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.
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?"
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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?
Around a decade ago the nascent LIDAR industry boomed and dozens of startups emerged out of nowhere all racing to make cheap automotive grade LIDAR, and here we are.
Of course MicroVisiom is only claiming their LIDAR to be suitable for advanced driver assist, but ADAS encompasses a wide array of capabilities: basically everything between cruise control and robotaxis, so there's no definition of how much LIDAR you need to do the job, just however much you feel like. Tesla feels like none at all.
Interestingly, there have been people in the LIDAR industry predicting costs like this for many years. I heard numbers like $250 per vehicle back in 2012 [1]
Of course, ambitious pricing like this is all about economies of scale - sensors that are used in production vehicles are ordered by the million, and that lowers the costs massively. When the huge orders didn't materialise, the economies of scale and low prices didn't materialise either.
Also 'Luminar Technologies, a prominent U.S. lidar manufacturer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025' LIDAR is useful in a small set of scenarios (calibration and validation) but do not bet the farm on it or make it the centre piece of your sensor suite.
This is very wrong.
LIDAR scanners have revolutionized surveying by
enabling rapid, high-precision 3D mapping of terrain and infrastructure, capturing millions of data points per second. LIDAR can penetrate dense vegetation, allowing accurate, ground-level, mapping in forested or obstructed areas. Drone mounted LIDAR has become very popular. Tripod mounted LIDAR scanners are very commonly used on construction sites. Handhels LIDAR scanners can map the inside of buildings with incredible accuracy. This is very commonly used to create digital twins of factories.
Lidar is critical for any autonomous vehicle. It turns out a very accurate 3D point cloud of the environment is very useful for self driving. Crazy, I know.
I work with programs approaching L3+ from L2, with the requirement that the system works for 99% of roads (not tesla before people start fixating on that).
We find that the cases where lidar really helps are in gathering training data, parking, and if focused enough some long distance precision.
None of these have been instrumental in a final product; personally I suspect that many of the cars including lidar use it for data collection and edge cases more than as part of the driving perception model.
Like Waymo? (https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-...) 17 years after betting the farm on LIDAR the solution fails to navigate a puddle. Sorry but they bet on the wrong technology, Tesla has overtaken them with multi camera and NN solution.
Your conclusion from a single incident is a bad inference. One vehicle getting confused by a puddle (likely a sensor fusion edge case or mapping artifact, not a fundamental LIDAR failure) doesn't indict the technology. Tesla's cameras have produces vastly more failures.
Waymo has driven tens of millions of autonomous miles with a serious injury/fatality rate dramatically lower than human drivers. The actual data shows the technology works. Tesla FSD still requires active driver supervision and is not legally or technically a robotaxi system. Comparing them as if they're at parity is wrong.
LIDAR gives direct metric depth with no inference required. Camera-only systems must infer depth from 2D images using neural networks, which introduces failure modes LIDAR doesn't have. Radar is very valuable when LIDAR and cameras give ambiguous data.
What metrics has Telsa overtaken Waymo? Deployed robotaxi revenue miles? No. Disengagement rates? No published comparable data. Safety per mile in driverless operation? No.
A Tesla wouldn't stop for a puddle. Also its not locked to a small geofenced area (people have driven coast to coast without a single intervention on FSD including parking spot to parking spot) when I can buy a Waymo vehicle that does this then Waymo would have caught up with Tesla.
Your puddle example is utterly irrelevant. Tesla's are notorious for phantom breaking. Robotaxis are very much locked to tiny conferenced areas. Some even shaped like a penis because Musk is such a child.
"people have driven coast to coast without a single intervention on FSD including parking spot to parking spot"
I find this claim very dubious. Prove it. Teslas never drive empty for a very good reason.
I'm not well versed into RF physics. I had the feeling that light-wave coherency in lasers had to be created at a single source (or amplified as it passes by). That's the first time I hear about phased-array lasers.
The beam is split and re-emitted in multiple points. By controlling the optical length (refractive index, or just the length of the waveguide by using optical junctions) of the path that leads to each emitter, the phase can be adjusted.
In practice, this can be done with phase change materials (heat/cool materials to change their index), or micro ring resonators (to divert light from one wave guide to another).
The beam then self-interferes, and the resulting interference pattern (constructive/destructive depending on the direction) are used to modulate the beam orientation.
You are right that a single source is needed, though I imagine that you can also use a laser source and shine it at another "pumped" material to have it emit more coherent light.
I've been thinking about possible use-cases for this technology besides LIDAR,. Point to point laser communication could be an interesting application: satellite-to-satellite communication, or drone-to-drone in high-EMI settings (battlefield with jammers). This would make mounting laser designators on small drones a lot easier. Here you go, free startup ideas ;)
In principle, as the sibling comment says, you could measure just the phase difference on the receiver end. The trick is that it's much harder for light frequencies than radar. I'm non even sure we can measure the phase etc of a light beam, and if we could, the Nyquist frequency is incredibly high - 2x frequency takes us to PHz frequencies.
There might be something cute you can do with interference patterns but no idea about that. We do sort of similar things with astronomic observations.
Not an expert, but main challenges with laser coherency are present when shaping the output using multiple transmitters.
For lidar you transmit a pulse from a single source and receive its reflection at multiple points. Mentioning phased array with lidar almost always means receiving.
A phased array is an antenna composed of multiple smaller antennas within the same plane that can constructively/destructively aim its radio beam within any direction it is facing. I'm no radio engineer but I think it works via an interference pattern being strongest in the direction you want the beam aimed. This is mostly used in radar arrays though I suppose it could work with light too since it is also a wave.
Interesting to see the cost curve drop ... this always changes the market.
I have been watching the sensor space for a while. Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. ALSO regulatory and mapping integration will matter. I tried to work with public datasets and it's messy. The hardware is only one part! BUT it's exciting to see multiple vendors in the space. Competition might push vendors to refine the software stack as well as the hardware. HOWEVER I'm keeping an eye on how these systems handle edge cases in bad weather. I don't think we have seen enough data yet...
> Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars.
Interestingly, there are already some comparatively cheap LIDAR units on the market.
In the automotive market, ideally you need a 200m+ range (or whatever the stopping distance of your vehicle is) and you need to operate in bright direct sunlight (good luck making an eye-safe laser that doesn't get washed out by the sun) and you need more than one scanning plane (for when the car goes over bumps).
On the other hand, for indoor robotics where a 10m range is enough and there's much less direct sunlight? Your local robotics stockist probably already has something <$400
Neato from San Diego has developed a $30 (indoor, parallax based) LIDAR about 20 years ago, for their vacuum cleaners [1].
Later, improved units based on the same principle became ubiquitous in Chinese robot vacuums [2]. Such LIDARs, and similarly looking more conventional time-of-flight units are sold for anywhere between $20-$200, depending on the details of the design.
Sounds like the quality isn't all that great but LD06 sensors look like they're about $20 and someone who works on libraries about this suggested the STL27L which seems to be about $160 and here's an outdoor scan from it: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pidar-scan-240901-0647-7997b...
Not sure if the ld06 is a scanner like this or if it's just a line (like you'd use for a cheaper robot vac).
@dang .... do these comments seem organic to you? old accounts with almost zero karma going out of their way to use the same verbiage to compliment waymo 18 minutes after an article gets posted? .... dead internet at work.
Please don't post like this. If you suspect something, please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) with links to specific comments. The guidelines are clear abut this:
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Anytime a Tesla or Elon related article is posted it gets a barrage of negative comments usually FUD like. Any neutral or positive comment gets downvoted heavily. Bit suspicious to say the least, very clear pattern, they are not doing it very well should be a bit more nuanced.
There is no evidence of any such organised campaign. The critical comments we see against that company and person are generally from known, established HN users, and align with frequently-expressed sentiments among the general public. And the complaint is just as often made that "anything remotely critical" about that company and person is flagged. If posts about the topic are being downvoted and flagged, it's mostly because that person and company are in the news so frequently that most commentary about them is repetitive, sensationalist and uninteresting, and thus off topic for HN.
There are laser measurers sold for a few buck on Temu. Robot vacuums sold for few hundred dollars have Lidars that map out the room in a seconds.
Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of the surroundings will be built.
I know that automotive parts of the standard requirement to withstand 80°C (or 120°C for military use). A robot vacuum working in a living room can probably be made cheaper because it does not have to face as harsh environments?
Also, range is probably a factor. In a living room, you probably need something like 20m max. You car should "see" farther.
Sure, these are the assumptions but silicon is silicon, copper is copper and solder is solder. They don't use easy melting electronics in vacuums and hardened stuff in cars, the tech is about the same unless it is supposed to work in highly radioactive environment. The plastics are different but car interiors are full of plastics, so its unlikely that the costs of temperature resistant plastics needed for this is more than a cupholder.
As for the range, again pretty powerful lasers are sold for sub 10SUD prices on retail. I am sure that there must be higher calibration and precision requirements as the distance increase but is it really order of magnitudes higher? 120 meters laser measurer with 1cm accuracy is 15 Euros on Temu and that thing has an LCD screen and a battery as a handheld device. How much distance do you actually need?
Vibrations are surely an issue with electromechanical systems but hardly with electronics. There are plenty of cheap electronic accessories for cars and you can observe that those keep functioning for years.
to add to the rest of the comments, a reliability standard also adds on cost. The scale is different, but compare a car bolt vs manned space mission craft's bolt.
What makes you say radar is extremely expensive? Virtually every car from the last decade has at least one, many have two or more. They’re barely more than a PCB and a radar ASIC.
If you want to compete with LIDAR, you need high resolution 4D (range, velocity, azimuth, and height) RADAR. Those are usually phased arrays with expensive phase sensitive electronics, and behind that a chip that can do a lot of Fourier transforms very quickly.
The cheap RADAR devices you're talking about usually only output range and velocity, sometimes for a handful of rather large azimuth slices. That doesn't compete with LIDAR at all.
Is this Human safe at these volumes? There was a time you could get your feet sized by putting them into an X-ray box at the shoe store. Removed from stores once the harm was known.
Well, the energy levels used in those devices should be miniscule, and the wavelengths used are well studies. The problem with x-rays - was lack of studies on health effects, and regulations on those effects. I think, since that time, we've studies radiation (be it light, rf or other parts of spectrum) much more.
There is indeed a possibility that we're overlooking some bio-electromagnetic interaction effects; for instance now there is some evidence that led lights might not be harmless - but again, it's not the they affect biological structures somehow, but the lack of spectral components has some effects. It is an interesting topic to research. But, the lidar "should" be safe
I mean it doesn't. If you actually look at it comma.ai proves that level two doesn't require lidar. Thats not the same as full speed safe autonomy.
whilst it is possible to drive vision only (assuming the right array of cameras (ie not the way tesla have done it) lidar gives you a low latency source of depth that can correct vision mistakes. Its also much less energy intensive to work out if an object is dangerous, and on a collision course.
To do that in vision, you need to work out what the object is (ie is it a shadow) then you have to triangulate it. That requires continuous camera calibration, and is all that easy. If you have a depth "prior" ie, yes its real, yes its large and yes its going to collide, its much much more simple to use vision to work out what to do.
It's fair to point out that comma.ai is SAE level two system, however it's not geofenced at all, which is an SAE level 5 requirement. But really that brings up the fact that SAE's levels aren't the right ones, merely the ones they chose to define since they're the standards body. A better set of levels are the seven I go into more detail about on my blog.
As far as distinguishing shadows on the road, that's what radar is for. Shadows on the road as seen by the vision system don't show up on radar as something the vehicle will run into.
Your autonomy scale is pretty arbitrary and encodes assumptions about the underlying technology and environments the vehicle is supposed to implement and operate in.
The SAE autonomy scale is about dividing responsibility between the driver and the assistance system. The lowest revel represents full responsibility on the driver and the highest level represents full responsibility on the system.
If there is a geofenced transportation system like the Vegas loop and the cars can drive without a human driver, then that is a level 5 system. By the way, geofencing is not an "SAE level 5" requirement. Geofencing is a tool to make it easier to reach requirements by reducing the scope of what full autonomy represents.
I saw a Waymo in Seattle, today. If Waymo can get Seattle right, that gives me a lot of confidence that their stack is very capable of difficult road conditions.
Note: I have not had the pleasure of riding in one yet, but from what my friend in SJ says, it’s very convenient and confidence-inspiring.
I took the Waymo from San Jose airport to home on the peninsula. It took the 101 highway back for the most part, driving very conservatively at 65-55 mph, and in the right most lane. It still has a few quirks though. When there aren't any cars around it will speed up to 65 mph, but at on-ramps, it will slow down to 55 and then speed up once past. It will get stuck behind slow drivers being in the right most lane and patiently follow them a few car length behind them. On the plus side, the lidar stack field of view as shown on the internal display seems to see pretty far down the highway.
Why wouldn't you trust a Telsa, millions of people let there Tesla drive them all over USA (not geofences like Waymo) without touching the wheel from parking spot to parking spot everyday. Have you tried it?
> Why wouldn't you trust a Telsa, millions of people let there Tesla drive them all over USA (not geofences like Waymo)
I own a Tesla and paid about $10K for the full self driving capability a few years ago. Yeah, I would not trust a Tesla to drive me from airport to my house. There is a reason Tesla is still stuck at level 2 autonomy certification and not 3, 4 or 5.
Maybe because of the multiple investigations Tesla has currently due to crashes, deaths, injuries, etc. all caused by "whoops our cameras were fooled by some glare/fog and accelerated into a truck/pole"
Those are mainly autopilot which people conflate with FSD, and high percentage are human caused accidents (auto pilot requires full attention and driver is liable).
Autopilot is Tesla’s brand name for adaptive cruise control with lane centering. This is a common feature available on a wide range of vehicles from nearly every major manufacturer, though marketed under different names (e.g., ProPilot, BlueCruise).
Drivers can and do misuse adaptive cruise control systems, sometimes with fatal consequences. Memes aside, there is no strong evidence that fatal misuse occurs more frequently by owners of Tesla cars than with comparable systems from other brands.
This perception reflects the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, more commonly known as the frequency illusion. Nobody is collecting statistics for other brands, so it’s assumed the phenomenon doesn’t occur.
A similar pattern occurred with media coverage of EV fires. Except in this case, good statistics exist which prove the opposite: ICE vehicles catch fire more often than EVs.
Because it is not real autonomous driving? Being liable for software that you can neither verify nor trust is THE dealbreaker. Once Tesla says "We are liable for all accidents with FSD" with higher level autonomous driving this game changes. But Waymo is just way more reliable.
Even more fury-inducing, they don't even have ultrasonic parking sensors on cars that have ultrasonic parking sensors. They disabled them to move to a vision-only stack that is no where near as accurate or as good and which categorically cannot tell a difference in ground truth has occurred in its blind spot. But hey, all _people_ need are two cameras, right?
Xpeng, Wayne, aiMotive to name three. Probably many others, who claim to use LIDAR but don’t actually rely on it. Because LIDAR is perceived as a prerequisite for autonomous safety, admitting to not needing it is a bad PR move — for now.
Yes, silly using just cameras, I mean humans have Lidar sensors, that why they can drive, why didn't new just copy that....oh wait.
It all seriousness though, Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world. I think we can see where this is going. (Hint: not well for Waymo)
Also the article is speculative 'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100 barrier'. One day...
Humans also don't have wheels, but we build objects with wheels. It is as if we can build objects that don't resemble humans for specific purposes. Crazy...
> Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world.
Wait what? when did they actually enter mass production?
> I mean humans have Lidar sensors
Real time slam is actually pretty good, the hard part is reliable object detection using just vision. Tesla's forward facing cameras are effectively monocular, which means that its much much harder to get depth (its not impossible but moving objects are much more difficult to observe if you only have cameras aligned on the same plane with no real parallax)
Ultimately Musk is right, you probably don't need lidar to drive safely. but its far more simple and easier to do if you have Lidar. Its also safer. Musk said "lidars are a crutch", not because he is some sort of genius, Its obvious that SLAM only driving is the way forward since the mid 00's (of not earlier). The reason he said it is because he thought he could save money not having lidar. The problem for him is that he didn't do the research to see how far away proper machine perception is to account for the last 1% in accuracy needed to make vision only safe and reliable.
This is a weirdly tired counterpoint that Elon and Elonstans like to bandy about as if it's an apples to apples comparison. Humans have a weirdly ultra-high-dynamic-range binocular vision system mounted on an advanced ptz/swivel gimbal that allows for a great degree of freedom of movement, parallax effects, and a complex heuristic system for analyzing vision data.
The Tesla FSD system has... well, sure, a few more cameras, but they're low resolution, and in inconveniently fixed locations.
My alley has an occlusion at the corner where it connects to the main road: a very tall, very ample bush that basically makes it impossible to authoritatively check oncoming traffic to my left. I, a human, can determine that if I see the light flicker even slightly as it filters through the bushes, that the path is not clear: a car is likely causing that very slight change in light. My Tesla has no clue at all that that's happening. And worse, the perpendicular camera responsible for checking cross-traffic is mounted _behind my head_ on the b-pillar, in a fixed location that means that without nosing my car _into_ the travel lane, there is literally no way for it to be sure the path is clear.
This edge case is navigated near-perfectly by Waymo, since its roof-mounted lidar can see above and beyond the bush and determine that the path is clear. And to hit back on the "Tesla is making cheaper cars that can drive autonomously anywhere in the world": I mean, they still aren't? Not authoritatively. Not authoritatively enough that they aren't seeing all sorts of interventions in the few "driverless" trials they're doing in Austin. Not authoritatively enough when I have my Tesla FSD to glory. It works well enough on the fat part of the bell curve, but those edges will get you, and a vision only system means that it is extremely brittle in certain conditions and with certain failure modes, that a lidar/radar backup help _enhance_.
Moreover, Waymo has brought lidar development in-house, they're working to dramatically reduce their vehicle platform cost by reducing some redundant sensors, and they can now simulate a ground truth model of an absurd number of edge cases and odd scenarios, as well as simulate different conditions for real-world locations in parallel with their new world modeling systems.
None of which reads to me as "not going well for Waymo." Waymo completes over 450,000 fully autonomous rides per week right now. They're dramatically lowering their own barriers to new cities/geographies/conditions, and they're pushing down the cost per unit substantially. Yeah, it won't get to be as cheap as Tesla owning the entire means of production, but I'm still extremely bullish on Waymo being the frontrunner for autonomous driving for the foreseeable future.
Waymos are still making lots of errors that a human wouldn't (Stopping in middle of a road due to a puddle was a recent one https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-...) 17 years after betting on LIDAR, I think Tesla is ahead now in most respects. It's could be wrong though we will probably know by the end of this year.
Stereo based depth mapping is kind of bad, especially so if it is not IR assisted. The quality you get from Lidar out of the box is crazy good in comparison.
What you can do is train a model using both the camera and Lidar data to produce a good disparity and depth map but this just means you're using more Lidar not less.
>It all seriousness though, Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world. I think we can see where this is going. (Hint: not well for Waymo)
This feels like a highly misleading claim that might technically be true in the sense that there are less restrictions, but a reduction in restrictions doesn't imply an increase in capability.
The comment about Waymo seems to be particularly myopic. Waymo has self driving technology and is operating as a financially successful business. There is no conceivable situation where the mere existence of competition with almost the same capabilities would shake that up. Why isn't it companies like Uber, who have significantly fallen behind, that are in trouble?
>Also the article is speculative 'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100 barrier'. One day...
> Yes, silly using just cameras, I mean humans have Lidar sensors, that why they can drive, why didn't new just copy that....oh wait.
Humans don't have wheels and cannot go 70MPH. Humans also don't have rear view cameras and cannot process video feeds from 8 cameras simultaneously. The point of these machines is to be better than humans for transportation. If adding LIDAR means that these vehicles can see better than humans and avoid accidents that humans do get into, then I for one want them in my vehicle.
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...
https://youtube.com/shorts/oeHtfMFdzIY?si=cANJDT5BLfdd9ZUT
So they don't care if that breaks my phone camera? Wtf?
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.
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.
Absorbing the laser isn't necessarily any good. Very hypothetically it could lead to cataracts.
Thanks! What a headache
https://youtube.com/shorts/oeHtfMFdzIY?si=hpLBgqom_kHVPuhL
* 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.
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.
There are SLAM cameras that only select "interesting" points, which are privacy preserving. They are also very low power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Of course MicroVisiom is only claiming their LIDAR to be suitable for advanced driver assist, but ADAS encompasses a wide array of capabilities: basically everything between cruise control and robotaxis, so there's no definition of how much LIDAR you need to do the job, just however much you feel like. Tesla feels like none at all.
Of course, ambitious pricing like this is all about economies of scale - sensors that are used in production vehicles are ordered by the million, and that lowers the costs massively. When the huge orders didn't materialise, the economies of scale and low prices didn't materialise either.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161013165833/http://content.us...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/03/17/youtub...
The EU requires every new car to have Autonomos Emergency Braking. If LiDAR becomes cheaper than radar, this is a potential market of millions.
Radar is just cheaper than the number of cameras and compute, it's also not really a strict requirement.
Look at how the current cars fuck up, it's mostly navigation, context understanding, and tight manoeuvres. Lidar gives you very little in these areas
We find that the cases where lidar really helps are in gathering training data, parking, and if focused enough some long distance precision.
None of these have been instrumental in a final product; personally I suspect that many of the cars including lidar use it for data collection and edge cases more than as part of the driving perception model.
Let me guess, you heard this from Elon?
Waymo has driven tens of millions of autonomous miles with a serious injury/fatality rate dramatically lower than human drivers. The actual data shows the technology works. Tesla FSD still requires active driver supervision and is not legally or technically a robotaxi system. Comparing them as if they're at parity is wrong.
LIDAR gives direct metric depth with no inference required. Camera-only systems must infer depth from 2D images using neural networks, which introduces failure modes LIDAR doesn't have. Radar is very valuable when LIDAR and cameras give ambiguous data.
What metrics has Telsa overtaken Waymo? Deployed robotaxi revenue miles? No. Disengagement rates? No published comparable data. Safety per mile in driverless operation? No.
"people have driven coast to coast without a single intervention on FSD including parking spot to parking spot"
I find this claim very dubious. Prove it. Teslas never drive empty for a very good reason.
> phased-array
I'm not well versed into RF physics. I had the feeling that light-wave coherency in lasers had to be created at a single source (or amplified as it passes by). That's the first time I hear about phased-array lasers.
Can someone knowledgeable chime in on this?
In practice, this can be done with phase change materials (heat/cool materials to change their index), or micro ring resonators (to divert light from one wave guide to another).
The beam then self-interferes, and the resulting interference pattern (constructive/destructive depending on the direction) are used to modulate the beam orientation.
You are right that a single source is needed, though I imagine that you can also use a laser source and shine it at another "pumped" material to have it emit more coherent light.
I've been thinking about possible use-cases for this technology besides LIDAR,. Point to point laser communication could be an interesting application: satellite-to-satellite communication, or drone-to-drone in high-EMI settings (battlefield with jammers). This would make mounting laser designators on small drones a lot easier. Here you go, free startup ideas ;)
There might be something cute you can do with interference patterns but no idea about that. We do sort of similar things with astronomic observations.
For lidar you transmit a pulse from a single source and receive its reflection at multiple points. Mentioning phased array with lidar almost always means receiving.
I have been watching the sensor space for a while. Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. ALSO regulatory and mapping integration will matter. I tried to work with public datasets and it's messy. The hardware is only one part! BUT it's exciting to see multiple vendors in the space. Competition might push vendors to refine the software stack as well as the hardware. HOWEVER I'm keeping an eye on how these systems handle edge cases in bad weather. I don't think we have seen enough data yet...
Interestingly, there are already some comparatively cheap LIDAR units on the market.
In the automotive market, ideally you need a 200m+ range (or whatever the stopping distance of your vehicle is) and you need to operate in bright direct sunlight (good luck making an eye-safe laser that doesn't get washed out by the sun) and you need more than one scanning plane (for when the car goes over bumps).
On the other hand, for indoor robotics where a 10m range is enough and there's much less direct sunlight? Your local robotics stockist probably already has something <$400
Later, improved units based on the same principle became ubiquitous in Chinese robot vacuums [2]. Such LIDARs, and similarly looking more conventional time-of-flight units are sold for anywhere between $20-$200, depending on the details of the design.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Low-Cost+Laser+Dis... [2] https://github.com/kaiaai/awesome-2d-lidars/blob/main/README...
Not sure if the ld06 is a scanner like this or if it's just a line (like you'd use for a cheaper robot vac).
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
No no it's the cabal...
Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of the surroundings will be built.
Also, range is probably a factor. In a living room, you probably need something like 20m max. You car should "see" farther.
As for the range, again pretty powerful lasers are sold for sub 10SUD prices on retail. I am sure that there must be higher calibration and precision requirements as the distance increase but is it really order of magnitudes higher? 120 meters laser measurer with 1cm accuracy is 15 Euros on Temu and that thing has an LCD screen and a battery as a handheld device. How much distance do you actually need?
Glad to see someone lowering the cost of this technology, and hope to see lots of engineers using this tech as a result.
We might even see a boom in LIDAR tech as a result
The cheap RADAR devices you're talking about usually only output range and velocity, sometimes for a handful of rather large azimuth slices. That doesn't compete with LIDAR at all.
I mean it doesn't. If you actually look at it comma.ai proves that level two doesn't require lidar. Thats not the same as full speed safe autonomy.
whilst it is possible to drive vision only (assuming the right array of cameras (ie not the way tesla have done it) lidar gives you a low latency source of depth that can correct vision mistakes. Its also much less energy intensive to work out if an object is dangerous, and on a collision course.
To do that in vision, you need to work out what the object is (ie is it a shadow) then you have to triangulate it. That requires continuous camera calibration, and is all that easy. If you have a depth "prior" ie, yes its real, yes its large and yes its going to collide, its much much more simple to use vision to work out what to do.
As far as distinguishing shadows on the road, that's what radar is for. Shadows on the road as seen by the vision system don't show up on radar as something the vehicle will run into.
The SAE autonomy scale is about dividing responsibility between the driver and the assistance system. The lowest revel represents full responsibility on the driver and the highest level represents full responsibility on the system.
If there is a geofenced transportation system like the Vegas loop and the cars can drive without a human driver, then that is a level 5 system. By the way, geofencing is not an "SAE level 5" requirement. Geofencing is a tool to make it easier to reach requirements by reducing the scope of what full autonomy represents.
Note: I have not had the pleasure of riding in one yet, but from what my friend in SJ says, it’s very convenient and confidence-inspiring.
The drive was delightful and felt really safe. It handled the SF terrain, traffic and mixed traffic like trams very well.
I wouldnt trust a self driving tesla ( or any camera only systems) though!
I own a Tesla and paid about $10K for the full self driving capability a few years ago. Yeah, I would not trust a Tesla to drive me from airport to my house. There is a reason Tesla is still stuck at level 2 autonomy certification and not 3, 4 or 5.
Drivers can and do misuse adaptive cruise control systems, sometimes with fatal consequences. Memes aside, there is no strong evidence that fatal misuse occurs more frequently by owners of Tesla cars than with comparable systems from other brands.
This perception reflects the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, more commonly known as the frequency illusion. Nobody is collecting statistics for other brands, so it’s assumed the phenomenon doesn’t occur.
A similar pattern occurred with media coverage of EV fires. Except in this case, good statistics exist which prove the opposite: ICE vehicles catch fire more often than EVs.
They might not use them for autopilot, but maybe for some emergency braking stuff, when everything else failed.
It all seriousness though, Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world. I think we can see where this is going. (Hint: not well for Waymo)
Also the article is speculative 'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100 barrier'. One day...
Wait what? when did they actually enter mass production?
> I mean humans have Lidar sensors
Real time slam is actually pretty good, the hard part is reliable object detection using just vision. Tesla's forward facing cameras are effectively monocular, which means that its much much harder to get depth (its not impossible but moving objects are much more difficult to observe if you only have cameras aligned on the same plane with no real parallax)
Ultimately Musk is right, you probably don't need lidar to drive safely. but its far more simple and easier to do if you have Lidar. Its also safer. Musk said "lidars are a crutch", not because he is some sort of genius, Its obvious that SLAM only driving is the way forward since the mid 00's (of not earlier). The reason he said it is because he thought he could save money not having lidar. The problem for him is that he didn't do the research to see how far away proper machine perception is to account for the last 1% in accuracy needed to make vision only safe and reliable.
My understanding is that cyber cabs still need safety drivers to operate, is that not the case?
The Tesla FSD system has... well, sure, a few more cameras, but they're low resolution, and in inconveniently fixed locations.
My alley has an occlusion at the corner where it connects to the main road: a very tall, very ample bush that basically makes it impossible to authoritatively check oncoming traffic to my left. I, a human, can determine that if I see the light flicker even slightly as it filters through the bushes, that the path is not clear: a car is likely causing that very slight change in light. My Tesla has no clue at all that that's happening. And worse, the perpendicular camera responsible for checking cross-traffic is mounted _behind my head_ on the b-pillar, in a fixed location that means that without nosing my car _into_ the travel lane, there is literally no way for it to be sure the path is clear.
This edge case is navigated near-perfectly by Waymo, since its roof-mounted lidar can see above and beyond the bush and determine that the path is clear. And to hit back on the "Tesla is making cheaper cars that can drive autonomously anywhere in the world": I mean, they still aren't? Not authoritatively. Not authoritatively enough that they aren't seeing all sorts of interventions in the few "driverless" trials they're doing in Austin. Not authoritatively enough when I have my Tesla FSD to glory. It works well enough on the fat part of the bell curve, but those edges will get you, and a vision only system means that it is extremely brittle in certain conditions and with certain failure modes, that a lidar/radar backup help _enhance_.
Moreover, Waymo has brought lidar development in-house, they're working to dramatically reduce their vehicle platform cost by reducing some redundant sensors, and they can now simulate a ground truth model of an absurd number of edge cases and odd scenarios, as well as simulate different conditions for real-world locations in parallel with their new world modeling systems.
None of which reads to me as "not going well for Waymo." Waymo completes over 450,000 fully autonomous rides per week right now. They're dramatically lowering their own barriers to new cities/geographies/conditions, and they're pushing down the cost per unit substantially. Yeah, it won't get to be as cheap as Tesla owning the entire means of production, but I'm still extremely bullish on Waymo being the frontrunner for autonomous driving for the foreseeable future.
Do you actually own a Tesla? I do. With FSD. And let me assure you, you are very wrong.
Stereo based depth mapping is kind of bad, especially so if it is not IR assisted. The quality you get from Lidar out of the box is crazy good in comparison.
What you can do is train a model using both the camera and Lidar data to produce a good disparity and depth map but this just means you're using more Lidar not less.
>It all seriousness though, Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world. I think we can see where this is going. (Hint: not well for Waymo)
This feels like a highly misleading claim that might technically be true in the sense that there are less restrictions, but a reduction in restrictions doesn't imply an increase in capability.
The comment about Waymo seems to be particularly myopic. Waymo has self driving technology and is operating as a financially successful business. There is no conceivable situation where the mere existence of competition with almost the same capabilities would shake that up. Why isn't it companies like Uber, who have significantly fallen behind, that are in trouble?
>Also the article is speculative 'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100 barrier'. One day...
And so is the comment about Tesla cyber cabs.
Humans don't have wheels and cannot go 70MPH. Humans also don't have rear view cameras and cannot process video feeds from 8 cameras simultaneously. The point of these machines is to be better than humans for transportation. If adding LIDAR means that these vehicles can see better than humans and avoid accidents that humans do get into, then I for one want them in my vehicle.
Part of that is that humans are distractible, and their performance can be degraded in many ways, and that silicon thinks faster than meat.
But part of it is the sensor suite. Look at Waymo vs Tesla robotaxi accident rates.