Comment by rappatic
22 days ago
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?
> 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.
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.
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
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?
I can't speak for lidar, but the Tesla self driving with cameras only on HW4 in my little Model 3 is so good that I don't even think about it anymore. I never thought I would trust this type of technology.
Over the last 2 days I drove from Greenville, SC to Raleigh, NC (4-5 hours) and back with self driving the entire way. Traffic, Charlotte, navigating parking lots to pull into a super charger. The only place I took over was the conference center parking lot for the Secure Carolina's Conference.
It drives at least as well or better than me in almost all cases...and I'm a pretty confident driver.
I say all that to say this...I can't imagine lidar improving on what I'm already seeing that much. Diminishing returns would be the biggest concern from a standpoint of cost justification. The fact that this type of technology exists in a vehicle as affordable as the Model 3 is mind blowing.
Anecdotal evidence isn't super useful here in preventing tragedy, because the people with negative anecdotes might be dead, and thus cannot give them.
To wit: Plenty of other tesla owners in a similar position as you, probably similarly praised the system, until it slammed them into a wall, car, or other obstacle, killing them.
The one good thing about death statistics is that they are difficult to hide or game the reporting thresholds.
https://www.tesladeaths.com/
Autopilot kills loads of people but my understanding is that autopilot is the dumb driver assist while FSD is the one that tries to solve general purpose driving.
Has FSD really only killed 2 people? FSD has driven 6 billion miles and the human driver death rate is 10 per billion so it has killed 2 where "as good as human" would mean 60. That seems really good tbh.
EDIT: and it looks like "deactivate before collision" doesn't work as a cheat, NHTSA requires reporting if it was active at any time within 30 seconds of the crash: https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
1 reply →
Tesla FSD cannot drive empty the way Waymo's have been able to for years. This proves Waymo's approach is much better.
I don't have strong opinion on the technology itself, but what is the price difference? How likely is it to be added to consumer vehicles? Does the technology have to stick out in every direction or can it be better hidden? Are there negative side effects to having roads too full of lidar in terms of signal congestion?
I don't know the answer to any of these but it seems like the camera based approach has some advantages to it as well. Doesn't seem that cut and dry.
3 replies →
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Yeah Tesla has more smoothing, but IMO that's less interesting than the ability to navigate tricky scenarios and model other actors. Here's my collection of interesting videos, Tesla only because those are the ones I get forwarded to me. I'd love to see a similar collection for Waymo.
Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DWz1TD-VZg
Negotiation: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NxloAweI6nU
Model: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KVa4GWepX74
Smoother maneuvers, or things like seamlessly backing up a bit when it predicts that a large vehicle turning from an intersecting street won't have enough room to turn unless the car moves out of its way. It's really cool.
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.
> 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.
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.
Human eyes are incredible in so many dimensions, and that’s before you go to our embedded evolved world models and reflexes.
I think a future where cameras are more eye like would be a big leap forward especially in bad weather - give them proper eyelids, refined tears, rotating ability, actual lenses to refocus at different distances, etc.