Tesla bought over $2M worth of Lidar from Luminar (theverge.com)

Why would they not simply use lidar in the cars themselves?

100% revenue != valuation of company if that's what you're implying.

Not even remotely close.

This is clearly R&D just to validate the images from their vision approach.

enough for one engineer's test bench, more like

They produced 1.85 million vehicles in 2023.

So a $2 million order would work out to $1.08 per car.

Or if Lidar hardware for one car cost about $500, then $2 million is not quite enough for one day's worth of manufacturing output.

At $1000 a piece which is the rumored price ; is around 2,000 units if they got a volume discount it would be 4,000 units

Yes, 10 years after the initial announcement, Tesla has just now got around to ordering some LIDARs for capturing ground-truth training data. They then went out of their way to get the one LIDAR made to look palatable to end customers instead of the superior industrial ones everyone puts 8 of on their recording cars.

Not very credible.

And they've been doing this for several years already, with Luminar hardware mounted on engineering vehicles with manufacturer plates.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-y-luminar-lid...

Why would they not simply use lidar in the cars themselves?

Besides, I imagine many of the issues with vision (e.g. adverse weather) could not be addressed with training-time data.

If you had multiple cameras for stereoscopic vision. Couldn't you figure out the depth data vision only without lidar? I'm sure there was a good reason Tesla didn't go with a stereoscopic camera system (at least front facing) from the get-go.. they already have 3 cameras up there with 3 FOVs. Could add another camera there in a stereo setup for depth data.

As far as I know Musk and Tesla's position on this hasn't changed. They use Lidar for validation during R&D, they don't ship it on production vehicles.

That must clearly be true, but I'd like cars to driver better than humans and make use of all the tech that we can't. Academically vision only is an interesting feat, and as a backup mode for when sensors fail it makes sense to pursue vision only operation, but it seems to me that having more sensors should be superior.

It's an interesting argument, I'm sure there are lots of reasons why it's a bad argument, but the one I think about is that depth perception isn't actually fully understood, mostly, but not fully, and, an important system that is always overlooked in that argument is that the vestibular system (among others) is also involved in depth perception. You can say binocular vision is just LIDAR, but that's not the whole story.

That was always a stupid argument because if you replicate how humans do it, you're going to replicate our failure modes too. Things like being crappy at night driving, subject to optical illusions, etc.

I can assure you that a human with LIDAR and RADAR built in would get around even better than without.

The left hates Elon.