Why Tesla won't use LIDAR for full self driving cars

lidar

is nonsense and anyone who relies on luck responded that R is doomed to fail, expensive expensive sensors that are unnecessary, it's like having a bunch of expensive pen appendages, that compact appendage is bad, well now they won't put a Tons of them, that's ridiculous, you'll see almost every company working on

self

-

driving

cars

right now is using

lidar

if you look at Google with their uber Toyota mail projects, almost every manufacturer is putting some sort of lidar detector on top of Your

cars

are going to achieve autonomous

driving

except Tesla and the reason is everyone is going to get rid of lidar, that's my prediction, mark my words, it would make a lot of sense to put a lidar detector on a

self

-driving car, it essentially creates 3D maps. version of the world around it, which can be really useful when you're trying to make something drive itself.

The technology works similar to radar, but instead of using radio waves, it uses lasers, so it essentially projects all of these lasers out of the sensor and then measures how they return to the sensor and can then determine the size and shape of the world. surrounding it, but Elon made it very clear on autonomy day that Tesla would not use lidar, but why? Well, first there are a couple of reasons. Google's cost with its own project, no project has brought the cost of LIDAR down to around $7,500 per car, but it's still a huge cost and you don't want to add it to the already high price of a car, especially for a company like Tesla , which is very focused on costs and making their cars affordable, this is not something they want to try to put in every one of their cars, but probably Tesla's main selling point for not using lidar is that the world they It surrounds us and specifically the road is Designed for people who can see, it is

full

of visual stimuli created to help us navigate the world and navigate the path.

You all came here, you drove here and many of you used your neural network and your vision. They weren't shooting lasers. your eyes and you still ended up here we can have every road every sign every intersection is

full

of visual information to help us navigate the world around us and that's just stationary things like a traffic light or a stop sign but it gets really complicated when there are obstacles involved, so if you're using lidar you'll be able to see the obstacle and you'll be able to see it very well, especially the small things. It has very good resolution and you can see exactly what size and shape the object is, but it falls short when trying to determine what type of object it is and Tesla made it very clear that with their camera and radar system they can determine what the real object is.

An example they gave was a plastic bag rolling on the floor. highway, so we've probably seen that before and we don't slow down, we don't really worry because everyone is going so fast and you don't want to slam on the brakes just for a plastic bag if it hits your car. Now it's not a big deal with LIDAR. You will see this obstacle. He will think there is something in the middle of the road that you don't want to run into. It will brake suddenly. It could cause an accident behind you and that's not something you can do.

They want to, but with Tesla's software they can see that obstacle, see that plastic bag, see that there is some type of obstacle there with the radar and then with the cameras they can tell what type of object it is, which is really important. with lidar we only see the object, but with this camera and radar setup we can see what type of object it is and determine if it's something you can run over, it's something soft, something that won't damage the car, or something like that. It's hard that if you run into it, maybe you can hurt the passengers inside and that's really the most important thing here, being able to see the world as humans see it, it's expensive and unnecessary and like someone said once that you solve the vision, it's a bit useless. you have expensive hardware that is worthless in the car, another thing they made very clear on autonomy day was that this system is designed to adapt, they talked a lot about their neural network and how this Tesla software is capable of taking all the data that has accumulated. of everyone driving on the road and determine how to react to new situations, so that if road conditions change, you can adapt to those changes, which is very important for an autonomous driving system, so if any Have you ever seen a self-driving demonstration before?

Usually it's in an area where there has been fully GPS mapping. Everything is in ideal condition. The car has done it before with a normal driver. He was able to handle it perfectly. Maybe you have things connected to traffic lights so you know how to react to them, but in a real world scenario, when we implement this on a large scale, we won't be able to do it in every environment, the system will have to be able to adapt to the environment in which is found, which is what Tesla is trying to do. let's get into it here and I decided not to do a full video on it because it's way beyond what I understand.

If you want to see Tesla's full presentation, it's very interesting, especially for computer science people, it talks a lot about how they design their chip. Do it specifically for autonomous driving, no other company has done anything like this, so definitely check out their full presentation. I just wanted to touch on the lidar piece because it's something I understand and there's a lot of confusion about why Tesla isn't using it. lidar, so I hope I was able to clear some of that up and I don't want to make it seem like Tesla hates lidar. I think the technology is not good, there are definitely many applications and industries where it is used, I even said SpaceX uses it.

I should point out that I don't actually hate lidar as much as it might seem, but at SpaceX, their basic dragon uses lidar to navigate to the space station or dock, not only that we, SpaceX developed its own lidar from scratch to do that and I I spearheaded that effort personally because in that scenario lidar makes sense and in cars it's fucking stupid, there are a lot of industrial uses for lidar but Tesla feels autonomous driving just isn't one of them so thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this video that explains why Tesla. I made the decision not to use lidar.

I know this is something that has confused me, so if you enjoyed this video, definitely hit the like button and leave a comment below about what you think of this decision. Do you think it's a good idea not to? use lidar or is it something Tesla should maybe use as a redundancy method to maybe backup their camera and radar system so I want to hear what you think please leave a comment below and as always please subscribe so you don't miss next week's video. you guys next week and anyone who has any luck relying on lidar is doomed to failure, everyone is going to ditch lidar, that's my prediction, follow my words.