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Hell every iphone has lidar and the pro models have two lidar cameras. The tech is not very expensive, epecially not for a $80,000 car.
Around the time Elon made the claim Lidar for automotive purposes was quite expensive. That additional cost would make the self driving product a lot less desirable. Up selling cruise control into “self driving” earned them a lot of money.
Funnily enough all other aspects where Tesla has taken the expensive option the cult retail investors would claim it was brilliant decisions because economy of scale would kick in and make it cheaper in the long run.
Lidar was obviously exempt from any such scale and future tech improvements, because reasons.
My partner’s econobox has lidar for its cruise control, but Tesla can’t seem to figure out how to make it work.
It could be very expensive for Tesla to start using Lidar, because they’ve sold a lot of cars with the promise that they have the hardware for self driving. Retrofitting a million cars would not only cost a lot in terms of gear and work, but it would put additional stress on an already poor service network.
They have painted themselves into a corner. All because leadership thought self driving was a more or less solved problem almost a decade ago.
They decided radar was superfluous at one point during the pandemic. By sheer coincidence by the time supply chains were getting fucked. Hitting delivery targets were more important than safety.
They did do that. It can be pretty difficult to make sense of conflicting data like that. Tesla may have decided to not bother to solve such issues and hope less sensor data makes it easier to interpret.
This is what Elon had to say about Tesla’s sophisticated radar data interpretation capabilities in 2016:
I guess the ability to see around cars in front of you got lost in some software update along the line. Otherwise removing radar necessarily meant reducing the safety of the system, or Elon lied in 2016.
It depends on what you want to do with the sensors. Somewhat accurately mapping what’s immediately in front of the car to slightly improve speed matching and false positive/negative rates for emergency breaking comes at a cheaper price than the capability to fully map the surroundings fast and accurately enough for a computer to make correct decisions.