MicroVision aims to make lidar affordable for mainstream vehicles with a target price under $200.
MicroVision, a solid-state sensor technology company located in Redmond, Wash., says it has designed a solid-state automotive lidar sensor intended to reach production pricing below US $200. That’s less than half of typical prices now, and it’s not even the full extent of the company’s ambition. The company says its longer-term goal is $100 per unit. MicroVision’s claim, which, if realized, would place lidar within reach of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) rather than limiting it to high-end autonomous vehicle programs. Lidar’s limited market penetration comes down to one issue: cost.
Comparable mechanical lidars from multiple suppliers now sell in the $10,000 to $20,000 range. That price roughly tenfold drop, from about $80,000, helps explain why suppliers now are now hopeful that another steep price reduction is on the horizon.
For solid-state devices, “it is feasible to bring the cost down even more when manufacturing at high volume,” says Hayder Radha, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University and director of the school’s Connected & Autonomous Networked Vehicles for Active Safety program. With demand expanding beyond fully autonomous vehicles into driver-assistance applications, “one order or even two orders of magnitude reduction in cost are feasible.”
“We are focused on delivering automotive-grade lidar that can actually be deployed at scale,” says MicroVision CEO Glen DeVos. “That means designing for cost, manufacturability, and integration from the start—not treating price as an afterthought.”
MicroVision’s Lidar System
Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously dismissed lidar in 2019 as “a fool’s errand,” arguing that cameras and radar alone were sufficient for automated driving. A credible path to sub-$200 pricing would fundamentally alter the calculus of autonomous-car design by lowering the cost of adding precise three-dimensional sensing to mainstream vehicles. The shift reflects a broader industry trend toward solid-state lidar designs optimized for low-cost, high-volume manufacturing rather than maximum range or resolution.
Before those economics can be evaluated, however, it’s important to understand what MicroVision is proposing to build.
The company’s Movia S is a solid-state lidar. Mounted at the corners of a vehicle, the sensor sends out 905-nanometer-wavelength laser pulses and measures how long it takes for light reflected from the surfaces of nearby objects to return. The arrangement of the beam emitters and receivers provides a fixed field of view designed for 180-degree horizontal coverage rather than full 360-degree scanning typical of traditional mechanical units. The company says the unit can detect objects at distances of up to roughly 200 meters under favorable weather conditions—compared with the roughly 300-meter radius scanned by mechanical systems—and supports frame rates suitable for real-time perception in driver-assistance systems. Earlier mechanical lidars, used spinning components to steer their beams but the Movia S is a phased-arraysystem. It controls the amplitude and phase of the signals across an array of antenna elements to steer the beam. The unit is designed to meet automotive requirements for vibration tolerance, temperature range, and environmental sealing.
MicroVision’s pricing targets might sound aggressive, but they are not without precedent. The lidar industry has already experienced one major cost reset over the past decade.
“Automakers are not buying a single sensor in isolation... They are designing a perception system, and cost only matters if the system as a whole is viable.” –Glen DeVos, MicroVision
Around 2016 and 2017, mechanical lidar systems used in early autonomous driving research often sold for close to $100,000. Those units relied on spinning assemblies to sweep laser beams across a full 360 degrees, which made them expensive to build and difficult to ruggedize for consumer vehicles.
“Back then, a 64-beam Velodyne lidar cost around $80,000,” says Radha.
Comparable mechanical lidars from multiple suppliers now sell in the $10,000 to $20,000 range. That roughly tenfold drop helps explain why suppliers now believe another steep price reduction is possible.
“For solid-state devices, it is feasible to bring the cost down even more when manufacturing at high volume,” Radha says. With demand expanding beyond fully autonomous vehicles into driver-assistance applications, “one order or even two orders of magnitude reduction in cost are feasible.”
Solid-State Lidar Design Challenges
Lower cost, however, does not come for free. The same design choices that enable solid-state lidar to scale also introduce new constraints.
“Unlike mechanical lidars, which provide full 360-degree coverage, solid-state lidars tend to have a much smaller field of view,” Radha says. Many cover 180 degrees or less.
That limitation shifts the burden from the sensor to the system. Automakers will need to deploy three or four solid-state lidars around a vehicle to achieve full coverage. Even so, Radha notes, the total cost can still undercut that of a single mechanical unit.
What changes is integration. Multiple sensors must be aligned, calibrated, and synchronized so their data can be fused accurately. The engineering is manageable, but it adds complexity that price targets alone do not capture.
DeVos says MicroVision’s design choices reflect that reality. “Automakers are not buying a single sensor in isolation,” he says. “They are designing a perception system, and cost only matters if the system as a whole is viable.”
Those system-level tradeoffs help explain where low-cost lidar is most likely to appear first.
Most advanced driver assistance systems today rely on cameras and radar, which are significantly cheaper than lidar. Cameras provide dense visual information, while radar offers reliable range and velocity data, particularly in poor weather. Radha estimates that lidar remains roughly an order of magnitude more expensive than automotive radar.
But at prices in the $100 to $200 range, that gap narrows enough to change design decisions.
“At that point, lidar becomes appealing because of its superior capability in precise 3D detection and tracking,” Radha says.
Rather than replacing existing sensors, lower-cost lidar would likely augment them, adding redundancy and improving performance in complex environments that are challenging for electronic perception systems. That incremental improvement aligns more closely with how ADAS features are deployed today than with the leap to full vehicle autonomy.
MicroVision is not alone in pursuing solid-state lidar, and several suppliers including Chinese firms Hesai and RoboSense and other major suppliers such as Luminar and Velodyne have announced long-term cost targets below $500. What distinguishes current claims is the explicit focus on sub-$200 pricing tied to production volume rather than future prototypes or limited pilot runs.
Some competitors continue to prioritize long-range performance for autonomous vehicles, which pushes cost upward. Others have avoided aggressive pricing claims until they secure firm production commitments from automakers.
That caution reflects a structural challenge: Reaching consumer-level pricing requires large, predictable demand. Without it, few suppliers can justify the manufacturing investments needed to achieve true economies of scale.
Evaluating Lidar Performance Metrics
Even if low-cost lidar becomes manufacturable, another question remains: How should its performance be judged?
From a systems-engineering perspective, Radha says cost milestones often overshadow safety metrics.
“The key objective of ADAS and autonomous systems is improving safety,” he says. Yet there is no universally adopted metric that directly expresses safety gains from a given sensor configuration.
Researchers instead rely on perception benchmarks such as mean Average Precision, or mAP, which measures how accurately a system detects and tracks objects in its environment. Including such metrics alongside cost targets, says Radha, would clarify what performance is preserved or sacrificed as prices fall.
IEEE Spectrum has covered lidar extensively, often focusing on technical advances in scanning, range, and resolution. What distinguishes the current moment is the renewed focus on economics rather than raw capability
If solid-state lidar can reliably reach sub-$200 pricing, it will not invalidate Elon Musk’s skepticism—but it will weaken one of its strongest foundations. When cost stops being the dominant objection, automakers will have to decide whether leaving lidar out is a technical judgment or a strategic one.
That decision, more than any single price claim, may determine whether lidar finally becomes a routine component of vehicle safety systems.
Read the original article
Comments
By zelphirkalt 2026-02-2310:5622 reply Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection challenges.
Karpathy provided additional context on the removal of LiDAR during his Lex Fridman Podcast appearance. This article condenses what he said:
And here's one of Elon's mentions (he also has talked about it quite a bit in various spots).
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450?s=20
Edit: My personal view is that LiDAR and other sensors are extremely useful, but I worked on aircraft, not cars.
Based on that list it boils down to 2 things it seems:
- cost (no longer a problem)
- too much code needed and it bloats the data pipelines. Does anyone have any actual evidence of this being the case? Like yes, code would be needed, but why is that innately a bad thing? Bloated data pipelines feels like another hand-wave when I think if you do it right it’s fine. As proven by Waymo.
Really curious if any Tesla engineers feel like this is still the best way forward or if it’s just a matter of having to listen to the big guy musk.
I’ve always felt that relying on vision only would be a detriment because even humans with good vision get into circumstances where they get hurt because of temporary vision hindrances. Think heavy snow, heavy rain, heavy fog, even just when you crest a hill at a certain time of day and the sun flashes you
Just for the record though, Musk isn't blindly anti-LIDAR. He has said (and I think this is an objective fact) that all existing roads and driving are based on vision (which is what all humans do). So that should technically be sufficient. SpaceX uses LIDAR for their docking systems.
I would argue that yes, we do use vision but we get that "lidar depth" from our stereo vision. And that used to be why I thought cameras weren't enough.
But then look at all the work with gaussian splatting (where you can take multiple 2d samples and build a 3d world out of it). So you could probably get 80% there with just that.
The ethos of many Musk companies (you'll hear this from many engineers that work there) is simplify, simplify, simplify. If something isn't needed, take it out. Question everything that might be needed.
To me, LIDAR is just one of those things in that general pattern of "if it isn't absolutely needed, take it out" – and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that it isn't required. It's probably a nice to have, but maybe not required.
Humans aren't using only fixed vision for driving. This is such a tiresome thing to see repeated in every discussion about self driving.
You're listening to the road and car sounds around you. You're feeling vibration on the road. You're feeling feedback on the steering wheel. You're using a combination of monocular and binocular depth perception - plus, your eyes are not a fixed focal length "cameras". You're moving your head to change the perspective you see the road at. Your inner ear is telling you about your acceleration and orientation.
By kube-system 2026-02-2317:362 reply And also, even with the suite of sensors that humans have, their vision perception is frequently inadequate and leads to crashes. If vision was good enough, "SMIDSY" wouldn't be such an infamous acronym in vehicle injury cases.
By kelnos 2026-02-2319:53 For those of us not aware of Australian cycling jargon, "SMIDSY" means "Sorry, Mate, I Didn't See You".
By anthonypasq 2026-02-2320:432 reply the issue is clearly attention not vision when it comes to humans. if we could actually process 100% of the visual information in our field of view, then accidents would probably go down a shit load.
By kube-system 2026-02-2321:242 reply Humans have both issues. There are many human failures which are distinctly a vision issue and not attention related, e.g. misestimation of depth/speed, obscured or obstructed vision, optical focus issues, insufficient contrast or exposure, etc.
But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving? I mean, yes, we can’t see as well in fog, but that’s why you should slow down
By kube-system 2026-02-2322:22 Again, I'm still not saying that humans don't make bad decisions. I'm saying that, unequivocally, they also get into accidents while paying attention and being careful, as a result of misinterpretation or failure of their senses. These accidents are also common, for example:
* someone parking carefully, misjudges depth perception, bumps an object
* person driving at night, their eyes failed to perceive a poorly lit feature of the road/markings/obstacles
* person driving and suddenly blinded by bright object (the sun, bright lights at night)
* person pulling out in traffic who misinterprets their depth perception and therefore misjudges the speed of approaching traffic
* people can only focus their eyes at one distance at a time, and it takes time to focus at a different distance. It is neither unsafe nor unexpected for humans to check their instruments while driving -- but it can take the human eye hundreds of milliseconds to focus under normal circumstances -- If you look down, focus, look back up, and focus, as quick as you can at highway speeds, you will have travelled quite a long distance.
These type of failures can happen not as a result of poor decision making, but of poor perception.
By throw10920 2026-02-2414:492 reply > But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving?
Most of them.
We can lump together "inattention" and "idiocy" for the purposes of this conversation, because both could be massively alleviated by a good self-driving car without lidar.
If you look at the parallel comments, you'll see that the majority of accidents and fatalities indeed come from these two factors combined (two-thirds coming from distraction, speeding, and impaired driving), and that kube-system is having to resort to ridiculous fallacies to try to dispute the empirical data that is available.
By kube-system 2026-02-2415:15 I didn’t claim vision was responsible for the majority of accidents anywhere in this thread.
By throw10920 2026-02-240:391 reply > There are many human failures which are distinctly a vision issue and not attention related
Which are a tiny minority. The largest causes of crashes in the US are attention/cognition problems, not vision problems. Most traffic systems in western countries (probably in others, too, but I don't have personal experience), and in particular the US, are designed to limit visibility problems and do so very effectively.
By kube-system 2026-02-246:581 reply That sounds more like a personal opinion, because I don’t think that data is particularly easy to objectively collect.
Regardless it is irrelevant to the point. Whatever the number may be, lapses in human visual perception are responsible for some crashes
By throw10920 2026-02-2414:281 reply > That sounds more like a personal opinion, because I don’t think that data is particularly easy to objectively collect.
That sounds like a personal opinion?
Maybe do the bare minimum of research before spouting yours.
DOT says that only 5% of crashes are caused by low visibility during weather events.[1]
In 2023, the combined causes of alcohol, speeding, and distracted driving (all cognitive/attention issues) caused 67% of highway deaths. [2]
I was able to find these in 30 seconds. You did zero research to confirm whether your belief was correct before asserting that my claim was opinion. That's pathetic.
> Regardless it is irrelevant to the point.
And your point is therefore irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because the person you were replying to did not claim that vision had no safety impact, but that it had little safety impact:
> the issue is clearly attention not vision when it comes to humans. if we could actually process 100% of the visual information in our field of view, then accidents would probably go down a shit load.
...and, as we can clearly see, the issue is attention (and some bad decision making), not vision.
[1] https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/weather/roadimpact.htm
[2] https://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/opinion/columns/sa...
By kube-system 2026-02-2414:331 reply None of those things you cited is “human vision or perception”
“Low visibility during weather events” is a small subset of this.
A ridiculously common example of the limitations of human vision is when people hit curbs parallel parking because of the inherent limitations of relying on depth perception to estimate the exact location of the vehicle when it cannot otherwise be directly seen. Go look in a parking lot and see how common curbed wheels are.
Also, NHTSA estimates that they don’t have any information for 60% of incidents, because they go unreported.
By throw10920 2026-02-2414:381 reply > None of those things you cited is “human vision or perception”
> “Low visibility during weather events” is a small subset of this.
You're still refusing to do the most basic research or even read my comment:
> In 2023, the combined causes of alcohol, speeding, and distracted driving (all cognitive/attention issues) caused 67% of highway deaths.
Do the math. 100% - 67% is 33%. Even literally not opening Google, you can already deduce that the maximum fraction of fatalities caused by vision is 33%.
Given that you aren't interested in reading or researching and instead just want to push your opinion as fact, I think your claims can be safely discarded.
Edit: Because you're editing your comment because you realize that you're making an absolute fool of yourself:
> A ridiculously common example of the limitations of human vision is when people hit curbs parallel parking
A completely irrelevant distraction - this causes virtually zero accidents and even fewer fatalities, and you know it.
> Also, NHTSA estimates that they don’t have any information for 60% of incidents, because they go unreported.
Aha, so now you actually did research, and found that all of the available data supports my claims, so you're attempting to undermine it. Nice try. "Estimates" vs. actual numbers isn't really a contest.
Come back when you have actual data - until then, you're just continuing to undermine your own point with your ridiculous fallacies and misdirections - because if you actually had a defensible claim, you'd be able to instantly pull out supporting evidence.
By kube-system 2026-02-2414:57 Dude, you're arguing with a straw man.
I'm not arguing about fatalities or relative percentages of contributing factors, nor am I arguing that alcohol/speeding/attention are not all also issues. They are, you're right.
The only thing I argued is that "lapses in human visual perception are responsible for some crashes", which is a fact.
By gpm 2026-02-240:02 Attention is perhaps the limiting factor, but being able to look in two directions at once would help, and would help greatly if we had more attention capacity. E.g. anytime you change lanes you have to alternate between looking behind, beside, and in front and that greatly reduces reaction time should something unexpected happen in the direction you aren't currently looking...
In theory, a computer should be able to do the same. It could do sensor fusion with even more sense modalities than we have. It could have an array of cameras and potentially out-do our stereo vision, or perhaps even use some lightfield magic to (virtually) analyze the same scene with multiple optical paths.
However, there is also a lot of interaction between our perceptual system and cognition. Just for depth perception, we're doing a lot of temporal analysis. We track moving objects and infer distance from assumptions about scale and object permanence. We don't just repeatedly make depth maps from 2D imagery.
The brute-force approach is something like training visual language models (VLMs). E.g. you could train on lots of movies and be able to predict "what happens next" in the imaging world.
But, compared to LLMs, there is a bigger gap between the model and the application domain with VLMs. It may seem like LLMs are being applied to lots of domains, but most are just tiny variations on the same task of "writing what comes next", which is exactly what they were trained on. Unfortunately, driving is not "painting what comes next" in the same way as all these LLM writing hacks. There is still a big gap between that predictive layer, planning, and executing. Our giant corpus of movies does not really provide the ready-made training data to go after those bigger problems.
By dcrazy 2026-02-2320:43 Putting your point another way, in order to replicate an average human driver’s competence you would need to make several strong advancements in the state of the art in computer vision _and_ digital optics.
In India (among others), honking is essential to reducing crashes
We often greatly underestimate / undervalue the role of our ears relative to vision. As my film director friend says, 80% of the impact in a movie is in the sound
By SOLAR_FIELDS 2026-02-2323:11 The day a Waymo can functionally navigate the streets of Mumbai is when we really have achieved l5
By IncreasePosts 2026-02-2516:40 I'm positive that Teslas have gyroscopes and accelerometers in them. Our eyes actually have a fairly small focal length range due to the fixed nature of our cornea and only being able to change focal length by flexing the crystalline lens.
20 meters away motion vision is more accurate than stereoscopic vision. What is lidar helping to solve here?
By dymk 2026-02-2321:50 Waymo claims its system, which uses a combination of LIDAR & vision, resolves objects up to 500 meters away
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...
This company claims their LIDAR works conservatively at 250m, and up to 750m depending on reflectivity
https://www.cepton.com/driving-lidar/reading-lidar-specs-par...
By dymk 2026-02-267:04 What I said has to do with "vision only systems" (what Musk has claimed will be enough to do FSD) with sensor fusion systems (what everybody else having success in this space does)
Mentioning gaussian splatting for why we don't need lidar depth is a great example of Musk-esque technobabble; surface level seemingly correct, but nonsense to any practitioner. Because one of the biggest problems of all SfM techniques is that the results are scale ambiguous, so they do not in fact recover that crucial real-world depth measurement you get from lidar.
Now you might say "use a depth model to estimate metric depth" and I think if you spend 5 minutes thinking about why a magic math box that pretends to recover real depth from a single 2D image is a very very sketchy proposition when you need it to be correct for emergency braking versus some TikTok bokeh filter you will see that also doesn't get you far.
By servo_sausage 2026-02-2321:03 This is not really true if you have multiple cameras with a known baseline, or well known motion characteristics like you get with an accelerometer+ wheel speed.
> So that should technically be sufficient
Sufficient to build something close to human performance. But self driving cars will be held to a much higher standard by society. A standard only achievable by having sensors like LiDAR.
By anthonypasq 2026-02-2320:472 reply if a self driving car had the exact vision of humans it would still be better because it has better reaction times. never mind the fact that humans cant actually process all the visual information in our field of view because we dont have the broad attention to be able to do that. its very obvious that you can get super human performance with just cameras.
Whether thats worth completely throwing away LiDAR is a different question, but your argument is just obviously false.
By aworks 2026-02-2321:16 This reminds me of the time I was distantly following a Waymo car at speed on 101 in Mountain View during rush hour. The Waymo brake lights came on first followed a second or two later by the rest of the traffic.
By hn_acc1 2026-02-2322:50 Better reaction times only matter if the decisions are the same / better in every case. Clearly we are not there on that aspect of it yet.
Deciding to crash faster, or "tell human to take over" really fast is NOT better.
Even if they weren’t going to be held to a higher standard for widespread acceptance, tens of thousands of people a year in the us die due to humans driving badly. Why would we not try to do better than that?
By sylos 2026-02-2320:23 Because that's an acceptable loss and better costs more!
By BurningFrog 2026-02-2319:22 Teslas have at least 3 forward facing cameras giving them plenty of depth vision data.
They also have several cameras all around providing constant 360° vision.
Sufficient if all else were equal. But the human brain and artificial neural networks are clearly not equal. This is setting aside the whole question of whether we hope to equal human performance or exceed it.
By atonse 2026-02-2419:11 That doesn't matter. It's not like we use 100% of our brain capacity for driving.
In fact, that's why radio/music/podcasts thrive. Because we're bored when we drive. We have conversations, etc. We daydream.
As long as the skills relevant to actually driving are on parity with humans, the rest doesn't matter.
In fact, in a recent podcast, Musk mused that you actually may have a limit of how smart you want a vehicle model to be, because what if IT starts to get bored? What will it do? I found that to be an interesting (and amusing) thought exercise.
By atultw 2026-02-2320:14 To do gaussian splatting anywhere near in real time, you need good depth data to initialize the gaussian positions. This can of course come from monocular depth but then you are back to monocular depth vs lidar.
By maxdo 2026-02-2322:29 LIDAR also struggle in heavy rain, snow, fog, dust. Check how waymo handle such conditions.
It's not only failing, it's causing false positives.
By pbreit 2026-02-2319:37 Why is this getting downvoted? It's good faith and probably more accurate than not.
By thinkcontext 2026-02-2320:02 > and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that it isn't required
The reports that Tesla submits on Austin Robotaxis include several of them hitting fixed objects. This is the same behavior that has been reported on for prior versions of their software of Teslas not seeing objects, including for the incident for which they had a $250M verdict against them reaffirmed this past week. That this is occurring in an extensively mapped environment and with a safety driver on board leads me to the opposite conclusion that you have reached.
If Waymo proven their model works, why the silly automaker is doing several orders of magnitude more autonomous miles?
By AlotOfReading 2026-02-2323:33 They aren't. Tesla has logged some 800k total miles with their robotaxi vehicles, including miles with safety drivers. Waymo has logged 200M driverless miles. That's 0.4% of the mileage, with the most generous possible framing.
My understanding is that there's more data processing required with cameras because you need to estimate distance from stereoscopic vision. And as it happens, the required chips for that have shot up in price because of the AI boom.
But I think costs were just part of the reason why Elon decided against Lidar. Apparently, they interfere with each other once the market saturates and you have many such cars on the same streets at the same time. Haven't heard yet how the Lidar proponents are planning to address that.
How does Waymo handle it now? There are many videos of Waymo depots with dozens of cars not running into each other.
By ggreer 2026-02-2322:58 It's rare, but sometimes they do hit each other:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mdl5zn/tw...
https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1pggtpu/two_waymos_m...
Lidar critics like to pretend that anti-collision is not a well-studied branch of Computer Science and telecoms. Wifi, Ethernet and cellphones all work well simultaneously, despite participants all sharing the same physical medium.
By c7b 2026-02-2418:22 I'm not a Lidar critic. I'm really just curious how they're addressing it, or plan to.
By AnotherGoodName 2026-02-2316:031 reply The points linked repeatedly focus on cost and complexity as justification, even explicitly stating musks desire to minimise components in Kaparthy’s list.
They don’t focus on safety or effectiveness except to say that vision should be ‘sufficient’. Which is damning with faint praise imho.
If that link was to try and argue that the removal of sensors makes perfect sense i have to point out that anyone that reads that would likely have their negative viewpoint hardened. It was done to reduce cost (back when the sensors were 1000’s) and out of a ridiculous desire by Musk for minimalism. It’s the same desire that removed the indicator stalk i might add.
To be clear, from a personal standpoint, I am pro-more sensors and sensor fusion.
I assume Musk, et al are acting in best faith in trying to find the right compromises.
By kappi 2026-02-2319:26 Instead of betting on RADAR and LIDAR HW getting better and cost going down, they went with vision only approach. Everybody in this field knows the strengths and weakness of each system. Multi-modal sensor fusion is the way to go for L4 autonomy. There is no other way to reduce the risk. Vision only will never be able to achieve L4 in all the weather conditions. Tesla may try to demonstrate L4 in limited geography and in good weather conditions but it won't scale.
From the article:
Karpathy’s main points: Extra sensors add cost to the system, and more importantly complexity. They make the software task harder, and increase the cost of all the data pipelines. They add risk and complexity to the supply chain and manufacturing. Elon Musk pushes a philosophy of “the best part is no part” which can be seen throughout the car in things like doing everything through the touchscreen. This is an expression of this philosophy. Vision is necessary to the task (which almost all agree on) and it should also be sufficient as well. If it is sufficient, the cost of extra sensors and tools outweighs their benefit. Sensors change as parts change or become available and unavailable. They must be maintained and software adapted to these changes. They must also be calibrated to make fusion work properly. Having a fleet gathering more data is more important than having more sensors. Having to process LIDAR and radar produces a lot of bloat in the code and data pipelines. He predicts other companies will also drop these sensors in time. Mapping the world and keeping it up to date is much too expensive. You won’t change the world with this limitation, you need to focus on vision which is the most important. The roads are designed to be interpreted with vision.
By utopcell 2026-02-249:24 So the argument is pretty much: it should be sufficient to use vision only, and that it is too difficult / expensive to do otherwise.
By galangalalgol 2026-02-2311:219 reply The reasoning is cynical but sound. If the system uses only the sensing modes people have, it will make the mistakes people do. If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win. It doesn't matter if your system has fewer accidents if some of the failure modes are different than human ones, because the jury will think "how could it not figure that out?"
I don't think that's the reasoning.
The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes.
Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your accidents look the same, so I don't think your logic is even internally sound.
By seanmcdirmid 2026-02-2313:103 reply Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams. Thats mainly a software problem and companies like Waymo have done it, but Tesla was having trouble with it earlier, and if you don’t do it right, your self driving system can be less reliable.
By DennisP 2026-02-2321:52 Sensor fusion seems like it'd be a big problem when you're handcoding lots of C++, and way less of a problem when all the sensors are just feeding into one big neural network, as Tesla and probably others are doing now. The training process takes care of it from there.
One of Udacity's first courses was on self-driving, taught by Sebastian Thrun who later cofounded Waymo. He went through some Bayesian math that takes a collection of lidar points, where each point contributes to a probabilistic assessment of what's really going on. It's fine if different points seem to contradict each other, because you're looking for the most likely scenario that could produce that combined sensor data. Transformers can do the same sort of thing, and even with different sensor types it's still the same sort of problem.
By overfeed 2026-02-2320:27 > Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams
The response to the challenge shouldn't be whittling down your sensor-suite to a single type, but to get good at sensor fusion.
By switchbak 2026-02-2320:35 I think this is the key. In theory - more information stream when fused together (properly) should reduce error. If their stumbling block is the "properly" part, than the rest of those justifications come off as a pretty weak way to sidestep their own inabilities to deliver this properly.
We have lots of evidence of similar strategies being used in other domains, this seems like an especially life-critical domain that ought to have high rigor and standards applied.
> how incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
It is pretty incredible but people will (rightly so?) hold automated drivers to an ultra high standard. If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly.
By MengerSponge 2026-02-2316:041 reply > If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly.
This is evidently false. Robotaxi crash rates exceed human drivers', but there's not an effective regulatory agency to outlaw them!
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-cras...
According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more often than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles), which is clearly false. I think it's far more likely that humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance, and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on average.
> According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more often than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles), which is clearly false.
Why is it clearly false? It might be false, but clearly? I would definitely like to see evidence either way.
> I think it's far more likely that humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance, and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on average.
That sounds like you are trying to find reasons to get the conclusion you want.
By ggreer 2026-02-2322:22 The NHTSA requires a report when any automated driving system hits any object at any speed, or if anything else hits the ADS vehicle resulting damage that is reasonably expected to exceed $1,000.[1] In practice, this means that everyone reports any ADS collision, since trading paint between two vehicles can result in >$1k in damage total.
If you go to the NHTSA's page regarding their Standing General Order[2] and download the CSV of all ADS incidents[3], you can filter where the reporting entity is Waymo and find 520 rows. If you filter where the vehicle was stopped or parked, you'll find 318 crashes. If you scan through the narrative column, you'll see things like a Waymo yielding to pedestrians in a crosswalk and getting rear-ended, or waiting for a red light to change and getting rear-ended, or yielding to a pickup truck that then shifted into reverse and backed into the Waymo. In other words: the majority of Waymo collisions are due to human drivers.
So either Waymos are ridiculously unlucky, or when these sorts of things happen between two human driven cars, it's rarely reported to insurance. In my experience, if there's only minor damage, both parties exchange contact info and don't involve the authorities. Maybe one compensates the other for damage, or maybe neither party cares enough about a minor dent or scrape to deal with it. I've done this when someone rear-ended me, and I know my parents have done it when they've had collisions.
If human driven vehicles really did average 229k miles between any collision of any kind, we'd see many more pristine older vehicles. But if you pay attention to other cars on the road or in parking lots, you'll see far more dents and scratches than would be expected from that statistic. And that's not even counting the damage that gets repaired!
1. See page 13 of https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/third-am...
2. https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
3. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...
By kube-system 2026-02-2320:29 Definitely. I looked at Tesla's source for these numbers, looks like they primarily used data sourced from police reports, which most people only file if the incident is serious enough to turn into insurance.
Tesla notes:
> These assumptions may contain limitations with respect to reporting criteria, unreported incident estimations (e.g., NHTSA estimates that 60% of property damage-only crashes and 32% of injury crashes are not reported to police
Eh, I think ‘miscalculation’ might be giving too much credit about good intentions.
He wanted (needed?) to get on the hype train for self driving to pump up the stock price, knew that at the time there was zero chance they could sell it at the price point lidar required at the time - or even effective other sensors (like radar) - and sold it anyway at the price point that people would buy it at, even though it was not plausibly going to ever work at the level that was being promised.
There is a word for that. But I’m sure there are many lawyers that will say it was ‘mere fluffery’ or the like. And I’m sure he’ll get away with it, because more than enough people are complicit in the mess.
Miscalculation assumes there was a mistake somewhere, but near as I can tell, it is playing out as any reasonable person expected it too, given what was known at the time.
By estearum 2026-02-2313:05 I think Musk is really not as smart as he thinks he is and this specific thing was probably an earnest mistake. Lots of other fraudulent stuff going on though of course!
By mytailorisrich 2026-02-2312:14 IMHO not using lidars sounds like a premature optimisation and a complication, with a level of hubris.
This is a difficult problem to solve and perhaps a pragmatic approach was/is to make your life as simple as possible to help get to a fully working solution, even if more expensive, then you can improve cost and optimise.
> Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
And, less excusable, ignorant of how incredible human eyes are compared to small sensor cameras. In particular high DR in low light, with fast motion. Every photographer knows this.
By venusenvy47 2026-02-2313:212 reply And also ignorant about how those two eyes have binocular vision, adjustable positions, and can look in multiple mirrors for full spatial awareness.
There are good arguments but this isn’t one. Many humans (like me!) drive fine without binocular vision. And the cars have many cameras all around, with wide angle lenses that are watching everything all the time, when a human can only focus in one direction at a time.
By venusenvy47 2026-02-2319:581 reply I thought only the front view has binocular vision on the cars. The others are single, with no depth perception. How does it know how close objects are outside this forward cone?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure/fi...
By cobbzilla 2026-02-241:02 I’m guessing the fields of view overlap for any 2 adjacent cameras, so you can get parallax measurements from any angle.
So your eye does not have an adjustable position and you cannot use mirrors?
By wat10000 2026-02-2316:20 Both are easily compensated for by having many cameras.
Binocular vision is not only relevant for driving (well, maybe for the steering wheel, but that's not the point).
By venusenvy47 2026-02-2319:561 reply It gives us depth perception. And moving the eyes and/or head gives the depth perception over a wide field of view.
What I mean is that binocular vision just give us depth perception for a meter or so - about around where our hands can touch.
Moving the head/body goes a little further, but that was not my point.
By venusenvy47 2026-02-2415:08 Is this true? I'm looking at a tree outside and I get parallax when I close one eye and then the other. I thought the parallax is the basis for depth perception.
> Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR
Given that Musk has a history of driving lower costs, it's unlikely he overestimated the long-term cost floor. He just thought we were close to self-driving in 2014.
Another factor is Andrej Karpathy, who was the primary architect for the vision-only approach. Musk wanted fewer parts, and Karpathy believed he could deliver that. Karpathy is still an advocate of vision-only.
By estearum 2026-02-2316:36 Right, for the reasons that I just mentioned
By naravara 2026-02-2315:16 Considering he also runs a company that puts computer chips inside brains to augment them you’d think he ought to have a more sound understanding as to the limits of both.
Musk has never been scared of vertically integrating something that's too expensive initially.
By estearum 2026-02-242:18 What has he vertically integrated that's as technologically sophisticated as LIDAR?
By cyanydeez 2026-02-2311:56 There certainly is a pretty on going miscalculation regarding human intelligence, and consrquentially, empathy.
Seeing the SOTA in FSD techs it is not obvious that Musk made a miscalc so far.
By estearum 2026-02-2320:17 Nah
If the data were positive for Tesla, Tesla would publish it
They do not, so one can infer it is not flattering
(Before you post the "Miles driven with FSD" chart, you should know upfront (as Tesla must) that chart doesn't normalize by age of vehicle or driving conditions and is therefore meaningless/presumably designed to deceive)
By bluGill 2026-02-2312:13 Until a lawyer points out other cars see that. My car already has various sensors and in manual driving sounds alarms if there is a danger I seem not to have noticed. (There are false alarms - but most of the type I did notice and probably should have left more safety margin even though I wouldn't hit it)
also regulators gather srastics and if cars with something do better they will mandate it.
By small_model 2026-02-2312:237 reply Very recent issue with Waymo https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-.... This is 17 years after they bet the farm on LIDAR, with no signs its ever going to be cost effective or that it's better than multiple cameras, with millisecond reaction 360 degrees, that never gets tired, drunk, distracted, and also has other cheaper sensors and NN trained on Billions or real world data.
Tesla does not handle rain well either. This is not a LIDAR problem, it is a problem with self driving cars in general.
My Tesla can't even tell if it should turn the wipers on consistently or correctly. Let alone drive in the rain.
By MengerSponge 2026-02-2316:071 reply Seriously. Why do people think a company that can't do automatic wipers could possibly do automatic driving?
By lazide 2026-02-2317:30 The same people that seriously thought we’d have a mars base by now.
By mrguyorama 2026-02-2317:17 A feature that is bulletproof in other cars with a very boring and industry standard sensor (it's not even expensive), while Tesla insisted they could do it with just normal cameras.
By sfn42 2026-02-2315:07 People also don't handle rain well.
By RobotToaster 2026-02-2312:401 reply That's an example of it failing safe. I'd rather it did that than drive me into a sinkhole because it thought it was a puddle.
By small_model 2026-02-2312:541 reply Ok so Waymo is useless in the rain then, kind of limiting. But at least that 0.000000000001% times it actually is a sinkhole you won't damage the bumper.
I'd rather a Waymo be useless in the rain rather than a Tesla be actively dangerous and likely to kill me.
Tesla ""autopilot"" fatalities: 65
Waymo fatalities: 0
By seanmcdirmid 2026-02-2313:12 Autopilot isn’t full self driving (FSD), most cars these ship with smart cruise control (what autopilot basically is). Do you have fatality statistics for FSD?
If we are just talking about smart cruise control, most cars are using cameras and radar, not lidar yet. But Tesla is special since it doesn’t even use radar for its smart cruise control implementation, so that could make it less safe than other new cars with smart cruise control, but Autopilot was never competing with Waymo.
By MichaelNolan 2026-02-2314:551 reply > Waymo fatalities: 0
By some measures Waymo is actually at -1 fatalities. There has been one confirmed birth of a child in a Waymo. https://apnews.com/article/baby-born-waymo-san-francisco-6bd...
By aix1 2026-02-2316:28 I think the car would have to be more actively involved in the process for that to count. :)
By WarmWash 2026-02-2313:03 There is also a report from the same flooding in LA of a Waymo driving into a flooded road and getting stuck.
They might have flipped a switch after that, causing this.
By idiotsecant 2026-02-2312:38 >A vehicle got stuck trying to figure out an obstacle so sensors with less information are better than sensors with more information.
Dude that's not a 'puddle' as the article claims, that's a body of water that it's not even visually obvious whether it's safe to drive through. Maybe I'm a bad driver but I'd hesitate to drive through that in a small car either.
By galangalalgol 2026-02-2314:122 reply I think the difference is the prior knwoldege a commuter has of that section of road. Does it always flood shallowly in heavy rain?
By kevlened 2026-02-2315:11 Even without prior knowledge, seeing others safely navigate the same section will lower your estimated risk.
The amount of water will depend on the rain, so we don't know how shallow it is even with prior knowledge.
By devilbunny 2026-02-2314:48 If you drive the road every day, you probably do. If you can see someone drive through it (perhaps someone who knows the area well and knows how deep it is based on puddle width), you definitely do.
By blinding-streak 2026-02-2414:20 You're not even supposed to take Teslas in a car wash. Countless photos and videos online of flooding Tesla interiors when it's raining or in a car wash.
I don't think water is the platform you want to boast about for Teslas.
By JumpCrisscross 2026-02-246:34 > If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win
“A federal judge” recently “rejected Tesla's request to overturn a $243 million jury verdict over the 2019 crash of an Autopilot-equipped Model S” [1]. If a human supervising still incurs liability, human-like errors, particularly if Waymo and BYD aren’t making them, is a poor defense.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-upholds-243-million-v...
By georgeecollins 2026-02-2314:57 It is sound to think that cameras plus an accelerometer, plus data about about the car and environment (that you get from your ears) ought to be able to mimic and improve on human driving. However humans general purpose spatial awareness and ability to integrate all kinds of general information is probably really hard to replicate. A human would realize that an orange fluid spilling across the road might be slippery, guess the way a person might travel from the way their eyes are pointing...
It may just be faster to make lidar cheap. And lidar can do things humans can't.
Most accidents happen because people are human, aren't paying attention, are inebriated, not experienced enough drivers, or reckless.
It's not fair to say that vision based models will "make the same mistakes people do" as >99% of the mistakes people make are avoidable if these issues were addressed. And a computer can easily address all those issues
By jeltz 2026-02-2314:21 Which means the mistakes vision-based models for today are unique to them.
By lesuorac 2026-02-2317:30 IIUC, the cameras in a Tesla have worse vision (resolution) at far distances than a human. So while in the abstract your argument sounds fine; it'll crumble in court when a lawyer points out a similar driver would've needed corrective lens.
This is a new and flawed rationale that I haven't heard before. Tesla cameras are worse (lower resolution, sensitivity, and dynamic range) than human eyes and don't have "ears" (microphones).
By peterfirefly 2026-02-2314:311 reply The cars do have at least one microphone.
By xnx 2026-02-2315:35 Inside the car though, right? With multiple exterior microphones they could do spatialization like Waymo.
By lazide 2026-02-2312:56 Pretty hard to do if your whole selling point is ‘better and safer than human’ however?
> Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only
Human eyes do not have distance information, either, but derive it well enough from spatial (by ‘comparing’ inputs from 2 eyes) or temporal parallax (by ‘comparing’ inputs from one eye at different points in time) to drive cars.
One can also argue that detecting absolute distance isn’t necessary to drive a car. Time to-contact may be more useful. Even only detecting “change in bearing” can be sufficient to avoid collision (https://eoceanic.com/sailing/tips/27/179/how_to_tell_if_you_...)
Having said that, LiDAR works better than vision in mild fog, and if it’s possible to add a decent absolute distance sensor for little extra cost, why wouldn’t you?
By tsimionescu 2026-02-2312:441 reply Human/animal vision uses way more than parallax to judge distances and bearings - it uses a world model that evolved over millions of years to model the environment. That's why we can get excellent 3D images from a 2D screen, and also why our depth perception can be easily tricked with objects of unexpected size. Put a human or animal in an abstract environment with no shadows and no familiar objects, and you'll see that depth perception based solely on parallax is actually very bad.
By Someone 2026-02-247:53 > it uses a world model that evolved over millions of years to model the environment. That's why we can get excellent 3D images from a 2D screen
That doesn’t require millions of years of evolution. We can ‘evolve’ it way faster on computers.
For an example, see https://depth-anything.github.io/.
I also think we don’t need good depth estimation to avoid collisions while walking around. The problem is scale-invariant except for the fact that deceleration is superlinear (doubling your speed more than doubles stopping distance), but at walking speed, that effect isn’t very large.
Decent depth estimation is needed for judging foot placement, but that’s at relatively close range.
At driving speed, that changes, but I think you can still get away with rough estimates.
(I’m not saying one shouldn’t use LiDAR, just arguing that we don’t know whether “LiDAR is necessary” is true. Yes, cameras cannot reproduce all aspects of human vision yet, but they also can surpass many aspects of human vision. Examples are resolution and field of view)
By larsnystrom 2026-02-2312:28 Human eyes are much better than cameras at dealing with dynamic range. They’re also attached to a super-computer which has been continuously trained for many years to determine distances and classify objects.
By dymk 2026-02-2316:55 > Human eyes do not have distance information
Single human eyes do resolve depth perception. Not as good as binocular vision, but you don't loose all depth perception of you lose an eye.
By dumbfounder 2026-02-2312:26 I don’t like the comparison between humans and humans. Humans don’t travel around at 100mph in packs of other humans. Why not use every sensor type at our disposal if it gives us more info to make decisions? Yes I understand it’s more complicated, but we figure stuff out.
By idiotsecant 2026-02-2312:43 Let me know when you have a camera package with human eye equivalency.
As I understand, lidars don't work well in rain/snow/fog. So in the real world, where you have limited resources (research and production investment, people talent, AI training time and dataset breadth, power consumption) that you could redistribute between two systems (vision and lidar), but one of the systems would contradict the other in dangerous driving conditions — it's smarter to just max out vision and ignore lidar altogether.
By RobotToaster 2026-02-2312:342 reply > lidars don't work well in rain/snow/fog.
Neither do cameras, or eyeballs.
When it's not safe to drive, it's not safe to drive.
I've been in zero-road-speed whiteout conditions several times. The only move to make is to the side of the road without getting stuck, and turning on your flashers.
Low-light cameras would not have worked. Sonar would not have worked. Infrared would not have worked.
By alkonaut 2026-02-2314:39 I think the weather where cameras/sensors start having problems is much better than zero-vis whiteout.
If we could make sensors that lets an autonomous vehicle drive reliably in any snow/rain where a human could drive (although carefully) then we're good. But we are a long way from that. Especially since a lot of sensor tech like cameras tend to fail in 2 ways, both through their performance being worse in adverse condition but also simply failing to function at all if they are covered in ice/snow/water.
By plasticchris 2026-02-2313:351 reply Radar might still have worked
By bob1029 2026-02-2314:25
By 0_____0 2026-02-2314:37 If you have multi-return lidar, you can see through certain occlusions. If the fog/rain isn't that bad, you can filter for the last return and get the hard surface behind the occlusion. The bigger problem with rain is that you get specular reflection and your laser light just flies off into space instead of coming back to you. Lidar not work good on shiney.
No, it isn't "smarter." Camera-only driving is the product of a stubborn dogmatic boss who can't admit a fundamental error. "Just make it work" is a terrible approach to engineering.
By RockRobotRock 2026-02-2314:472 reply Can hatred of Musk not derail this entire thread please? I have a camera-only ADAS that I think works quite well, but having both would be better.
By nutjob2 2026-02-2316:12 Criticism of Musk isn't hate of Musk. The point is completely valid and the results of this management style infuses all of his businesses albeit with differing results.
It's significant that a truly hard problem like autonomous driving doesn't respond to a "brute force" management style. Rockets aren't in this category because the required knowledge and theory is fairly complete, whereas real autonomous driving is completely novel.
By RockRobotRock 2026-02-2314:561 reply I don't know what that means
By BugsJustFindMe 2026-02-2317:351 reply By RockRobotRock 2026-02-2318:191 reply Oh, that's silly. I don't own a Tesla. I just wanna talk about LIDAR without people ragebaiting about Elon.
By BugsJustFindMe 2026-02-2318:331 reply > without people ragebaiting about Elon
Hmm. Is it ragebaiting to respond to a tired and wrong statement by saying that it's tired and wrong and that the situation is merely the product of piss poor management decisions? People get understandably frustrated seeing the same wrong talking point that people with domain knowledge in computer vision and robotics have repeatedly explained is wrong in extremely fundamental ways.
> I don't own a Tesla.
n.b. The shoe/foot comment was not about you. It was about Musk. It wouldn't make any idiomatic sense for the expression to be about you given what you said and what you were responding to. If they'd said "pot, meet kettle", then it would have been about you. In that context, saying that you don't own a Tesla feels like a weird thing for you to insert in your comment. It potentially comes across as suspiciously defensive.
By RockRobotRock 2026-02-2322:191 reply suspiciously defensive??? you got me. Or maybe I just didn't understand their comment.
By BugsJustFindMe 2026-02-2323:11 I'm just trying to help you out here, friend.
Why does this matter? You have to slow down in rain/snow/fog anyway, so only having cameras available doesn't hurt you all that much. But then in clear weather lidar can only help.
If your vision is good enough to drive in rain/snow/fog, you don't need lidar in clear conditions. If you planned to spend $10B on vision and $10B on lidar — you would be better off spending $20B on better vision.
We have actual proof this isn’t true. Waymo is light years ahead of Tesla despite spending less.
Tesla is spending upwards of $6B/year to Waymo’s $1.5B. Only one of these companies makes an autonomous robotaxi that’s actually autonomous.
By tk781 2026-02-2317:43 Yes, but how much of that is due to the lidar vs camera choice?
By Forgeties79 2026-02-2314:29 It still infuriates me that Tesla went so long being able to call their feature “auto pilot.“ Then they had the audacity to call it user error when people thought the car would automatically pilot itself.
By zozbot234 2026-02-2315:19 > If yo[u can] drive in rain/snow/fog, you don't need lidar in clear conditions
Of course you do, you're driving at much higher speeds and so is the surrounding traffic. You can't just guess what you might be looking at, you have to make clear decisions promptly. Lidar is excellent in that case.
By lazide 2026-02-2314:35 Evidence clearly shows otherwise.
Also, military sensor use shows the best answer is to have as many different types of sensors as possible and then do sensor fusion. So machine vision, lidar, radar, etc.
That way you pick up things that are missed by one or more sensor types, catches problems and errors from any of them, and end up with the most accurate ‘view’ of the world - even better than a normal human would.
It’s what Waymo is doing, and they also unsurprisingly, have the best self driving right now.
By brk 2026-02-2314:33 Nothing works perfectly in all conditions and scenarios. Sensor fusion has been the most logical approach now, and into the foreseeable future.
Computer vision does not work exactly like human vision, closely equating the two has tended to work out poorly in extreme circumstances.
High performance fully automated driving that relies solely on vision is a losing bet.
By zemvpferreira 2026-02-2312:301 reply Limited resources? Billions per year are being thrown at the base technology. We have the capital deployed to exhaust every path ten times over.
Even if so, it doesn't mean that capital deployment efficiency and expected payoff make equal sense in all directions.
Then again, it's good that we have self-driving companies with lidar and without — we will find out which approach wins.
By kikki 2026-02-2316:41 We have already found out, Waymo is SAE Level 4, Tesla is SAE Level 2
By philistine 2026-02-2315:271 reply Why does that strategy absolutely require the lidar to be absent from the car? When was less technology the solution to a software problem?
By mrguyorama 2026-02-2317:30 People who don't understand that sensor fusion is an entire field of study with tons of existing work and lots of expertise have been fooled by a fake argument of "If the camera and lidar disagree, what do you do?"
It's frustrating to still see it repeated over a decade later. It was always bullshit. It was always a lie.
By heisenbit 2026-02-2312:33 The Swiss cheese model would like to disagree.
By Yossarrian22 2026-02-2314:12 When you have sensor ambiguity sounds like the perfect time to fail safely and slow to a halt unless the human takes over.
By idiotsecant 2026-02-2312:411 reply This is silly. Cameras are cheap. Have both. Sensors that sense differently in different conditions is not an exotic new problem. The kalman filter has existed for about a billion years and machine learning filters do an even better job.
Cameras are cheap, but, as I understand:
1) it's not cheap to produce lidars at a stable predictable quality in millions;
2) car driving training data sets for lidars are much scarcer (and will always be much scarcer due to cameras' higher prevalence) and at a much lower quality;
3) combined camera+lidar data sets are even scarcer.
Doesn’t that make it a sensible long term play to equip your car with $200 LIDAR and start gathering that data as a competitive advantage?
By jeltz 2026-02-2314:27 Yeah, this is all about Musk not wanting to admit he was wrong.
By Mawr 2026-02-2323:56 > 1) it's not cheap to produce lidars at a stable predictable quality in millions;
It wasn't cheap to produce accelerometers at a stable predictable quality in millions before smart phones either. Mass production shakes things up somewhat. See the headline for reference.
By tzs 2026-02-2315:54 1. Automotive LiDAR is down to $350 in China already. BYD is starting to put LiDAR in even entry level cars. (It's been in their mid and high end cars for a while).
2+3. BYD collects extensive training data from customers, much like Tesla does. They will have no trouble with training.
By theappsecguy 2026-02-2314:25 Do cameras work well in those conditions? Nope. Also cameras don't work well with certain answer of glare, so as a consumer I'd rather have something over-engineered for my safety to cover all edge cases...
By foooorsyth 2026-02-2314:47 I wouldn’t take too much issue with the “cameras are enough” claim if cameras actually performed like eyes. Human eyes have high dynamic range and continuous autofocus performance that no camera can match. They also have lids with eyelashes that can dynamically block light and assist with aperture adjustment.
The appeal to human biology and argument against fusion between disparate sensors kinda falls flat when you’re building a world model by fusing feeds from cameras all around the car. Humans don’t have 8 eyes in a 360 array around their head. What they do have is two eyes (super cameras) on ~180 degree swiveling and ~180 degree tilting gimbal. With mics attached that help sense other vehicles via road noise. And equilibrioception, vibration detection, and more all in the same system, all fused. If someone were actually building this system to drive the car, the argument based on “how did you drive here today?” gets a lot stronger. One time I had some water blocking my ear and I drove myself to the hospital to get it fixed. That was a shockingly scary drive — your hearing is doing a lot of sensing while driving that you don’t value until it’s gone.
Yea, even in the case they could match human level stereo depth perception with AI, why would they say "no" to superhuman lidar capabilities. Cost could be a somewhat acceptable answer if there wouldn't be problems with the camera only approach but there are still examples of silly failures of it. And if I remember correctly they also removed their other superhuman radar in their newer models, the one which in certain conditions was capable of sensing multiple cars ahead by bouncing the signal below other cars.
By peterfirefly 2026-02-2314:351 reply Because they don't have superhuman LIDAR. They never did. Nobody ever did. LIDAR input is not completely reliable so what do you do then?
By MengerSponge 2026-02-2316:081 reply By peterfirefly 2026-02-2520:20 Not the great answer you think it is.
By radial_symmetry 2026-02-2313:446 reply I'm not an expert on ML vision, but I do have a Tesla and it seems to be able to tell how far away things are just fine. I'm not sure what would be wrong with the vision system that lidar needs to fix.
The phantom braking issue with auto pilot tells me it can’t. A shadow from a tree doesn’t trigger your brakes locking up at 70+ mph when there’s a lidar sensor to tell you it’s not a physical object.
“Just buy FSD” isn’t a reasonable answer to a problem literally no other automaker suffers from.
By ubercore 2026-02-2314:30 Stopped using autopilot because of the phantom braking.
It's also recently gotten much worse at lane departure sensing, often confused by snow or slightly faded road markers. Not pleasant to have the alarms go off while calmly and safely driving.
By thinkcontext 2026-02-2320:10 How do you explain the reports of Robotaxis running into fixed objects? If what you are saying is true that shouldn't be able to happen.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-cr...
By DustinBrett 2026-02-2315:42 Luckily everyone else in the comments is an expert. And also doesn't recognize that Tesla's already drive themselves and did not need Lidar. They also mischaracterize the reasoning.
By xpe 2026-02-2314:52 > I'm not sure what would be wrong with the vision system that lidar needs to fix.
This conversational disconnect is as old as the hills:
1. Person 1 asks "what's wrong" (if it ain't broke don't fix it)
2. Person 2 wants to make something better
My meta-goal here on HN (and many places where people converse) is for people to step back and recognize the conversational context and not fall into the predictable patterns that prevent us from making sense of the world as best as we can.
By Mawr 2026-02-240:01 > I'm not an expert on ML vision, but I do have a Tesla
Well, you did get a chuckle out of me, so that's something!
By Phil_Latio 2026-02-2314:13 Yeah it's BS. Tesla uses lidar where it makes sense: They have a small lidar fleet to collect ground truth depth data for better vision estimation. This part is long solved.
By wasmainiac 2026-02-2311:181 reply Just say Tesla, why censor yourself.
By zelphirkalt 2026-02-2312:293 reply I have a suspicion here on HN. When criticizing big tech, especially Google and FB, at a certain time of the day a specific cohort comes online and downvotes. Suspiciously, that is a time when one could conclude, that now people in the US start working or come online. Either fanboys, employees or an organized group of users trying to silence big tech criticism.
I have no proof of course and it might be coincidence, or just difference of mindset between US citizens and Europe citizens. It happened a few times already and to me looks sus.
But if they actually read and not just ctrl+f <company name>, then of course not writing the company name, but hinting at it in an obvious way is no more helpful either.
By throwa356262 2026-02-2312:46 I have seen this happening multiple times, some to fairly reasonable comments with a just tiny negative tone.
There is also flagging abuse which effectively kills the comment /post.
By simpss 2026-02-2313:38 I know for a fact at least 1 bigger US company has a bot in slack that brings up any mentions of $companyname on hackernews...
By sergiotapia 2026-02-2313:151 reply It's been my experience that hn and reddit have a very high overlap in audience these days. The jerrybreakseverything crowd. Anything anti-tesla, anti-grok, is applauded.
By ImPostingOnHN 2026-02-2314:41 Yeah, I agree with GP, pretty much anything that isn't effusively praising tesla or elmu etc will tend to get reflexively downvoted.
It's not that simple. Cameras don't report 3D depth, but these AI models can and do pick up on pictorial depth cues. LiDAR is incredibly valuable for collecting training and validation data, but may also make only an insignificant difference in production inference.
By pwarner 2026-02-2321:50 Stereo cameras? My 2015 Subaru has them to detect obstacles and it works great.
considering cameras can create reliable enough distance measurements AND also handle all the color reception needed for legally driving roads it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain set of people that lidar is necessary.
By tsimionescu 2026-02-2312:401 reply No, cameras cannot create reliable distance measurements in real-world conditions. Parallax is not a great way to measure distance for fast, unpredictably moving objects (such as cars on the road). And dirt or misalignment can significantly reduce accuracy compared to lab conditions.
Note that humans do not rely strictly on our eyes as cameras to measure distances. There is a huge amount of inference about the world based on our internal world models that goes into vision. For example, if you put is in a false-perspective or otherwise highly artifical environment, our visual acuity goes down significantly; conversely, people with a single eye (so no parallax-based measurement ability) still have quite decent depth perception compared to what you'd naively expect. Not to mention, our eyes are kept very clean, and maintain their alignment to a very high degree of precision.
By s08148692 2026-02-2316:51 I don't think they meant literally cameras only can create reliable distance measures. At the risk of putting words in their mouth, I would guess they meant "cameras as the only input to a distance model". the "model" doing all the heavy lifting, covering the points that you quite rightly point out are needed
Several companies, most notably Tesla, have done this well enough to drive in all manner of traffic. I'm not going to comment about if lidar is strictly needed or not to achieve better-than-human safety, that's yet to be proven one way or another by anyone. The point is that cameras + local inference can do a pretty good job at distance estimation
By numpad0 2026-02-2312:54 Stereo cameras are useless against repeating patterns. They easily match neighboring copies. And there are lots of repeating or repeating-like patterns that computers aren't smart enough to handle.
You can solve this by adding an emitter next to the camera that does something useful, be it just beaconing lights or noise patterns or phase synced laser pulses. And those "active cameras" are what everyone call LIDARs.
By ImPostingOnHN 2026-02-2314:33 'cameras can see in color, therefore lidar is unnecessary for self driving' is unconvincing
By throwa356262 2026-02-2312:42 There are tons of evidence showing that cameras are alone are not safe enough and even Tesla has realized that removing lidar to save cost was a mistake.
By xpe 2026-02-2314:56 > ridiculous idea by a certain set of people that lidar is necessary.
"Necessary"? Seems like a straw man, don't you think? I strive to argue against the strongest reasonable claim someone is making.
Lots of reasonable people suggest LIDAR is helpful to fill in gaps when vision is compromised, degraded, or less capable.
People running businesses, of course, will make economic trade-offs. That's fine. But don't confuse, say, Elon's economic tradeoff with the full explanation of reality which must include an awareness that different sensors have different strengths in different contexts.
So, when one thinks about what sensor mix is best for a given application, one would be wise to ask (and answer) such questions as:
- What is the quality bar?
- What sensors are available?
- Wow well do various combinations of sensors work across the range of conditions that matter for the quality bar?
- WRT "quality bar": who gets to decide "what matters"? The company making the cars? The people that drive them? regulators that care about public safety. The answer: it is a complex combination.
It is time to dismiss any claim (or implication) that "technology good, regulation bad". That might be the dumbest excuse for a philosophy I've ever heard. It is the modern-day analogue of "Brawndo's got what plants crave." Smart people won't make this argument outright, but unfortunately, their claims sometimes reduce to this level of absurdity. Neither innovation nor regulation are inherently good nor bad. There are deeper principles in play.
Yes, some individuals would use their self-proclaimed freedom to e.g. drive without seatbelts at 100 mph at night with headlights off. An extreme example, but it is the logical extension of pure individualism run amok. Regulators and anyone who cares about public safety will draw a line somewhere and say "No. Individual stupidity has a limit." Even those same people would eventually come to their senses after they kill someone, but by then it is too late.
It's not complicated. LIDAR hardware was in short supply during COVID. Elon obviously couldn't slow down production and sink the inflated stock price.
By Phil_Latio 2026-02-2317:14 April 2019: https://www.youtube.com/live/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9220s
There are probably even earlier statements from him against lidar...
By jollyllama 2026-02-2315:37 WTF was their calculus on the break-even liability point? The "if we do this, we save X amount of money, but stand to lose Y in lawsuits for cases where the usage of LIDAR could have otherwise prevented it."
By rustystump 2026-02-240:13 There are more practical difficulties than just cost. If you have lidar it must be calibrated relative to all other sensors. Bumps in the road, weather, thermals, this all causes drift which is non trivial. Waymos are constantly brought in and recalibrated. The advantage of camera only is you have less moving parts which is not insignificant.
But cost isnt the issue as much.
By SecretDreams 2026-02-2313:07 I'll preface by saying lidar should be used with autonomous vehicles.
Individual cameras don't have distance information, but you can easily calibrate a system of cameras to give you distance information. Your eyes do this already, albeit not quantitatively. The quantitative part comes from math our brains aren't setup to do in real time.
By dzhiurgis 2026-02-2321:23 Certain company has 300k subscribers that rely on that ridiculous service.
My father lost vision in 1 eye and 50% in other one something like 20 years ago. He struggles in parking but otherwise doing ok without lidar. Turns out motion vision is more accurate after 10-20 meters than stereoscopic vision.
One camera can't really produce depth/distance information, but two cameras sure can. The eyes in your head don't capture distance information individually, but with two eyes you can infer distance.
You're forgetting the nervous system and the brain connected to those eyes (and vestibular system).
Why would you assume I "forgot" about any of that? It's implied. That's what "infer" means in that sentence. Of course it requires a brain and nervous system. Maybe you don't know what the word "infer" means?
That fake indignation doesn't change the fact that you equated two cameras with two eyes, and if we're going that hard on semantics, you used the word produce for the cameras.
> One camera can't really produce depth/distance information, but two cameras sure can.
By leptons 2026-02-244:45 This pointless conversation you created is over. If you get your jollies by intentionally misunderstanding comments and pointing out your miscomprehension, then you're talking to the wrong person. I really can't imagine what you think you're getting out of this interaction.
By DonsDiscountGas 2026-02-2321:31 Humans don't have explicit distance sensors either. When LIDAR sensors were $20k+ I think it made a lot of sense to avoid them.
By FrustratedMonky 2026-02-2313:07 It was cost wasn't it?
If this lowers Lidar costs, and Tesla has spent all this time refining the camara technology. Now have both.
Use both.
By turtlesdown11 2026-02-2322:14 TIL roads don't have rumble strips
By DoesntMatter22 2026-02-2318:17 It was a great decision to drop LiDAR. The cars are running excellently without it
By NedF 2026-02-2322:51 [dead]
By MetaWhirledPeas 2026-02-2315:014 reply I find it comical that people continue to go back to this rage well against "a certain company" for their vision-only approach when the truth is they have the best automatic driving system an individual can buy, rivaling Waymo and beating the Chinese brands.
Why are the commenters not pissed at the dozens of other car companies who have done absolutely nothing in this space? Answer: because it's not nearly as fun to be pissed at Kia or Mercedes or whoever. Clearly they are just enjoying the shared anger, regardless of whether it is justified.
By array_key_first 2026-02-2315:231 reply 1. Tesla is not competitive with Waymo, they're not even in the same class. Waymo is 10 years ahead at least. I understand you can't buy a Waymo, but still.
2. Other car companies are properly valued, Tesla is overinflated.
3. Other cars, even basic Hondas, have the same level of self driving as Teslas.
4. Other car companies don't lie to their customers about their capabilities or what they're buying.
By MetaWhirledPeas 2026-02-2316:44 > Other cars, even basic Hondas, have the same level of self driving as Teslas.
This is not true at all. Don't confuse lane assist with self driving. And yes I'm aware people are upset by the "Autopilot" product name they chose for lane assist.
By TulliusCicero 2026-02-2322:32 Because other car companies don't have CEOs who've been super confident about predicting actual full self driving either "this year" or "next year" for the past decade. If Ford had been swearing up and down they'd have full self driving cracked any day now for ten years, and been charging people for the hardware along the way, everyone would be pissed at them too.
Surely you already know this, so why pretend otherwise?
By epolanski 2026-02-2321:40 You're way off if you think that Waymo and FSD are anywhere close.
By superxpro12 2026-02-2315:061 reply There is certainly some truth that "some company" overpromised and underdelivered. They advertise "full self driving" but then hide in the fine-print that "oh jk, not really, but its still full self driving if anyone asks ;) ;) ;)"
I think the frustration stems from the obvious falsehoods in the advertising, and the doubling-down on the tech, despite the well-documented weaknesses of the implementation.
By taylortrusty 2026-02-2315:111 reply Have you driven in Tesla FSD recently? If anything it’s undersold. It’s an absolute miracle. I use it everyday.
By bicepjai 2026-02-2315:36 Please be courteous to other drivers on the road, we all share it. Just make sure you’re the one in charge, not the software. This isn’t to put your argument down, but to offer the perspective of people involved in accidents. Loss of life is bad, but surviving accidents is also equally bad.
Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive. Lidar just seems like feature engineering, which has proven to be a dead end in most other AI applications (bitter lesson).
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
> Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive.
Because we want self driving cars to be safer than human driven cars.
If humans had built in lidar we would use it when driving.
By bko 2026-02-2321:46 Read the comment again. It's not that vision is "good enough", it's that feature engineering doesn't work
Self driving cars are not equipped with human brains so this doesn’t really make sense.
“We should achieve self driving cars via replicating the human brain” strikes me as an incredibly inefficient and difficult way to solve the problem.
Then you deeply underestimate how difficult the problem is, and deeply misunderstand where all the effort has been spent in developing autonomous vehicles.
If all the effort has been spent in trying to replicate the human brain then I am comfortable saying that is a mistake.
We have a tool that can tell with great accuracy how far away an object is. The suggestion that we should ignore it and rely on cameras that have to guess it because “that’s how humans work” is absurd, frankly.
By sebastos 2026-02-2420:27 Before you can learn how far away an object is, you must decide: which laser return corresponds to which object? In fact, what counts as an object? Where does a tree stop and become a fallen tree branch? Is that object moving towards me? Is the apparent velocity of this point represent the fact that the object is moving, or that it's rotating, or that it's flexing, or dividing, or all 4? Is that object moving towards me but that's ok because it's a car that's going to stay in its lane? What's a lane? What's my laser return for where the lane is? Should I stop at this intersection? What's my laser return for whether the light is red? Am I in the blind spot of the car in front of me? Is he about to shift into my lane because he doesn't see me? What laser return do I get to tell me whether his indicator is on?
The problem of understanding what is happening in front of you while driving is preposterously more complicated than just a point cloud of distances. That is .01% of the problem. To solve the remaining 99.99%, you need interpretation of photons and sound waves into a semantic understanding that gives you predictive power to guess how the physical world will evolve and avoid breaking the rules of the road. Show me a mechanized way of understanding the causes of how the physical structure of the world is about to evolve, and I'll show you something that is imitating a human brain, however poorly. The cameras give you _plenty_ of data to determine 3D structure, at a higher resolution than the laser, without being emissive, for cheaper. It's a completely reasonable approach to focus your limited computational hardware on interpreting the data you have instead of adding more modalities with their own limitations that (according to nature) are demonstrably unnecessary.
The world is more complicated than slogans and pitchforks and Elon Bad.
By stevenhuang 2026-02-255:05 People get into accidents not because they don't know with great accuracy how far away an object is.
They get into accidents because they make bad decisions and get distracted.
If AI makes better decisions and don't get distracted, the amount of accidents will already be greatly reduced compared to humans.
Having lidar in addition to cameras will be of marginal benefit (but a benefit to be sure) when you realize what is actually important: proper modeling of the environment. And for this, cameras are better at providing than lidar, so you still will want cameras anyways.
The focus on lidar is really a red herring. You merely push the computational budget you have to understanding a point cloud instead of vision. You're back to square 1 of "how can I properly model the environment given this sensory modality". This is the part that essentially needs human level understanding of the world that you're missing.
As the other commenter says, you deeply misunderstand the problem.
This knee-jerk reply is old and tired, and the counterarguments are well-trod at this point. Even if cameras-only can build a car that’s as good as humans, why should we settle for “as good as“ humans, who cause 40,000 fatalities a year in the US? If we can do better than humans with more advanced sensors, we are practically morally obligated to do that.
By stevenhuang 2026-02-254:56 I would bet a large portion of fatalities is from distracted/bad driving, not that human sight was insufficient.
Phrased a different way, I would expect lidar to help marginally, but it is safer driving in general that will bring down fatalities. This could be done with cameras.
By xpe 2026-02-2314:50 Yes! The smart and nuanced panoply of replies to the GP are a wonderful counterbalance to people "just saying things that pop into their head" -- which is unfortunately how I view a lot of human speech nowadays :/
By a_better_world 2026-02-2314:341 reply > we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive.
Science would like to point out that rats also can learn to drive
https://theconversation.com/im-a-neuroscientist-who-taught-r...
By ImPostingOnHN 2026-02-2321:311 reply yeah but not reliably, they often totally space on their commitments to pick you up from the airport, etc
By rkomorn 2026-02-2321:33 If you had to choose between picking someone up at the airport or dragging a slice of pizza twice your size down the NYC subway stairs, what would YOU do?
By jeltz 2026-02-2314:32 Humans can drive with eyes only, but we are better drivers when we can also use other senses like hearing. If humans has lidar we would use it when driving.
By Ajedi32 2026-02-2314:49 The bitter lesson I think is a great way of explaining the logic behind Tesla's strategy. People aren't getting it.
Whether or not it'll actually work remains to be seen, but it's a perfectly reasonable strategy. One counterargument would be that the bitter lesson can be applied to LIDAR too; you don't have to use that data for feature engineering just because it seems well suited for it.
By elicash 2026-02-2314:24 Don't cars already use a ton of sensors that don't reproduce human senses and ways of doing things?
Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part.
Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a supervisor in a chase car. You can't even be driving remotely. Your driver software has to be able to drive independently in all cases, even those where it needs to ask a human how to proceed.
The difference between level two and level three driver assist and level four autonomy is like the difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing.
I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsoft in the 90s, allowing them to make a ton of incremental money without all the capex of making their own cars.
In a saner world Teslas would be running Waymo's self-driving stack instead of the half-baked "might kill you at any time" not quite-FSD.
They are not the same. I don't think Tesla or its consumers are interested in geofenced self driving, they want to be able to use it on road trips and driving around suburbs.
By elteto 2026-02-2316:29 I think that was implied in my comment: that Tesla would use Waymo's stack for free navigation and self-driving, instead of not quite-FSD.
By hermanzegerman 2026-02-2317:23 That's true, Waymo has true Level 4 Automation, and Tesla Customers delude themselves about the Capabilities of their Level 2 System and endanger others for some clout videos
By gilfaethwy 2026-02-2319:52 I mean, Tesla gave up on quality self-driving many years ago when Elon went hard against LIDAR. He's never relented, either, and I don't foresee that changing.
By Zigurd 2026-02-2315:14 That is one plausible outcome. Waymo is experimenting with partnerships with ride hailing apps on the one hand, and building their software into Toyotas on the other hand. So far they have built a few thousand vehicles in a factory run by Magna, which specializes in low volume vehicles. Hyundai wants to sell Waymo tens of thousands of vehicles. That's going to look different in fundamental ways.
By scarmig 2026-02-2315:12 It would be smarter to take that approach. Google's core competency is technology, technical infrastructure, and research. More mundane things like manufacturing and customer service are... shall we say, less of a core competency. Take the high value add, leave other things to automakers to duke it out. Also good for avoiding attracting even more regulatory attention.
Why sell cars to everyone?
People on here used to buy servers themselves (very few of us still do), most now rent via cloud.
Why should transportation be different?
>>Why should transportation be different?
Good question, and for many it will not be, and rentals are acceptable.
But also for many, renting a car has a huge ICK factor. It is one thing while traveling to rent from an agency who has (purportedly) thoroughly cleaned and inspected the car before you get it. It would be quite another to rent cars like scooters, where the previous user likely smoked, left wrappers and food debris, and who knows what else, even damage. Plus, most people who own cars keep a fair amount of stuff in the car for their specific convenience, and have their own settings, etc.
The fact that the likes of Zipcar, Turo, and the lot have not entirely taken over urban transport but instead remain niche players shows the extent of this preference.
For suburban and rural markets, it just gets more extreme. How quickly could a rental service be able to deliver a car; could it reliably do it in less than 5-10 minutes for people to run an errand? If not, unless they are insanely cheap, ppl will likely want to own their own. Perhaps it'll be more of a hybrid, households owning one car and renting the spare for specific trips?
By wombat-man 2026-02-2321:461 reply I think it's more comparable to Uber or Lyft. Some passengers may actually prefer to not have a driver chatting with them.
By toss1 2026-02-2323:40 Yup, for some types of rides it's definitely better, and the not having to chat up the driver is definitely an advantage.
To take off as a real replacement for ownership, self driving cars likely needs to meet at least these criteria: 1) overall cheaper vs ownership for average mileage/year, maybe 12kmiles/yr. 2) consistent delivery of car to rider in <5-10min, 3) a way to ensure the cars are always clean when they arrive (how? route them all through a cleaning station first?/lotsa cameras in the car to monitor cleanliness?/ability to order replacement car in <3min?).
Seems the short rides
, if they are cheaper than ownership, .
By lazide 2026-02-2317:22 If you use them regularly, renting is both a pain in the ass and quite costly. If you have atypical security (or even normal, in many cases) or usage patterns, it’s even worse.
A lot of folks are relearning lessons on this front in Cloud right now.
By kjkjadksj 2026-02-2317:34 Moores law applies to cpus not the car that has been functionally the same for decades.
By ThrowawayR2 2026-02-2318:54 Not a good analogy: a server is not a personal space occupied by humans. It's for the same reason people don't want to hot-desk; they prefer a personal space with their own stuff in it.
By TulliusCicero 2026-02-2322:33 They'll probably operate some services and also license their tech to carmakers to sell to consumers. I'm sure there'll be a subscription involved for that too.
By xbmcuser 2026-02-2317:01 With the price declines in ev we are talking about 1 million ev even with all the waymo tech for $50 billion soon. approximate Annual Revenue of a private hire car is $50+k ie $50-60 billion a year for a million cars. But total taxi driver population is 350-400k in the US. I think people are underestimating the electric tech + ai/automation to hit soon.
By Tempest1981 2026-02-2315:421 reply Do OEMs want to manage their own ride-share platforms? 10+ apps/providers?
By bigmadshoe 2026-02-2315:51 I think they were referring to making personal vehicles self driving. Probably the rideshare market is just the start for Waymo.
By sideband 2026-02-2316:34 Alphabet wants drivers on their devices looking at ads instead of driving.
By mschuster91 2026-02-2315:582 reply > but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone?
Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual customer support.
Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse.
For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight. For a company such as Google, this alone (remember Killed By Google) is a huge obstacle to overcome.
Then, you need production. Sure, you can go to Magna or other contract manufacturers, or have an established large brand build vehicles for you, or you say you have to go the Tesla route and build everything from scratch. Either way has associated pros and cons.
And then, you need a nationwide network of spare parts, dealerships, repair shops and technicians that can fix the issues that people will get alone because the wide masses abuse cars in ways you might not even dare think about while testing, or because other people run into your cars and so your cars need repairs.
Even being a derivative of an established car brand can be a royal PITA. Let's take Mercedes Benz as an example with the 2003-2009 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. On paper, it's a Mercedes vehicle, with a lot of the parts actually originating from stock Mercedes cars - but most dealerships will refuse to work on it. Either because they lack the support to even properly jack the car up, or because they lack the specialized tools for the AMG engine, or because they cannot even order the parts as Mercedes gates repairs for that thing to special shops. Or, again Mercedes, with Maybach luxury cars. The situation isn't as bad as with the McLaren, but their cars are challenging in another way - the S 650 Pullman weighs around 3 metric tons empty and is 6.50 meters long. Good luck finding a jack even capable of lifting that beast, most Mercedes sports-car shops don't carry jacks that are normally used to lift Mercedes Vito transporters!
Even Tesla, and they've been at it for the better part of two decades, still struggles with that. Their shitty spare parts logistics actually drive up not just insurance prices for their own customers, but for everyone - hit a Tesla with your Dodge and be at fault, and now your insurance has to pay out for months of a rental car because Tesla can't be arsed to provide the body shop the Tesla ends up at with spare parts in any reasonable time.
Established car brands however have all of that ironed out for many, many decades now. American, Asian, European, doesn't matter. And the spare parts don't even have to be made for cars: ask your local Volkswagen dealer to order a few pieces of "199 398 500 A" and one piece of "199 398 500 B" and you'll probably have a lead time of less than a day, at least in Germany - for the uninitiated: that part number belongs to the famous sausage, the second one to the accompanying curry ketchup, with more sausages being sold each year than actual cars.
And established car brands also bring something to the table: their own experiences with integrating smart technology. Yes, particularly German carmakers are notoriously bad in that regard, but for example Mercedes Benz was the first car brand in the world to get a certified Level 3 system on the road [1] and are now working on a Level 4 certification [2]. That kind of experience in navigating bureaucracy, integration and testing cannot be paid for in money.
tl;dr: I see no way in which Waymo goes to general availability regarding selling cars. They will run their own autonomous car fleets in select markets where they can fully control everything, but seeing Waymo tech generally available will be as part of established car brands.
[1] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...
[2] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...
> For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight.
Those bits should be easy, unless the OEM was tragically stupid. Where you'll get into trouble is when you need replacement computer bits; those are often tricky for mainstream brands, but if your niche brand ECUs all fail around the same time (wouldn't be the first time for a Google product), and the OEM isn't around to make new ones or make it right, off to the junkyard with all of them. If it's just normal failure rates, you can probably scavenge from totaled vehicles at junkyards even after new parts become unobtainium.
OEM style lighting will also probably get hard to find. Ideally a niche maker would lean towards standard parts there, but that's not the fashion of the times.
By mschuster91 2026-02-2317:17 > Those bits should be easy, unless the OEM was tragically stupid.
Well... just look at Tesla. A lot of their parts don't come from the classic supplier-OEM delivery chain model, but Tesla makes as much as they can on their own. It saves them a bunch of money, both when it comes to the profit margin of the supplier, and being at the whims of their supplier, but it is nasty for the customers when there simply is no parts OEM that one could go to when the vehicle manufacturer goes out of business or refuses to support the car any further.
> Where you'll get into trouble is when you need replacement computer bits
Oh hell yes. New EU law is particularly to blame here. OBD diagnosis always was nasty enough, you virtually always need to buy expensive diagnosis software and hardware (e.g. Mercedes XENTRY, VW ODIS, BMW ICOM)... but the newest requirements enforce live digital signatures and anti-tamper checks. Nasty as hell. And the buses itself... it's no longer just one CAN bus doing everything, not since the Kia Boys, it's multiple buses of different speeds, some using encryption on the wire, all making diagnosis, troubleshoots and repairs much more difficult than it used to be.
And that is before getting into the replacement parts issue itself that you wrote up.
By robotresearcher 2026-02-2317:541 reply > Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse.
Tesla did it, and is more valuable than most other car brands added together. They had a novel product: a good EV that was fun to drive. Is that a unique situation? Could a truly autonomous car launch do it?
Your arguments make sense in themselves, but maybe underestimate the revolutionary value that a level 4 car would provide.
By mschuster91 2026-02-2317:59 > Tesla did it, and is more valuable than most other car brands added together.
Half of Tesla's value is hopium, the rest of it is pure trust in that the current government will continue propping Elon up (even if he personally ran afoul of the Dear Leader). A lot of the promises Elon made, particularly when it comes to FSD, had to be tracked back and I don't see them ever coming to fruition - at least not for the cars that don't have LIDAR hardware.
By MontyCarloHall 2026-02-2317:241 reply >Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data.
How much of Waymo's training data is based on LIDAR mapping versus satellite/aerial/street view imagery? Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. The fact that this needs to happen suggests Google's geospatial data moat is not as wide as it seems.
If LIDAR becomes cheap, you could imagine other car manufacturers would add it cars, initially and ostensibly to help with L2 driver aids, but with the ulterior motive of making a continuously updated map of the roads. If LIDAR were cheap enough that it could be added to every new Toyota or Ford as an afterthought, it would generate a hell of a lot more continuous mapping data than Waymo will ever have.
By ra7 2026-02-2319:08 > Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city.
Not entirely true. From their recent "road trips" last year, the trend is they just deploy less than 10 cars in a city for a few weeks (3-4 weeks from what I recall) for mapping and validating. Then they come back after a few months to setup infrastructure for ride hailing (depot, charging, maintenance, etc.) and start service.
> difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing.
But suborbital flight and payload in orbit is much less of a difference than you might think.
The delta V is not that significantly different. Scale is almost the same, and a little bit more power and (second stage) your payload is now hurtling around the earth instead of falling like an ballistic missile which was what their suborbital predecessors are.
By mapt 2026-02-2316:57 Suborbital ballistic "travel" beyond continental distances, is almost as expensive as orbital. If you can make it to the antipode, you're basically almost orbital.
Suborbital "trips" straight up, beyond the atmosphere, are very cheap.
By RockRobotRock 2026-02-2314:401 reply >Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data.
That's true, and they have a huge headstart, but I wonder if all these cubesat companies can bring the price down on data enough that others will be able to compete.
Maybe. But Google has been there in a sensor laden car, overhead with an airplane, and buying all the access that is available in satellite imagery, and fusing that together in a continually updated model. Plus real time data from a billion maps and navigation users. I pity the fool going up against that.
I don't think Waymo is using Street View / satellite data to drive. They have to build an HD map using a special LIDAR-equipped vehicle before deploying in a new area.
Maybe their navigation system will be better than the competition due to real-time traffic data from Google Maps users, but I don't think it'll be so much better as to be an unbeatable advantage.
By daemonologist 2026-02-2316:171 reply They use LIDAR maps in service areas, but might be using Street View data for training? (I imagine it would be really, really difficult to build a useful simulator with just SV imagery, but probably also quite valuable to have the variety of environments.)
By denimnerd42 2026-02-2318:57 did you see this, they can build a simulator from sv images. https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f... even the lidar part
By StevenNunez 2026-02-2316:391 reply Time to extend comma.ai!
By dymk 2026-02-2316:46 Yeah, imagine having, say, two of these LIDAR sensors, each pointed towards the car's blind spots. Comma already does well with the car's built-in radar + vision on straight freeway runs, but can't reliably change lanes on its own. The built in blind spot detectors on most cars are a binary "there is/not a car present", which doesn't reliably determine if it's safe to actually do a lane change.
I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I, with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0.
And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.
By yayitswei 2026-02-2318:03 I think of Tesla autopilot as sophisticated cruise control. Can perform most driving tasks better than I can, saves a lot of cognitive work, still needs close of my 100% attention.
Is this comment from 2010? Maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems you would be shocked by what modern cars are capable of.
By julianeon 2026-02-2318:31 The intention of my comment (possibly unclear) was to say: I know we can do self-driving very well very expensively. But what can we do extremely cheaply?
Like the difference between "what can do we with an LLM on my maxxed-out laptop with an RTX 5090 card" vs. "what can we do with a mac mini." Self-driving car version.
By zemvpferreira 2026-02-238:255 reply The mind salivates at the idea of sub-$100 and soon after sub-$10 Lidar. We could build spatial awareness into damn near everything. It'll be a cambrian explosion of autonomous robots.
By moffkalast 2026-02-239:221 reply There are already very good sub-$100 lidars, especially for 2D since they were made en masse for vacuum cleaners. E.g. the LD19 or STL-19P as they're calling it now for some reason. You need to pair them with serious compute to run AMCL with them, plus actuation (though ST3215s are cheap and easy to integrate now too) and control for that actuation which also wants its own compute, plus a battery, etc. the costs quickly add up. Robotics is expensive regardless of how cheap components get.
I think the difference is that these are intended for automotive use and have a much longer range than the ones in your Roomba.
By moffkalast 2026-02-2314:53 True, you have to go up to $120 for the 25m version, or $450 for Unitree's L2 which gets 30m in 3D. That's about as much you could possibly ever need unless you're making high speed vehicles that need more reaction time. In which case you probably shouldn't be relying on the cheapest thing on the market :)
RIP to every single camera in existence if that happens. Lidar is awful with damaging camera lenses.
I had to look this up, because I had never heard of it. How could a lens be damaged by infrared lasers?
It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...
There is complains that some Volvo cars damaged iPhone cameras. It’s not even clear if Apple takes those under warranty. We’ve seen car review YouTubers that got their iPhone camera sensors damaged captured (by a second camera) while reviewing
One such review where Marques shows how it happened to his phone
By RobotToaster 2026-02-2312:271 reply One highlight from the video, he says most cameras are fine, it's just iphones that don't have a very good IR filter. Which sounds correct, in my experience most cameras have pretty substantial IR filters that have to be removed if you want to photograph IR.
I also wonder if the smaller sensor size on phones contributes, since the energy is being focused onto a smaller spot.
Either way, for that to happen he was filming the LIDAR while active, for a decent amount of time, from right next to the car. I assume under normal conditions it wouldn't be running constantly while the vehicle is stationary?
Is it possible that the iPhone filters are weaker due to FaceID requirements? I seem to recall that FaceID (and similar systems, like Windows Hello) depend on IR to get a more 3D map of the face, so it'd make sense that they want to be more sensitive in that range.
Laptops aren't generally being used in the same areas as cars though, so you wouldn't expect to see as many cases involving Windows Hello compatible laptops/cameras.
If this is true, the eyes are no better. Especially as it can't be seen, who will look awsy? And at night, with open irises?
There was someone who had his eyes damaged by sitting next to a heater.
By zamadatix 2026-02-2316:34 Are the eyes really "no better" in this scenario? From the above article it seems we tuned the behavior to the eye specifically (but not necessarily image sensors):
> Moving to a longer wavelength that does not penetrate the human eye allows new lidars to fire more powerful pulses and stretch their range beyond 200 meters, far enough for stopping faster cars. Now a claim of lidar damage to the charge-coupled-device (CCD) sensor on a photographer's electronic camera has raised concern that new eye-safe long-wavelength lidars might endanger electronic eyes.
> Producers of laser light shows are well aware that laser beams can damage electronic eyes. “Camera sensors are, in general, more susceptible to damage than the human eye,” warns the International Laser Display Association
"doesn't penetrate the human eye" seems a bit hand wavy, but I take it to mean "these length pulses in this wavelength are tuned to have the power not be enough to damage the eye". Camera lenses may not have the same level of IR filtering/gathering area or, if they do, there is nothing implying the image sensor has the exact same tolerances as the inside of the eye. From the same:
> Sensor vulnerability to infrared damage would depend on the design of the infrared filters
A heater usually damages the eyes through drying out/heating up the outside layer with constant high intensity, not by causing damage to the retina (post filtering). https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q12691/
> Furthermore, since the eye blocks the IRR, the eye begins to overheat leading to eye damage and possible blindness. Because of this, you should not look at the heater for an extended period of time.
Enough intensity of any wavelength is enough to damage any camera or eye of course, but the scenario here seems to be built around that question for the eye. Similarly, I've heard of Waymo's causing 6 mph accidents but no reports of eye damage from any car LiDAR. Despite that, in the above YouTube clip Marques Brownlee actively shows his camera being clearly damaged as its moved around.
By aeternum 2026-02-2316:19 The next headline will be that it also damages human retinas.
It's not safe just because it's infrared. And the claims that it's safe because of the exposure time is highly questionable, would you be okay with that for any other laser?
> The biggest concern is not photographic cameras but rather the video cameras mounted on autonomous cars to gather crucial information the cars need to drive themselves.
So they don't care if that breaks my phone camera? Wtf?
By cyanydeez 2026-02-2311:58 The Epstein classes argument is: If youre not my property, why should We care?
By pedro_caetano 2026-02-2310:302 reply Is there any deeper study on long term effects regarding retinal damage?
I would imagine, even with safe dosages, there would be some form of cumulative effect in terms of retinal phototoxicity.
More so if we consider the scenario that this becomes a standard COTS feature in cars and we are walking around a city centre with a fleet of hundreds of thousands of these laser sources.
Some lidar units simply use the wavelength that the human eye is opaque to.
The grandparent comment is about camera lenses with little to no near infrared cutoff filter. Some older iPhones were like that and that was the original breaking story.
> human eye is opaque to
Absorbing the laser isn't necessarily any good. Very hypothetically it could lead to cataracts.
By bregma 2026-02-2311:19 Absolutely, and is a major cause of cataracts. Somewhat near 100% of people with lenses in their eyes will get cataracts eventually if they are ever exposed to unfiltered sunlight.
By IsTom 2026-02-2311:16 And staring directly at the sun is not recommended.
By jayd16 2026-02-2313:22 That's why we don't look at it.
By jandrese 2026-02-2314:59 I remember those old cellphones with weak IR filters. It was a scandal because light clothing turns out to be more transparent to IR than to visible light so they were acting as a sort of clothing "X-Ray" in bright light. Creepers on the Internet tried to start a whole new genre of porn but were shut down in a hurry by cellphone manufacturers adding robust IR filters on the next generation of smartphones.
Shame that perverts had to ruin that for us, it was kinda neat to point a TV remote as the camera and see the bulb light up.
By Terr_ 2026-02-2311:16 I suspect we can't quantify human eye-damage enough to easily rule-out chronic effects... until it's too late for the patient.
By KoolKat23 2026-02-2310:29 Other cameras. When the lidar laser points at the camera sensor.
By culi 2026-02-2318:33 I wish this was true. It'd immediately be the best way to fight surveillance systems like Flock
By kleiba 2026-02-2311:09 Could be a gain for privacy ;-)
By micromacrofoot 2026-02-2314:54 we'd likely see new coatings and sensor designs that avoid it, not trivial but also not the end of the world
By lencastre 2026-02-2311:07 TIL!
Thanks! What a headache
By natch 2026-02-2310:31
By culi 2026-02-2318:31 The short-range stuff is already $150-300 per unit. If you're thinking indoor robots that's already technically feasible. Over 25% of all Chinese cars being produced today have LiDAR.
Even mid-range sensors used in ADAS systems only cost $600-750. The long-range stuff that's needed for trucking or robotaxis is $1,500–6,000
By SubiculumCode 2026-02-2311:35 RIP to humans under authoritarian regimes?
By zemvpferreira 2026-02-238:442 reply I think we’re well past the point where mass surveillance was a technical challenge. Mass oppression through autonomous violence however…
By ben_w 2026-02-2310:00 Even back when Snowden was current news, we'd reached the point where laser microphones could cover every window in London for a bill of materials* less than the annual budget of London's police force.
* I have no way to estimate installation costs, but smartphones show that manufacturing at this scale doesn't need to increase total cost 10x more than the B.o.M.
By lonelyasacloud 2026-02-2310:37
The minute internet became widespread it was game over.
Pros and cons. :/
It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy. The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for this, and big interest donors oppose it.
Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer something here, though?
Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be vigilant.
By seanmcdirmid 2026-02-2313:23 Lidar doesn’t really give you much to “see”, just shape and distance…so I’m a bit confused how it can be used for invasive surveillance, do you mean when fused with vision input it somehow allows it to infer more privacy stuff?
The EU already has. GDPR and the AI Act puts a lot of limits on what you can do in the open space, although it doesn't always go far enough.
By jonplackett 2026-02-239:042 reply And barely gets enforced
2775 fines for a total of €6.8B since July 2018. It's not A LOT (I would hope for A LOT MORE fines), but it's not nothing.
By jonplackett 2026-02-2318:151 reply It’s very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
But also kinda weird. There seems to be a lot of fines for hospitals for example.
Some Portuguese hospital was fined €400,000 for ‘Insufficient technical and organisational measures to ensure information security’
By jacquesm 2026-02-2320:29 Medical, banking and insurance are three industries that the European data privacy watchdogs are much more strict about because of the potential for damage.
By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-239:193 reply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR_fines_and_notices
Top 5 fines:
1 - Meta - Ireland - €1.2 billion
2 - Amazon Europe - Luxembourg - €746 millions
3 - WhatsApp - Ireland - €225 millions
4 - British Airway - UK - £183 millions
5 - Google - France - €60 millions
I wish every law barely got enforced this way.
By throawayonthe 2026-02-239:54 pretty pathetic, but people keep insisting you can regulate capital
I'd say the numbers listed here prove the GPs point of poor enforcement. The largest fine is roughly 0.97% of Meta's 2023 revenue, the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year. It's a tiny-tiny cost of doing business at best, definitely not a deterrent, given Meta's blatant disregard for GDPR since then.
By Mordisquitos 2026-02-2311:022 reply > the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year
I don't know about you, but on that income I would certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not. But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the future? Absolutely yes.
My bad, a better analogy would be a dealer making 60k / year selling drugs, gets caught by police and is fined $600. I wouldn’t expect them to change much.
By Mordisquitos 2026-02-2311:35 Fair enough. In that sense I do see value in the analogy.
By SkiFire13 2026-02-2311:44 Would you still do your best to avoid it if that involved taking a pay cut of more than $600/year?
By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-2310:142 reply 1% of Meta's global revenue is a tiny-tiny cost of doing business? At that point, I think I can stop even trying to argue here. It's a massive fine any way you put it. Especially when you consider the ceiling hasn't been reached and non compliance is more and more costly by design.
By KoolKat23 2026-02-2310:35 Their net profit was $60billion in 2024. This is peanuts. It can fluctuate by multiples of this fine in a month, depending on whether or not they've had a bad or good month, nevermind year. This pretty much is just a cost of doing business.
It's not even 1% of their annual revenue, let alone the entire multi year period they've been in breach before and since. It's nothing to them.
By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-2312:362 reply The interesting part is that it keeps going up. You seem to believe we have somehow reached a cap where Meta can just expense it as a cost of doing business. That's not how European law works. The fine maximum is far higher and repeated non compliance keeps making the fines higher and higher. It's a ladder not a sizing precedent.
By Zanfa 2026-02-2315:47 Unfortunately it doesn't in practice. Meta's total revenue since 2018 when GDPR came into force is just shy of $1T. Even with all the smaller fines combined, the total amount of GDPR related fines is in the range of $3B. It's a rounding error.
There isn't a trend of increasing fines, nor has any fine even reached the cap, let alone applied multiple times for the recurring violations. Even more with the current US administration's foreign policy towards the EU.
While GDPR as a law is fine, with the exception of enforcement limitations, enforcement so far has been a complete joke.
Maximum GDPR fine is 4% of global revenue in the previous year. If a company has 30% profit margin then they can, in theory, treat is as a cost of doing business, indefinitely.
By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-2315:24 It's 4% per fine. Each violation is a fine and Meta owns multiple companies that can be fined. But 4% of global revenue already can't be treated as just a cost of doing business. Their shareholders would murder them.
LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually
By KaiserPro 2026-02-239:10 I don't think it makes a difference. Dense lidar goes you more information than 2d colour imagery.
There are SLAM cameras that only select "interesting" points, which are privacy preserving. They are also very low power.
I’d definitely feel much better if most cameras in the world were replaced by LIDAR. I feel like it would be much tougher to have a flawless facial recognition program with LIDAR alone
Who needs facial recognition if you can identify people based on gait?
By 0x3f 2026-02-2310:20 Gait recognition is almost entirely hype. Sure it works to tell the difference between n = 10 people but so what, you can tell the difference between a group of 10 people by what kind of shoes they are wearing.
Judicial systems where a 6% error rate is deemed way too high to lead to a conviction.
By adrianN 2026-02-2311:11 Then you combine it with some other technique, eg tracking daily routes of individuals, to lower the error rate. You only need a handful of bits to distinguish all inhabitants of the average city. But imho that error rate would likely be low enough for some judge to authorize more invasive surveillance of suspects thus identified.
People saying LIDARs can't recognize colors or LIDARs can't take pictures don't know what they are talking about.
They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star Trek material-informational converting transporters. Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs.
By abeppu 2026-02-2315:37 I don't know what I'm talking about, but isn't the wavelength of the laser pretty limiting to the idea of just slapping a Bayer color filter on? Like, if the laser is IR (partly so they're not visually disrupting all the humans around them), the signal you get back doesn't the visual spectrum sections that you'd need to get RGB right?
By aix1 2026-02-2316:31 > LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually
Right, but how likely is it that there will be LIDAR and no cameras (especially given the low cost of the latter)?
Humanity has never known a world without surveillance. Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan. Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of endless conflict.
By donkey_brains 2026-02-2311:162 reply Mass surveillance is a relatively recent development. Dense urban civilizations are not. And yet their denizens have not historically devolved into a “nasty, brutish, and short” existence. In fact, cities have been centers of culture and learning throughout history. How does this square with your theory?
The 19th century was the true cradle of mass surveillance. Civil registration, property tracking, and institutionalized police forces provided the systemic oversight required to manage dense urban life. These administrative tools served as the analogue version of digital monitoring to ensure every citizen remained known and categorized. Cities thrived as centers of culture only because these new forms of visibility prevented the Hobbesian collapse that anonymity would have otherwise triggered.
By tsimionescu 2026-02-2312:521 reply And what about all of the previous ~40-50 centuries where cities were centers of learning and art and not Hobbesian hell holes? Ur is slightly older than the 19th century, I believe.
And note that there is evidence for cities of tens of thousands of inhabitants from 3000 BCE, while Rome reached 1 000 000 residents by 1CE. Again, without becoming some Hobbesian nightmare.
By rfv6723 2026-02-242:03 Augustus established the Vigiles Urbani and the Urban Cohorts, creating a state-funded police and firefighting force to replace the chaotic and often violent system of private client-patron justice. These were the bold, persistent experiments in social order that allowed a million people to coexist without descending into a Hobbesian hell.
By squigz 2026-02-2311:36 None of those things are remotely comparable to the surveillance we're talking about. There's a world of difference between, "My city knows who owns what properties and also we have a police force", and "Western intelligence agencies scoop up every bit of data they can grab about anyone on the planet and store it forever"
By expedition32 2026-02-2312:201 reply In my country it wasn't until the late 19th century that someone had the balls to stop going to church on Sunday. It was a huge scandal at the time but it all worked out in the end.
Humans have always done mass surveillance on eachother. You don't need technology for that.
By macintux 2026-02-2312:53 At no point in time before this era was it possible for a random bureaucrat to have a reasonably comprehensive list of everyone in a country who attended church yesterday.
Scale matters.
By cucumber3732842 2026-02-2311:271 reply This is a reduction to absurdity. Those old societies you cite didn't actively surveil with the goal of micromanaging people's daily lives the way that modern ones do.
Rural surveillance was far more suffocating because every single action was subject to the community gaze. This is exactly why classic literature frames the journey to the city as a liberation from the crushing weight of the village eye. The idea of the peaceful countryside is a modern utopian fantasy that ignores how ancient clans dictated every aspect of life including marriage and death. Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management. Ancient society did not just monitor people; it owned their entire existence through inescapable social visibility.
By cucumber3732842 2026-02-2312:401 reply "It was always shit everywhere" is revisionist history born out of the fantasy of statists looking to justify the modern (administrative) enforcement state.
While the lack of anonymity in small towns certainly puts a damper on one's ability to deviate too far from social norms, the list of things and subject that could get you subjected to government violence without creating a victimized party was infinity shorter. Things that get state or state deputized enforcers on your case today were matters of "yeah that's distasteful, he'll have to settle that with god" or it would come back to bite you when something happened 150+yr ago because society did not have the surplus to justify paying nearly as manny people to go around looking for deviance that could be leveraged to extract money. These people had way more practical day to day freedom to run and better their lives than we do now, if constrained by the fact that they had substantially less wealth to leverage to that effect.
> Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management
And they almost exclusively deal in things that historical societies didn't even bother to regulate.
You're beyond delusional if you think running afoul of HOA is worse than running afoul of the local, state or federal government. Yeah they can screech and send you scary letter with scary numbers but they don't get the buddy treatment from courts that "real" governments do (to the great injustice of their victims) and their procedural avenues for screwing their victims on multiple axis are way more limited.
Seriously, go get in a pissing match with a municipality over just where the line for "requires permit" is and get back to me. Unless you want to do something that is more than petty cosmetic stuff and unambiguously in violation of the rules a HOA is a paper tiger for the most part (not to say that they don't suck).
By rfv6723 2026-02-241:59 Modern bureaucracy provides the institutional architecture and political recourse needed to check such arbitrary local tyranny. Without a central legal authority, an HOA or a town council becomes a lawless fiefdom. In those "freer" times, falling out with the local elite meant you didn't fight a permit; you simply had to pack your life and leave.
Your reaction actually proves the point. Aggression thrives in anonymous spaces because the lack of oversight removes the weight of accountability. When people feel unobserved, they quickly abandon the social friction that once held tribes and clans together. You are essentially providing a live demonstration of why a society without any form of monitoring inevitably slides into the Hobbesian trap.
I don't think a random internet comment proves anything about society at large.
People don't hesitate to be aggressive even when they're not anonymous and there's a threat of accountability - see, all crime, or people just acting shitty toward others.
Mass surveillance does not cause everyone to magically get along.
History shows that whenever surveillance gaps appear, chaos follows. The explosion of crime during early urbanization was the specific catalyst for the creation of modern police forces because traditional social bonds had failed to provide oversight in growing cities. Japan maintains its safety through a deep-rooted culture of mutual neighborhood monitoring that leaves little room for anonymity. Even China successfully quelled the violent crime waves of its early economic boom by implementing a sophisticated surveillance network.
By squigz 2026-02-2311:33 Police forces nor "neighborhood monitoring" are equivalent to mass surveillance though.
Anyway I'm curious why - despite having less anonymity than at any point in history, at least from the perspective of law enforcement - we still see high crime rates, from fraud to murders?
