In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
I didn’t think it was about the cost. I think he just likes to be contrarian because he thinks it makes him seem smart. He then needs to stick by his stupid decisions.
I’m assuming it’s a cost because it makes sense to me. His goal was to build full-self-driving (FSD) into ever car and sell the service as a subscription.
If you add another $500 in components then that’s a lot of cost (probably a lot cheaper today but this was 10 years ago). Cameras are cheap and can be spread around the car with additional non-FSD benefits where as lidar has much fewer uses when the cost is not covered. I think he used his “first-principles” argument as a justification to the engineers as another way for him to say “I don’t want to pay for lidar, make it work with the cheap cameras.”
Why else would management take off the table an obviously extremely useful safety tool?