this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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"Well you see lidar cameras are expensive. Yeah... that's the excuse. No more questions" - Tesla whenever they are asked to explain themselves
Actually the excuse Musk uses is that humans only use their eyes to drive, so that’s enough for cars as well.
Wrong on so many levels…
Holy shit did he really say that?
The "humans drive cars with just optical input" has become a weirdly tightly held misconception for Elon Musk, it's a core part of his personality where autonomy is concerned:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-tesla-doesnt-023035552.html
Humans drive with optical input, haptic feedback, and millenia of evolution to handle the decision-making and social skills required to handle a vehicle safely. No LiDAR or radar waves, sure, but I wouldn't say no if either were on offer!
The dumbest part? He developed this belief in ~2019. Lidar costs have dropped immensely since then, and are fast-dropping still. Any technologist who doesn't fucking suck knows that component prices follow that depreciation curve. So he's basically an old man shouting at a cloud at this point, it would be cheaper to fix the mistake, but it could hurt his personal branding as a guru.