Comment by rappatic

Comment by rappatic 14 hours ago

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In the current state of self-driving tech, lidar is clearly the most effective and safest option. Yet companies like Tesla refuse to integrate lidar, preferring to rely solely on cameras. This is partially to keep costs down. But this means the Tesla self-driving isn't quite as good as Waymo, which sits pretty comfortably at level 4 autonomy.

But humans have no lidar technology. We rely almost solely on sight for driving (and a tiny bit on sound I guess). Hence in principle it should be possible for cars to do so too. My question is this: at what point, if at all, will self-driving get good enough to make automotive lidar redundant? Or will it always be able to make the self-driving 1% better than just cameras?

convenwis 14 hours ago

There are unquestionably some cases where Lidar adds actual data that cameras can't see and is relevant to driving accuracy. So the real question is whether there are cases where Lidar actually hurts. I think that is possible but unlikely to be the case.

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  • Royce-CMR 8 hours ago

    I think the safety of other humans eyes (lidar exposure) is the real negative for lidar use.

    The MKBHD YouTube video where he shows his phone camera has burned out pixels from lidar equipped car reviews is revealing (if I recall correctly, he proceeds to show it live). I don't want that pointed at my eye.

    I love lidar from an engineering / capability perspective. But I grew up with the "don't look in a laser!" warnings everywhere even on super low power units... and it's weird that those have somehow gone away. :P

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iknowstuff 12 hours ago

if cameras end up only slightly better than humans - who cause 40k deaths annually and 1M worldwide, or a world war amount of deaths every 15 years or so - but rapidly deployable due to cost, they will save more lives than a handful of lidar cars.

As far as Tesla, time will tell. I ride their robotaxis daily and see them performing better than Waymo, but it's obviously meaningless until we see accident stats after they remove safety monitors.

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  • flutas 12 hours ago

    > I ride their robotaxis daily and see them performing better than Waymo, but it's obviously meaningless until we see accident stats after they remove safety monitors.

    I've seen this claimed a lot but never have gotten a definitive answer.

    Is this like "overall better but hard to pinpoint" or "this maneuver is smoother than Waymo" or something in between?

    Would love to hear experiences with them since they're so limited currently.

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bsder 12 hours ago

> We rely almost solely on sight for driving (and a tiny bit on sound I guess).

And proprioception. If I'm driving in snowy conditions, I'm definitely paying attention to whether the wheels are slipping, the car is sliding, the steering wheel suddenly feels slack, etc. combined with memorized knowledge of the road.

However, that's ... not great. It requires a lot of active engagement from the driver and gets tiring fast.

Self-driving can be way better than this.

GPS with dead reckoning tells the car exactly where it is relative to a memorized maps of the road--it won't miss a curve in a whiteout condition because it doesn't need to see the curve--that's a really big deal and gets you huge improvements over humans. Radar/lidar will detect a stopped car in front of you long before your sight will. And a computer system won't get tired after driving in stressful conditions for a half hour. etc.

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thechao 13 hours ago

Let's just do a quick comparison: the visual cortex consumes about 10x more volume of the human brain than the language center. So... that's a rough comparison of difficulty. I seem to remember the visual centers is also a lot older, evolutionarily than the language centers?

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floatrock 13 hours ago

> My question is this: at what point, if at all, will self-driving get good enough to make automotive lidar redundant?

By 2018, if you listen to certain circa-2015 full self-driving technologists.

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readthenotes1 14 hours ago

Many humans do a really bad job at driving, so I'm not sure we should try to emulate that.

And it is certain that in India they use sound sound for echolocation.

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  • rappatic 14 hours ago

    > Many humans do a really bad job at driving, so I'm not sure we should try to emulate that

    Agreed, but there are still really good human drivers, who still operate on sight alone. It's more about the upper bound, not the human average, that can be achieved with only sight.

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    • Zigurd 13 hours ago

      That upper bound can be pretty low in bad lighting conditions. If you have no strategy to work around that, your performance is going to be bad compared to vehicles with radar and lidar. On top of all that, Waymo's performance advantage might come in part from the staggering amount of geospatial data available to Waymo vehicles and unique to Waymo's parent company.

      The second and third place companies in terms of the number of deployed robotaxis are both subsidiaries of large Chinese Internet platforms, and both of them are also leaders in providing geospatial data and navigation in China. Neither operates camera-only vehicles.

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