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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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As much as I lost trust in his bullshittery a long time ago, his need to mention the cost of critical safety systems is what stuck out to me the most here. That's how you know the priorities are backwards.
Also, my robot vacuum has LiDAR. It’s not expensive relative to a car.
Hell every iphone has lidar and the pro models have two lidar cameras. The tech is not very expensive, epecially not for a $80,000 car.
My partner's econobox has lidar for its cruise control, but Tesla can't seem to figure out how to make it work.
Around the time Elon made the claim Lidar for automotive purposes was quite expensive. That additional cost would make the self driving product a lot less desirable. Up selling cruise control into "self driving" earned them a lot of money.
Funnily enough all other aspects where Tesla has taken the expensive option the ~~cult~~ retail investors would claim it was brilliant decisions because economy of scale would kick in and make it cheaper in the long run.
Lidar was obviously exempt from any such scale and future tech improvements, because reasons.
It could be very expensive for Tesla to start using Lidar, because they've sold a lot of cars with the promise that they have the hardware for self driving. Retrofitting a million cars would not only cost a lot in terms of gear and work, but it would put additional stress on an already poor service network.
They have painted themselves into a corner. All because leadership thought self driving was a more or less solved problem almost a decade ago.
Rebrand to Ludicrous Self Drive and add back LIDAR.
Good point. I thought Teslas had radar for awhile though and they took it out?
Was lidar that expensive in a car though? Because Infiniti started adding it in 2014 for the cruise control and those cars usually sell new for $50k if you get it fully loaded.
And they could have added radar and sonar to assist the cameras at least. The radar couldn't give 3d data, but it could say "yo bro that's a solid object, not the skyline" at least.
Good point on the promises though. They really fucked themselves with Elon's claims.
They decided radar was superfluous at one point during the pandemic. By sheer coincidence by the time supply chains were getting fucked. Hitting delivery targets were more important than safety.
They did do that. It can be pretty difficult to make sense of conflicting data like that. Tesla may have decided to not bother to solve such issues and hope less sensor data makes it easier to interpret.
This is what Elon had to say about Tesla's sophisticated radar data interpretation capabilities in 2016:
I guess the ability to see around cars in front of you got lost in some software update along the line. Otherwise removing radar necessarily meant reducing the safety of the system, or Elon lied in 2016.
It depends on what you want to do with the sensors. Somewhat accurately mapping what's immediately in front of the car to slightly improve speed matching and false positive/negative rates for emergency breaking comes at a cheaper price than the capability to fully map the surroundings fast and accurately enough for a computer to make correct decisions.
It's actually gotten cheaper since they figured out how to make it solid state.
Skimping on cost is how disasters happen. Ask Richard Hammond. "Spared no expense" my ass, hire more than 2 programmers, you cheap fuck.
Edit: This was supposed to be a Jurassic Park reference, but my dumb ass mixed up John Hammond and Richard Hammond. That's what I get for watching Top Gear and reading at the same time.
Were Richard Hammond’s many crashes a result of cost skimping? If so, I had no idea. Could you elaborate?
I was under the impression that Hammond’s serious crashes were a combination of bad luck and getting a bit too spicy when driving in some already-risky situations. I, too, would appreciate some corroboration.
Same here. I did a little googling and can’t find any corroborating evidence, but I also learned that Hammond’s Grand Tour insurance premiums are now more expensive than Top Gear’s budgets were for entire specials.
That has to be the real reason they've canceled Grand Tour
I mean… given that he has had two very well documented and life-threateningly catastrophic crashes in the course of making car shows… the insurance company underwriting his policies isn’t out of line.
I figured insuring him would be expensive, but it’s more the magnitude of his premiums that shocked me.
As someone who hasn't much watched Top Gear, I was cracking up at your Jurassic Park reference until I saw your edit and was like "Wait a minute."
Top Gear? Jurassic Park? Either way: Hold on to your butts.
😆