BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

https://thedriven.io/2026/01/11/byds-cheapest-electric-cars-to-have-lidar-self-driving-tech/

77•senti_sentient•2h ago

Comments

cadamsdotcom•2h ago

Disruption at its finest :)

senti_sentient•2h ago

Someone said that LiDAR is too expensive, camera is better :)

iknowstuff•2h ago

And then made the best adas on the market using cameras

refulgentis•2h ago

I've struggled with this over the years, but think we can call it at this point: Waymo is definitely better.

Just too much real world data.

(i.e. scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+)

DustinBrett•2h ago

We being who? What is your evidence it's better? The fact all the cars stopped moving when the power went out? The fact they cost WayMore? Show the evidence for your claims. And they have remote operators as proven by the power outage.

refulgentis•2h ago

Apologies, I was unclear with the "i.e." bit I assume, to spell it out: I think after struggling with it over years its time to call it because Waymo has a scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+.

iknowstuff•2h ago

Waymo is fully autonomous, FSD is an adas for consumers.

Robotaxi is a separate product. They are fantastic at driving but until they remove supervisors it’s a moot comparison

refulgentis•1h ago

Ah, I see. ADAS as in "assistance on a car I can buy", makes sense.

terminalshort•1h ago

Is it really comparable, though? What is better a Ferrari or a Ford Ranger? That depends on if you are trying to go fast or haul 500 lbs of stuff across town. Waymo is a much better completely autonomous robo taxi in limited areas mapped to the mm, but if I want an autonomous driving system for my personal car to go wherever I want, Tesla FSD is the better option.

Rebelgecko•2h ago

By what metric? In terms of deaths, injuries, and crashes per mile their Full Self Driving at least an order of magnitude behind Waymo

DustinBrett•2h ago

Show the proof then with links to unbias articles and the numbers/math.

iknowstuff•2h ago

Waymo is not an adas. There’s nothing close to FSD 14 abilities out there for consumers.

And your stats comparing to waymo are made up and debunked in the very reddit thread they came from

cyberax•1h ago

Sure. And Tesla doesn't have robotaxis at all, they're still playing in the kindergarten league.

So Tesla is in a weird state right now. Tesla's highway assist is shit, it's worse than Mercedes previous generation assist after Tesla switched to the end-to-end neural networks. The new MB.Drive Assist Pro is apparently even better.

FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even in simple city conditions. If I try to turn it on, it attempts to kill me at least once on my route from my office to my home. So other car makers quite sensibly avoided it, until they perfected the technology.

ronnier•1h ago

This goes against my daily fsd usage and my friends fsd usage. We all use fsd daily, zero issues, through hard city and highway environments. It’s near perfect outside of the occasional weird routing issues (but that’s not a safety issue). We all have the latest fsd on hw4. No other consumer car on the market in the US can do this (go from point a to b with zero interventions through city and highway). If there was something better then I’d buy it, but there’s not.

terminalshort•1h ago

The issue here is that "zero issues" is something that must be based on a very large sample size. In the US the death rate for cars is a bit over 1 per 100 million miles. So you really need billions of miles of data. FSD could be 10x as dangerous as the average driver and still it would most likely be "zero issues" for you and all your friends.

qwerpy•1h ago

I'll post the 7 billion miles of stats here (https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety) but then the objections will be "it's Tesla of course they lie" and the debunked "they turn FSD off right before an accident".

ronnier•1h ago

It doesn’t matter what stats are shown. You’ll dismiss it because of political reasons. You can lie to yourself and others but I use this car daily and you won’t fool me.

cyberax•1h ago

Sigh. FSD is OK on freeways, but it constantly changes lanes for no discernible reasons. Sometimes unsafely or unnaturally, forcing me to take over. The previous stack had a setting to disable that, but not the new end-to-end NN-based system.

In cities, it's just shit. If you're using it without paying attention, your driving license has to be revoked and you should never be allowed to drive.

durandal1•1h ago

For anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie. Why would you spend energy lying on HN of all places?

qwerpy•1h ago

I recently went on vacation and rented a 7 year old Model X and the FSD on it (v12) was better than nothing but not great, especially after having v14 on my truck drive 99% of my miles. It truly is a life-changer for people fortunate enough to have it, so it's always jarring to see the misinformed/dishonest comments online. It's still not perfect but at this point I would trust it more than the average human and certainly more than a new/old/exhausted/inebriated/distracted driver.

cyberax•1h ago

I've been using Tesla since 2015. And no, it's not a lie.

Tesla FSD gives up with the red-hands-of-death panic at this spot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Cfe9LBzaCLpGSAr99 (edit: fixed the location)

It also misinterprets this signal: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhZsQtN5LKy59Mpv6 It doesn't have enough resolution to resolve the red left arrow, especially when it's even mildly rainy.

At this intersection, it just gets confused and I have to take over to finish the turn: https://maps.app.goo.gl/DHeBmwpe3pfD6AXc6

You're welcome to try these locations.

JumpCrisscross•53m ago

> anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie

I used the latest FSD and Waymo in December. FSD still needs to be supervised. It’s impressive and better than what my Subaru’s lane-keeping software can do. But I can confidently nap in a Waymo. These are totally different products and technology stacks.

iknowstuff•9m ago

Girl get real. Mercedes fooled quite a few people with their PR stunt but they have NOTHING like fsd. Drive assist pro is vaporware, as their “L3” has been for the past 2 years. You can’t order that shit but half of hackernews is glazing mercedes for it

Rebelgecko•7m ago

Llm hallucination? I want to give posters the benefit of the doubt but I didn't mention a reddit thread.

If you're just getting me mixed up with another poster, I got my stats from an electrek article supplemented by Waymo's releases: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

Tesla's tech is also marketed as a full self driving autopilot, not just basic driver assistance like adaptive cruise control.

That's how they're doing the autonomous robotaxis and the cross country drives without anyone touching the steering wheel.

cr125rider•2h ago

That’s not true at all. Tesla taxis aren’t even close to Waymo’s capabilities.

iknowstuff•2h ago

I said adas, nothing about waymo. That being said, yes they are, I ride them every day.

DustinBrett•2h ago

Where is the proof/evidence for this statement?

jeltz•1h ago

Curious how you only ask this to people who claim Teslas are bad and not to people who claim Teslas are good.

kcb•1h ago

I was just thinking about this on my 60 mile FSD driver I just finished. Basically inevitable that I would shortly go HN or reddit and read how FSD doesn't work.

FSD is here, it wasn't 3 or 4 years ago when I first bought a Tesla, but today it's incredible.

jandrewrogers•1h ago

The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors.

For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be assumed to remain the case forever.

consumer451•1h ago

I am just some schmoe, but optics alone can be easily spoofed as any fan of the Wile E. Coyote has known for decades. [0]

What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ

solumunus•1h ago

Why isn’t the solution a combination of both?

ycui1986•1h ago

everyone uses cellphone that transmit on the same frequency. they don't seem to cause interference. once enough lidar enters real word use. there will be regulation to make them work with each other.

jandrewrogers•48m ago

Completely different problem domains. A mobile phone is interacting with a fixed point (i.e. cell tower) that coordinates and manages traffic across cell phones to minimize interference. LIDAR is like wifi, a commons that can be polluted at will by arbitrary actors.

LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference.

AnotherGoodName•2h ago

Lidars come down in price ~40x.

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...

Meanwhile visible light based tech is going up in price due to competing with ai on the extra gpu need while lidar gets the range/depth side of things for free.

Ideally cars use both but if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar. Musk made an ill timed decision to go vision only.

So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.

refulgentis•2h ago

^ this, the article is quoting LIDAR price ($25K) from years ago.

DustinBrett•2h ago

Show the cost differences and do the math then come back to us before you can suggest what decisions were ill timed. Otherwise it's just armchair engineering.

refulgentis•2h ago

I'd love to take on this challenge: the article they linked shows the cost add for LIDAR (+$130) --

-- but I'm not sure how to get data on ex. how much Tesla is charged for a Nvidia whatever or what compute Waymo has --

My personal take is Waymo uses cameras too so maybe we have to assume the worst case, +full cost of lidar / +$130

iknowstuff•1h ago

Tesla uses their own chips. Chips which you can’t skip by using lidar because you still need to make decisions based on vision. A sparse distance cloud is not enough

terminalshort•1h ago

The issue isn't just the cost of the lidar units off the shelf. You have to install the sensors on the car. Modifications like that at the scale that Waymo does them (they still have less than 10K cars) are not automated and probably cost almost as much as the price of the car itself. BYD is getting around this by including them in a mass produced car, so their cost per unit is closer to the $130 off the shelf price. This is the winning combination IMO.

RivieraKid•1h ago

Depends on the specific lidar model. It seems that there's a wide range of lidar prices and capabilities and it's hard to find pricing info.

Tempest1981•1h ago

Could it also be about the looks? Waymo has a rather industrial look, with so many LiDARs, and the roof turret.

golemiprague•1h ago

Some companies work on reducing the size of it so manufacturers will be able to put it inside the car behind the mirror. Innoviz is one example https://techtime.news/2025/11/14/innoviz-27/

dzhiurgis•1h ago

Can lidar say what colour is traffic light?

pyrolistical•45m ago

It’s not either lifar or regular cameras. Use both and combine the information to exceed the humans

mrtksn•1h ago

I wonder if ubiquity doesn’t effect the lidar performance? Wouldn’t the systems see each other’s laser projections if there are multiple cars close to each other? Also is LIDAR immune to other issues like bright 3rd party sources? At least on iPhone I’m having faceid performance degradation. Also, I suspect other issues like thin or transparent objects net being detected.

With vision you rely on external source or flood light. Its also how our civilization is designed to function in first place.

Anyway, the whole self driving obsession is ridiculous because being driven around in a bad traffic isn’t that much better than driving in bad traffic. It’s cool but can’t beat a the public infrastructure since you can’t make the car dissipated when not in use.

IMHO, connectivity to simulate public transport can be the real sweet spot, regardless of sensor types. Coordinated cars can solve traffic and pretend to be trains.

Philip-J-Fry•1h ago

I'd assume not since Waymo uses lidar and has entire depots of them driving around in close proximity when not in use.

quietsegfault•45m ago

LIDAR systems use timing, phase locking, and software filtering to identify and eliminate interference from other units. There is still risk of interference, resulting in reduced range, noise, etc.

JumpCrisscross•54m ago

Between anti-Musk sentiment, competition in self driving and the proven track record of Lidar, I think we’ll start seeing jurisdictions from Europe to New York and California banning camera-only self-driving beyond Level 3.

general1465•39m ago

Nah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.

kelipso•18m ago

Why is it preferable to wait for people to die and then sue the company instead of banning it in the first place?

JBlue42•2m ago

This doc from 1999 has an answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE

cyberax•2h ago

Keep in mind, that $25k AUD is just $16600. And for that price, you're getting a real car with driver-assist features and a reasonable crash safety rating.

The US car manufacturers are cooked.

aetherspawn•1h ago

I heard from a friend he paid around $12k AUD for the cheapest new ICE car, Holden brand, which I guess proves the west can compete if they try?

Edit: Holden Spark.

jhy•1h ago

New? You haven't been able to buy a new Holden since '21.

AnotherGoodName•1h ago

Well the best comparison are the Teslas which are made in China (all Teslas sold in Australia today) vs Teslas made in the USA.

For the model 3 it’s USD$8000 cheaper like for like.

pityJuke•44m ago

The Holden Spark appears to just be a re-badge of a Chevrolet Spark, which was made by their South Korean subsidiary, and was discontinued three years ago [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Spark#Discontinuatio...

vmchale•1h ago

> The US car manufacturers are cooked.

Biden put a 100% tariff on Chinese cars and then Trump added tariffs on inputs.

Americans are getting screwed!

plemer•1h ago

We in the US can't hide forever.

g947o•1h ago

US manufacturers are going to be ok as long as there are policies banning foreign cars and there are tariffs, which is going to be true for a long time.

And somehow US consumers feel comfortable paying more for worse cars.

senti_sentient•1h ago

I had family friends visiting Australia from USA and they were surprised by the sheer number and varieties of Chinese cars on our roads. I too have a BYD Dolphin and Shark, they loved them and felt they’re missing out big time on this. Mind you we have lots of Teslas on the roads as well, but they are bleeding their lead.

AnotherGoodName•1h ago

Those Teslas in Australia are Chinese made too of course as are the majority of Teslas globally. USA made really doesn’t exist at all in Australia. It’s merely USA branded. Even the Ford Ranger that’s sold in Australia is made in Thailand.

senti_sentient•52m ago

True true… isn’t the LFP battery pack in model 3 and and Y supplied by BYD as well?

cyberax•1h ago

This can't last indefinitely. At some point, the contrast between the US-made and Chinese-made cars will become too great to ignore.

We saw that during the 80-s, with the Japanese cars.

expedition32•12m ago

Don't Americans like big pickup trucks? Nobody else really drives those in large numbers.

DustinEchoes•1h ago

Still not convinced of the safety of lidar. I guess all these cars with cheap lidar sensors on board will generate real world safety data over the next few years.

senti_sentient•1h ago

Why not? And cheap is a relative term, from American point of view these sensors may be expensive because they have to buy it from suppliers, from BYD’s perspective it could be home grown given they are by far the most vertically integrated vehicle manufacturer.

DustinEchoes•56m ago

See here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395

neilv•1h ago

What if the real world safety data over time is... secret retinal damage to millions of walkers and runners, with symptoms attributed to Covid mysteries (and not obviously due to vision), and it takes years more before someone happens to get enough data, and does the right study analysis, and then there's industry with strong incentive not to be on the hook for blinding millions of people?

If the tech industry has taught us anything, it's that big money is still as irresponsible and greedy as ever.

I suppose that one small bit of hope is that one of the most obvious bad actors in general happened to be opposed to Lidar, and might like to screw competitors with a scandal. So the news might come out, after much tragic damage is done.

Tempest1981•1h ago

The roof mount seems very practical, but it's a look that may turn off some buyers... buyers who care about looks.

For SUVs, maybe it could be blended in with a roof air scoop, like on some off-road trucks. Or a light bar.

Where is the LiDAR on the Atto 1? In the grille? How much worse is the field of view?

senti_sentient•1h ago

My personal take is that if users can get used to the notch on the iPhone , they could get used to that too.

protastus•1h ago

My impression is that Chinese consumer products haven't been hijacked by the "design above everything else" mindset. The priority is to make things work at scale.

American product design is obsessed with appearance and finish. Products end up costing 3 times more and functionality is degraded.

barbazoo•1h ago

Also car as a status symbol. If you look at it more utilitarian it’s not that bad as long it’s somehow compatible with a roof rack or box.

senti_sentient•36m ago

I have noticed that in Chinese web / app design philosophy as well, it’s always function over form.

Tycho•1h ago

How do you train a model to drive with LiDAR when the human drivers who generate the training data don’t use LiDAR?

knallfrosch•1h ago

Scan with LiDAR while manually driving.

jayd16•55m ago

Hell, you could even use slower offline 3d reconstruction of vision data for training, and still ultimately rely on runtime LiDAR.

hnburnsy•57m ago

Related: Volvo drops LIDAR...

https://www.carscoops.com/2025/11/volvo-says-sayonara-to-lid...

senti_sentient•54m ago

Aren’t they Chinese owned?

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