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.
-- 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
The problem with Tesla is, that they need to combine the outputs of those camera's into a 3d view, what takes a LOT more processing power to judge distances. As in needing more heavy models > more GPU power, more memory needed etc. And still has issues like a low handing sun + white truck = lets ram into that because we do not see it.
And the more edge cases you try to filter out with cameras only setups, the more your GPU power needs increase! As a programmer, you can make something darn efficient but its those edge cases that can really hurt your programs efficiency. And its not uncommon to get 5 to 10x performance drops, ... Now imagine that with LLM image recognition models.
Tesla's camera only approach works great ... under ideal situations. The issue is those edge cases and not ideal situations. Lidar deals with a ton of edge cases and removes a lot of the progressing needed for ideal situations.
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.
If you charged car makers $20m per pedestrian killed by their cars regardless of fault you'd probably see much safer designs.
This is an extremely optimistic view on how companies work
> So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.
They could be going for a Tesla-esque approach, in that by equipping every car in the fleet with lidar, they maximise the data captured to help train their models.
The US car manufacturers are cooked.
Edit: Holden Spark.
For the model 3 it’s USD$8000 cheaper like for like.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Spark#Discontinuatio...
Biden put a 100% tariff on Chinese cars and then Trump added tariffs on inputs.
Americans are getting screwed!
And somehow US consumers feel comfortable paying more for worse cars.
We saw that during the 80-s, with the Japanese cars.
I wouldn't want to own it in a very dense city, but there are only a couple of those in the US. Most US cities even at their densest locations are fine with a half ton.
I don't know what the real barrier to success will be, but I don't think it will be blindness. It may be difficulty competing on labor cost, but that's a good case for carefully applied tariffs to keep competition fair.
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.
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?
American product design is obsessed with appearance and finish. Products end up costing 3 times more and functionality is degraded.
Under that model, LIDAR training data is easy to generate. Create situations in a lab or take recordings from real drives, label them with the high-level information contained in them and train your models to extract it. Making use of that information is the next step but doesn't fundamentally change with your sensor choice, apart from the amount of information available at different speeds, distances and driving conditions
https://www.carscoops.com/2025/11/volvo-says-sayonara-to-lid...
Joking aside, this BYD Seagull, or Atto 1 in Australia (AUD$24K) and Dolphin Surf in Europe (£18K in the UK), is one the cheapest EV cars in the world and selling at around £6K in China. It's priced double in Australia and triple in the UK compared to its original price in China. It's also one of China best selling EV cars with 60K unit sold per month on average.
Most of the countries scrambling to block its sales to protect their own car industry or increase the tariff considerably.
It's a game changing car and it really deserve the place in EV car world Hall of Fame, as one of the legendary cars similar Austin 7, the father of modern ICE car including BMW Dixi and Datsun Type 11.
[1] BYD_Seagull:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Seagull
[2] Austin 7:
cadamsdotcom•2h ago
senti_sentient•2h ago
iknowstuff•2h ago
refulgentis•2h ago
Just too much real world data.
(i.e. scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+)
DustinBrett•2h ago
refulgentis•2h ago
iknowstuff•2h ago
Robotaxi is a separate product. They are fantastic at driving but until they remove supervisors it’s a moot comparison
refulgentis•2h ago
terminalshort•1h ago
Rebelgecko•2h ago
DustinBrett•2h ago
iknowstuff•2h ago
And your stats comparing to waymo are made up and debunked in the very reddit thread they came from
cyberax•2h ago
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•2h ago
terminalshort•1h ago
qwerpy•1h ago
ronnier•1h ago
cyberax•1h ago
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•2h ago
qwerpy•1h ago
cyberax•1h ago
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•1h ago
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•42m ago
Rebelgecko•40m ago
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
iknowstuff•2h ago
DustinBrett•2h ago
jeltz•1h ago
kcb•1h ago
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
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
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
wongarsu•17m ago
Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing the issue (removing the mural) and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift
solumunus•1h ago
ycui1986•1h ago
jandrewrogers•1h ago
LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference.
tim333•17m ago
vachina•8m ago