this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Vacuum doesn't run outdoors and accidentally running into a wall doesn't generate lawsuits.
But, yes, any self-driving cars should absolutely be required to have lidar. I don't think you could find any professional in the field that would argue that lidar is the proper tool for this.
...what is your point here, exactly? The stakes might be lower for a vacuum cleaner, sure, but lidar - or a similar time-of-flight system - is the only consistent way of mapping environmental geometry. It doesn't matter if that's a dining room full of tables and chairs, or a pedestrian crossing full of children.
I think you're suffering from not knowing what you don't know.
Let me make it a but clearer for you to make a fair answer.
Take a .25mw lidar sensor off a vacuum, take it outdoors and scan an intersection.
Will that laser be visible to the sensor?
is it spinning fast enough to track a kid moving in to an intersection when you're traveling at 73 feet per second?
You're mischaracterizing their point. Nobody is saying take the exact piece of equipment, put it in the vehicle and PRESTO. That'd be like asking why the vacuum battery can't power the car. Because duh.
The point is if such a novelty, inconsequential item that doesn't have any kind of life safety requirements can employ a class of technology that would prevent adverse effects, why the fuck doesn't the vehicle? This is a design flaw of Teslas, pure and simple.
But they do, there are literally cars out there with lidar sensors.
The question was why can't I have a lidar sensor on my car if my $150 vacuum has one. The lidar sensor for a car is more than $150.
You don't have one because there are expensive at that size and update frequency. Sensors that are capable of outdoor mapping at high speed cost the price of a small car.
The manufacturers suspect and probably rightfully so that people don't want to pay an extra 10 - 30 grand for an array of sensors.
The technology readily exists rober had one in his video that he used to scan a roller coaster. It's not some conspiracy that you don't have it on cars and it's not like it's not capable of being done because waymo does it all the time.
There's a reason why waymo doesn't use smaller sensors they use the minimum of what works well. Which is expensive, which people looking at a mid-range car don't want to take on the extra cost, hence it's not available
Only Tesla does not use radar with their control systems. Every single other manufacturer uses radar control mixed with the camera system. The Tesla system is garbage.
yeah, you'd think they'd at least use radar. That's cheap AF. It's like someone there said I have this hill to die on, I bet we can do it all with cameras.
Yeahhh pretty sure I know who
Not sure it's a him thing, though it definitely could be. An inexpensive Chinese radar element could have eliminated all these problems and they could still use cameras as the main system. It would have cost them dollars to add it to the parts list and it's just a minor input to the collision avoidance stuff.
I would expect him to do a cost-savings thing and pull parts, but they're not really all that cost adverse. ( until you get to QC )
Maybe it was a DOGE kid he hired to come up with ideas or something. Doing with cameras only is more like a technical challenge, nobody looks at that and goes, WOW they can just do that with cameras, they go wow, that's a horrible idea full of dust, dirt and mud issues.
That said, he has made worse plans :)
Your perspective is very generous to Elon. "It's a cheap part, why would they omit it? Probably it was some dumb kid working there".
Usually cost-cutting measures that make significant compromises are top-down pushes, profit is their concern. Might not have been the CEO himself but, in my perspective, it would have been from the top levels.
What's the opposite of occam's razor? The most convoluted, unbelievable answer full of assumptions is the correct one? Because it seems like rumba is operating from there.