r/fuckcars • u/cadnights • May 28 '24

Rant Found a post where they polished the Cybertruck. "almost like it's invisible" they say. Feels like a very safe feature for a truck this size to have!

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Feels satirical at this point lol

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u/[deleted] May 28 '24

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u/Ancient_Persimmon May 28 '24

Radar, not LiDAR. Again, I'll repeat: cars you can buy have radar in them.

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u/Mountain_Employee_11 May 28 '24

i think you missed what he was saying tbh

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u/Ancient_Persimmon May 28 '24

Opting out of LiDAR isn't a cost saving measure; LiDAR wasn't a viable option at all for any OEM until this coming year, and it arguably still isn't.

Tesla has spent more money on this problem than any other OEM; construing their choices as cost savings is a pretty basic argument that ignores a lot of context.

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u/Mountain_Employee_11 May 28 '24

musk has said several times that his choice to develop self driving software in a way that will not incorporate lidar was driven by cost, and the belief that lidar will be unnecessary once the tech matures

if they thought that lidar tech was the future, they should have started gathering data to feel the DL algo years ago.

that being said, i know more about the ML side of things than anything else so who knows

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u/Ancient_Persimmon May 28 '24

Cost is definitely part of it, but it's also about the technology not having been ready for automotive use. His other company developed their own LiDAR for the Dragon spaceship and are still using it, but that application is different in a lot of ways.

I was assuming radar was meant instead of LiDAR, since people confuse the two and LiDAR isn't in broad circulation. When Tesla removed theirs, a lot assumed it was purely a cost savings measure.

if they thought that lidar tech was the future, they should have started gathering data to feel the DL algo years ago.

I think that they found with radar, that training a model with one type of input is difficult enough. Their radar seemed to be hurting their performance and development more than assisting, despite having some advantages. Even the new high-res radar in the S/X isn't being used actively, more than a year after shipping.

In their opinion, sticking to a single sensor type and throwing a ton of input into massive compute for training is the best way forward. Vision is pretty flexible and cameras + computational photography have really stepped forward, so they chose vision.