this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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You're mischaracterizing their point. Nobody is saying take the exact piece of equipment, put it in the vehicle and PRESTO. That'd be like asking why the vacuum battery can't power the car. Because duh.
The point is if such a novelty, inconsequential item that doesn't have any kind of life safety requirements can employ a class of technology that would prevent adverse effects, why the fuck doesn't the vehicle? This is a design flaw of Teslas, pure and simple.
But they do, there are literally cars out there with lidar sensors.
The question was why can't I have a lidar sensor on my car if my $150 vacuum has one. The lidar sensor for a car is more than $150.
You don't have one because there are expensive at that size and update frequency. Sensors that are capable of outdoor mapping at high speed cost the price of a small car.
The manufacturers suspect and probably rightfully so that people don't want to pay an extra 10 - 30 grand for an array of sensors.
The technology readily exists rober had one in his video that he used to scan a roller coaster. It's not some conspiracy that you don't have it on cars and it's not like it's not capable of being done because waymo does it all the time.
There's a reason why waymo doesn't use smaller sensors they use the minimum of what works well. Which is expensive, which people looking at a mid-range car don't want to take on the extra cost, hence it's not available
Decent LIDAR sensors have gotten a lot cheaper in the last 5 years or so, here's one that is used in commercial self-driving taxis: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/X01-36020021-Nev-Auto-Parts-for_1601252480285.html
So that one sensor is $700. Waymo has 4 LIDAR sensors (all of which are physically larger and I would imagine fancier than the Alibaba ones, but that's speculation), so just in the scanner hardware itself you're looking at $2,800. Plus the computer to run it, plus the 6 radar receivers, and 13 cameras, I could absolutely see the price for the end user to be around $10k worth of sensors.
But to be clear, I don't think camera only systems are viable or safe. They should at minimum be forced to use radar in combination with their cameras. In fact I actually trust radar more than lidar because it's much less susceptible to heavy snow or rain.