Tesla partnered with Luminar by the way and even tested their LiDAR on a model 3 last year. I guess they weren't impressed though, since they seem to still be all-in on passive optical recognition.
> I guess they weren't impressed though, since they seem to still be all-in on passive optical recognition.
That's one take - the other take is that they have been selling cars claiming that they are capable of full FSD because they are going to sell it without Lidar, and have been selling FSD as a $5k bolt on, so swapping to Lidar at this point would be a PR nightmare even if it was a better solution....
That's the cynical view though... (Although I also wouldn't be the one to tell the people that have spent lots of money on Autopilot that they have bought total vaporware - or be the CFO that announces they are back-fitting Lidar cameras). Once you are all-in on 'lidar is shit' it makes it hard to reverse the trend, despite rapidly falling costs.
>Once you are all-in on 'lidar is shit' it makes it hard to reverse the trend
It can be done, if there's good cause. Just partner with your lidar oem of choice, get them to do a white paper about how the latest point increase version of hardware or firmware is "revolutionary!" and then claim that your earlier criticisms of lidar have been fully addressed by the groundbreaking new lidar tech.
I've actually been suspecting this will happen once solid state LIDAR technology crossed a certain threshold.
Traditional old school LIDAR units with spinning scan heads are why quite a few self driving cars have the odd bumps and protrusions on them. It's very easy to see someone who wants to make a "cool car" looking at these protrusions, deciding "lidar is shit" and doing everything possible to avoid it. There are some good engineering reasons to avoid traditional lidar units. Meanwhile solid state LIDAR tech has only been on the market for a few years and is still quite expensive compared to traditional LIDAR models, but its definitely superior for a lot of places people want to be able to use LIDAR or where LIDAR would be an excellent competitor to other technology currently in use such as 3D depth mapping and Time of Flight cameras. I briefly looked into some of this stuff when considering work on an "art game" using VR and various 3D scanning technologies in order to make a "fake" Augmented Reality experience as part of constructing the deliberate aesthetic choices of the project.
Solid state LIDAR will definitely be pushed forward by market demand for wider fields of view, lower costs, and smaller module size. All of which will eventually lead to a situation where it will be stupid not to augment the self driving technology due to the massive benefits with zero downsides.
One way out of the LIDAR PR dead end would be for Tesla:
1.) When solid state LIDAR is ready, re-brand it something like SSL technology (Solid State LIDAR) and put it on new high end Teslas.
2.) Wait for all 'camera only' enabled Teslas with FSD beta to age out of service and upsell the owners on a heavily discounted FSD subscription for their brand new Teslas with SSL.
A third path would be to frame the addition of solid state LiDAR as purely an enhancement to their existing cameras, framing it as a camera upgrade instead of a new separate sensor.
That's straight out of Apple's playbook. I recall how Tim Apple ridiculed the OLED displays, until it became impossible to ignore. So I guess it can be done.
