Comment by coryrc
5 hours ago
Human-piloted planes have altimeters and airspeed indicators; the failure of which have caused many accidents.
Tesla cars have speed sensors as well as GPS. (Altimeter and ILS not being relevant). I agree with Musk's claim they don't need LIDAR because human drivers don't; it's self-evidently true. But I think they _should_ have it because they can then be safer than humans; why settle for our current accident and death rate?
Following your logic (which is from the company marketing), why not remove GPS on the car in case they go wrong, as humans we don't need GPS? Cameras could go wrong too... then what happens?
Humans hear car/road noises, along with potential screams from outside or passenger shouts from inside, we sense vibrations, can respond to pedestrian or other driver hand signals, and constantly predict hazards through perceptions. How is the car doing all of this, if not for additional sensors and processing?
You can land a plane by eye, but what happens when there's fog? That's exactly like the situation in cars. LIDAR can provide extra sensory data where the cameras absolutely fail, just like our own eyes.
Knowing there's a solution to this, we are just to accept the car will fail where humans will? That's progress? Why wouldn't you want that extra data for such a small relative cost? LIDAR was already used on cars as a safety-only front collision avoidance system (that's how cheap it is to install).
In a properly designed system, adding data which is useful and cannot otherwise be inferred makes complete sense.
Given these cars are supposed to be so good that they will be working autonomously for you and pay themselves off in a year or two, the idea that LIDAR etc. is unnecessary and too expensive and will be lead to actively worse performance, is just insane logic for an "engineering" discussion.
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