Comment by ASalazarMX

3 days ago

At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended up spreading HTML5. Now I just think he refused LIDAR on purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.

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ASalazarMX

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dwaite  1 day ago

It's important to understand the timeline of the Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash - at that point the iPhone had been out just shy of three years, and before the first public betas on Android. So for nearly three years, Apple had been investing in HTML5 technology because Flash wasn't in a form where it was deployable.

Additionally, Flash required android phones with 256MB ram as a minimum (which would have precluded two of the three shipped iPhone models at the time) and at least initially only supported software video decoding. Because of the difference in screen dimensions, resolutions and interaction models (plus the issues with embedding due to RAM limitations), the website was still basically broken whether your mobile phone had Flash or not.

My understanding (based on the timing) was always that when Adobe was finally ready to push its partners to bundle mobile Flash, Apple looked at it and decided against it. Adobe made public statements against their partner and so Jobs did so in kind.

ciberado  3 days ago

That one was motivated by the need of controlling the app distribution channel, just like they keep the web as a second class citizen in their ecosystem nowadays.

londons_explore  3 days ago

Years ago he called lidar a crutch...

And I agree, it is. Clearly it is theoretically possible without.

But when you can't walk at all, a crutch might be just what you need to get going before you can do it without the crutch!

rcpt  2 days ago

> purely aesthetic reasons

This is huge though.

People aren't setting them on fire during protests, and if an FSD Tesla plows into a farmers market, it might not even make the news.

People hate tech so much that self-driving companies with easy-to-spot cars have had to shut down after just a few mistakes.

Disguising Teslas as plain old regular human-driven cars is a great idea and I wouldn't be surprised if they win the market because of this. Even if they suck at driving.

iamtheworstdev  3 days ago

he didn't refuse it. MobileEye or whoever cut Tesla off because they were using the lidar sensors in a way he didn't approve. From there he got mad and said "no more lidar!"

mr_toad  2 days ago

> The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.

That’s true now, but when they first debuted they would have doubled the cost of the car.

  • GuB-42  2 days ago

    When Tesla debuted, the cost of batteries made electric cars more like an expensive novelty. The Tesla roadster certainly was fun, but it wasn't a practical car for day-to-day use.

    Of course, things have changed.

    Had Tesla gone all-in on Lidar, they could have turned the technology into a commodity, they are a trillion dollar company producing a million cars a year. Lidar is already present on cheap robot vacuum cleaners, and we have time-of-flight cameras in smartphones, I don't believe it would have been a problem to equip $50k cars with Lidar.

smallmancontrov  3 days ago

His stated reason was that he wanted the team focused on the driving problem, not sensor fusion "now you have two problems" problems. People assumed cost was the real reason, but it seems unfair to blame him for what people assumed. Don't get me wrong, I don't like him either, but that's not due to his autonomous driving leadership decisions, it's because of shitting up twitter, shitting up US elections with handouts, shitting up the US government with DOGE, seeking Epstein's "wildest party," DARVO every day, and so much more.

  • jellojello  3 days ago

    Sensor fusion is an issue, one that is solvable over time and investment in the driving model, but sensor-can't-see-anything is a show stopper.

    Having a self-driving solution that can be totally turned off with a speck of mud, heavy rain, morning dew, bright sunlight at dawn and dusk.. you can't engineer your way out of sensor-blindness.

    I don't want a solution that is available to use 98% of the time, I want a solution that is always-available and can't be blinded by a bad lighting condition.

    I think he did it because his solution always used the crutch of "FSD Not Available, Right hand Camera is Blocked" messaging and "Driver Supervision" as the backstop to any failure anywhere in the stack. Waymo had no choice but to solve the expensive problem of "Always Available and Safe" and work backwards on price.

    • red75prime  3 days ago

      > Waymo had no choice but to solve the expensive problem of "Always Available and Safe"

      And it's still not clear whether they are using a fallback driving stack for a situation where one of non-essential (i.e. non-camera (1)) sensors is degraded. I haven't seen Waymo clearly stating capabilities of their self-driving stack in this regard. On the other hand, there are such things as washer fluid and high dynamic range cameras.

      (1) You can't drive in a city if you can't see the light emitted by traffic lights, which neither lidar nor radar can do.

      4 replies →

    • dham  2 days ago

      If you have mud on a camera, you can't drive it either way. Lidar or not. The way to actually solve these issues is to have way more cameras for redundancy / self cleaning etc, not other sensors.