<story><title>Contrary to Musk&apos;s claim, Lidar has some advantages in Self Driving technology</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverless-cars-dont-need-lidar-experts-arent-so-sure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>QuantumGood</author><text>Musk&amp;#x27;s point has always been to combine vision with radar, instead of Lidar. I&amp;#x27;m amazed that this combination is usually overlooked in discussions of Tesla&amp;#x2F;Lidar</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BluSyn</author><text>Exactly. What is rarely mentioned is his exact quote on the reasoning for radar vs. lidar:&lt;p&gt;“If you’re going to use active photon generation, don’t use visible wavelength, because with passive optical you’ve taken care of all visible wavelength stuff. You want to use a wavelength that’s occlusion-penetrating like radar. LIDAR is just active photon generation in the visible spectrum.”&lt;p&gt;This article is still missing the point when talking about redundancies. LIDAR only works in essentially perfect weather (&amp;quot;not occlusion-penetrating&amp;quot;). Even if it serves only as a &amp;quot;redundancy&amp;quot; there&amp;#x27;s no advantage in relying on a sensor suite that operates in a less-safe mode in the most adverse road conditions. So basically if you are driving in snow or fog, your LIDAR-based AV has to fall back to Radar+Cameras. If that system can pass all the safety tests in the &lt;i&gt;worst-case road condition&lt;/i&gt; then there is no value in the additional sensors that add expense but no safety margin.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s even more overlooked is power consumption. LIDAR is far more power intensive, especially when we&amp;#x27;re talking about multiple packages per vehicle. In the future world of Autonomous Electric Vehicle Fleets, the vehicles using LIDAR will get significantly less range efficiency than their radar counterparts and cost significantly more to build. In a fleet scenario where every margin counts this will result in a significant economic pressure to ditch LIDAR.&lt;p&gt;So in the end I think Elon will be proved right. Those currently investing in LIDAR-based systems will eventually ditch it for purely practical economic reasons. Those that don&amp;#x27;t will be completely destroyed in the open market.&lt;p&gt;The real competitive advantage for AEV&amp;#x27;s is in the software, not hardware. LIDAR is a crutch for bad software that reaches a theoretical maximum far short of what is needed for economically-viable LVL5 autonomy.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll restate this clearly: there&amp;#x27;s simply no economic or technological advantage to using LIDAR for AEV&amp;#x27;s.</text></comment>
<story><title>Contrary to Musk&apos;s claim, Lidar has some advantages in Self Driving technology</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverless-cars-dont-need-lidar-experts-arent-so-sure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>QuantumGood</author><text>Musk&amp;#x27;s point has always been to combine vision with radar, instead of Lidar. I&amp;#x27;m amazed that this combination is usually overlooked in discussions of Tesla&amp;#x2F;Lidar</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>liability</author><text>Musk badly wants for you to not realize that nobody is proposing LIDAR-only, but are rather proposing LIDAR+optical+radar.  Musk argues against straw men.&lt;p&gt;(Also the radar Telsa is using has jack-shit for angular resolution.  It can&amp;#x27;t tell the difference between a tree next to the road and a fire truck parked right across it.  Consequently that radar has very limited utility.)</text></comment>