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On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Am I remembering correctly that Tesla removed sensors for self driving?
Yuuup. Muskrat decided LiDAR was too expensive to include in every vehicle and scrapped it. Even disabled the sensors on the cars that have it.
My vacuum has LiDAR. That man is a cheap idiot.
The LiDAR you have on your vacuum isn't going to cut it as a safety relevant component onboard your car. Automotive-grade LiDAR are on another price range. Development for such sensors is quoted separately from the part price, and it costs millions of $.
Obviously, but my Ford Escape PHEV also has LiDAR and, despite being the highest trim level, cost FAR less than a Tesla. It doesn’t do FSD, obviously, but it still has LiDAR. And radar. And will do level 2 self driving enough that if I’m driving in traffic I’m more managing the car than driving it.
There is zero good excuse for not including LiDAR in Teslas.
There is a reason. It's just not a good one. It's profit.
I don't believe Tesla ever intended on having full self driving. That's just an idea Musk sold people to boost confidence in the company. The promise sold vehicles and boosted stock value, making Musk a shit load of money.
What difference would it make if they were fully devoted to FSD with the best technology they could get? It still wouldn't work perfectly and wouldn't be allowed alone everywhere probably, and they would have made less profit during that period. In what time frame would it actually pay back?
I can't seem to find information about the Ford Escape having a LiDAR, it's not on the spec. Sheet on Ford's website and in the news it's only about prototypes.
I am not saying Teslas should or shouldn't have LiDARs. I am just curious. I only know about Audi, Mercedes, Honda and Hyundai currently selling cars with LiDAR used for ADAS. They might be more Chinese OEMs selling cars with LiDARs, buy Ford, it surprises me.
I may be wrong then. There are a bunch of sensors above the windshield behind the rearview mirror, it could be that LiDAR isn’t one of them.
Probably cameras and rain sensor :)
When your compensation is based on profit per car, you make strange decisions like removing winker stalks and quality control.
Yes they sure did. I don't believe any Tesla ever shipped with Lidar, maybe some did. The big thing that they removed/disabled was the radar. They did this because the radar and visual cameras would disagree about where things were. So instead of spending more R&D time to get it right. They just removed the radar and called it solved.
That was just an excuse, they just couldn't get the parts. Radar is back now.