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‘Lidar is lame’: why Elon Musk’s vision for a self-driving Tesla taxi faltered
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Technology
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With good integrated design, the LIDAR could be practically invisible. So weird to think the average person actually would care about the details of how something works, or maybe Elon Musk just literally cannot imagine a car that uses LIDAR without it having a big assembly on the roof.
This has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with reducing production costs. The sensors themselves add to costs, but then the data processing for all of this data adds to the computational needs of the system, sensor installs requiring calibration and flexibility for changes in sensors add costs. The list goes on.
Musk and Tesla are standing firm on their position that LiDAR is needless and that others will follow their lead here, but so far in practice the lack of LiDAR in Tesla vehicles has shown to be a serious disadvantage compared to other systems.
Teslas are built cheap.
Compared to the Cybertruck's design, I don't think having a LIDAR antenna on top of the car is so bad.
Yep, I used to work for a robotics company that makes self-navigating floor cleaning robots. The LIDAR is completely integrated into the housing of the robot in both the old designs and the new one; it's barely noticeable.
I also much prefer my robot to not send a live camera feed to some Chinese server. So even if Lidar were to be less good I’d opt for that.
I'm absolutely not going to buy a mapping robot vacuum unless it keeps that info local, or on a server I can host. I have one right now with cloud controls, but it's only for the schedule.
Looking at their recent facelifts, I don't think they have many good designers left
I have a theory on this. They use a lot of ML for FSD and Ap. That a radical redesign would change the model enough that they would have to retrain from scratch. So they keep the facelifts extremely minor .
Just a theory.
Tesla's used to have LiDAR - they turned them off in software and stopped adding them to newer models.
Yeah, it's really all just cost savings. On their overpriced "luxury" cars
A long time ago Elon promised that full self-driving would be coming to existing cars that had their self-driving package installed which was cameras only. Elon is probably sticking with cameras only to avoid a lawsuit.
They stuck the model Y's new added front camera right under the "grille" shape (where the black trim ends and body colored panels begin), so the rest of it being so bland doesn't have an excuse. The rest of it's front cameras are under the front glass, they could at least make an interesting fascia, even if they had to keep the dimensions roughly the same