Almost every single company working on self-driving cars right now uses LIDAR. Uber, Waymo, and Toyota all use it, but not Tesla. I want to go over what the two competing technologies have to offer and what we should expect from self-driving cars in the future.

Lidar VS Vision

Lidar is a method of measuring distance by shooting lasers and detecting how much time they take to return. The idea is similar to Radar but instead of radio waves, we use lasers. The technology is extremely accurate at detecting objects even up to millimeters.

Computer Vision is a field of Artificial Intelligence that trains computers to understand the visual world. This is basically reverse engineering human vision.

Tesla’s Vision

(Elon Musk at Tesla Autonomy Day)

Tesla has been heavily relying on Vision and going against LIDAR sensors. At the same time, all the other companies use Lidar and do not seem to care. Elon Musk even said:

LIDAR is a fool’s errand… and anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. — Elon Musk

If you would like to see all Elon’s thoughts on the technology choice, make sure to check his talk at Tesla Autonomy Day.

Cost

Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on Unsplash

The most apparent reason for Tesla to take a different route is the cost. The cost of placing a single LIDAR device on a car is somewhere around $10,000. Google with its Waymo project has been able to slightly decrease the number by introducing mass production. However, the cost is still rather significant.

Tesla is highly focused on costs and making sure the cars are affordable. Adding the prices of a LIDAR on top of the already expensive car is quite significant.

#computer-vision #self-driving-cars #machine-learning #lidar #tesla