Article has a paragraph about how lidar is rapidly getting cheaper, so the camera comparison is only temporary

Dolgov also pushed back on the one knock that camera-only fans always reach for: cost. Waymo is on its sixth generation of hardware, and he said each generation has drastically cut the price. Betting against sensors like lidar on today’s prices, he warned, means betting on “a number that has a fairly short shelf life.”

"Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet"

Seems like a bad way to legislate this, since everyone else on the roads pays the price for cut rate self driving

Personally I would rather vote to ban them if they aren't safe enough. If car makers want to cheap out at the expense of public safety they should go to prison for the people they kill.

> Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet.

Nope, you need a regulatory approval, insurance etc. Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. So the trillion dollar question is when Lidar will meet all requirements and when camera-only.

1) Both in 2028

2) lidar in 2030 and cameras in 2035

3) Gov will require lidar for full self driving

You’re like 2-3 orders of magnitude off on your cost there.

Which is why we need strong regulation. People shouldn’t be able to vote with their wallet when other peoples lives are at stake.

Where did you get $200k worth of extra sensors?

Also, contrary to your statement, the article directly addresses the meat if the question:

> The disagreement is whether “good enough to help a human drive” ever becomes “good enough to remove the human,” and his answer is no, because the sensing tops out before you get the last few nines.

> Now, Tesla would point to its active Robotaxi service as an example of “removing the human”, but Dolgov also said that camera-only is also good for a demo, and that’s basically what Tesla’s Robotaxi service is right now.

LIDAR units are nowhere near that expensive. Even ten years ago, the Velodyne top of car units only cost about $80,000.

The short range ones, found at vehicle corners and on the rear, are now around $200 - $1500. The long range car-top unit is still expensive, around $10,000, and that's dropping. The whole sensor suite on a Waymo is probably under US$20,000 right now. If that.

The future direction for automotive seems to be more car-top sensors with narrower fields of view that add up to a full circle. Only the one that looks ahead needs 300m range.

> But are $200K worth of extra sensors actually worth it

Of course not!

So, you may be surprised to find that Waymo's sensor package doesn't cost $200k. Whoops!

> I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun.

Elon has already lied, on an investor call, about how such things are not necessary - he referenced how "Tesla cameras can count photons", as a reason why they were not affected by fog, rain, or snow.

Except, no they can't, and they never will be able to. Not the cameras in any Tesla now (and even then). It's a completely different type of camera (and it would do effectively nothing useful from a visualization perspective, let alone functional camera for human viewing). And even if they changed the camera, or added some, well, you can't count photos if you're not in an enclosed space (you know, like the open road).

This is where Elon gets really dangerous, in my mind, he knows enough to be dangerous, he knows what to say that convinces the layperson, or investor, passes the initial sniff test only to dramatically fall over when you investigate.

> you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras.

You can get 3D depth estimation from a single 2D image but I don’t know how good it is for automotive.

https://huggingface.co/tasks/depth-estimation

We already have those results. It’s why Waymo is doing millions of paid rides per month while Tesla is LARPing a robotaxi service that’s basically doing zero fully autonomous rides, as far as anyone can tell.

The 100% tariffs on Chinese cars have been the biggest obstacle from not getting to that cost point sooner.

If Teslas could self drive you could sit in the back seat, or sleep, or send the car somewhere without being in it. Elon really wants them to, but Tesla's do not self drive.

"self-driving" in better than ideal conditions.

You can't purchase a level 3 Tesla at any price, either.

To me, true self-driving starts at level 3. Otherwise, it's supervised.

And Tesla selling their product as "Full Self Driving (Supervised)" is like selling "Fully Cooked Meal (Frozen)". No! You call it a "frozen meal"!

Also humans can move their heads around which gives extra parralax information and thus better depth perception than two static cameras would imply.

Humans also have prior world domain knowledge. A human driver seeing a guy running across the road behind an obstacle can infer that the human will probably pop out on the other side (and prepare accordingly). A human can see the silhouette of an object with 1 eye and still infer that it has depth because they know what objects are, which is why one-eyed people can drive legally everywhere in the US. This inference extends to everything, not just shapes but behaviors of anything in the road, animate and inanimate objects.