyone else waits for a magic bullet.