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Joined 27 days ago
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Cake day: February 19th, 2025

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  • Back when Elon made avoiding LiDAR a core part of his professional personality, it was fairly expensive. But as any tech genius can tell ya, component prices drop rapidly for electronics.

    Now, radar is dirty cheap. Everything has radar. Radar was removed from Teslas. A radar sensor for my truck is $75, probably much less at scale orders.

    LiDAR sensors cost anywhere from $500-$1,500 for a vehicle of this type, near as I can tell (this type being Level 2 autonomy rather than something like a Waymo. A well-kitted out self-driving vehicle has 4 LiDAR sensors).

    Here is the LiDAR module currently used on the Mercedes S-Class, it’s $400 used: https://www.ebay.com/itm/285816360464

    It’s a hideously small cost-savings in 2025 for a luxury vehicle like a Tesla. Any rational company would’ve reversed course after the first stationary-object-strike fatality. Tesla is not a rational company.












  • I am fairly dumb. Like, I am both dumb and I am fair-handed.

    But, I am not pretentious!

    So, let’s talk about your points and the title. You said I had fairly dumb pretenses, let’s talk through those.

    1. The title of the article… there is no obvious reason to think that I think computers think like humans, certainly not from that headline. Why do you think that?
    2. There are absolutely realistic situations exactly like this, not a pretense. Don’t think Loony Tunes. Think 18 wheeler with a realistic photo of a highway depicted on the side, or a billboard with the same. The academic article where 3 PhD holding engineering types discuss the issue at length, which is linked in my article. This is accepted by peer-reviewed science and has been for years.
    3. Yes, I agree. That’s not a pretense, that’s just… a factually correct observation. You can’t train an AI to avoid optical illusions if its only sensor input is optical. That’s why the Tesla choice to skip LiDAR and remove radar is a terminal case of the stupids. They’ve invested in a dead-end sensor suite, as evidenced by their earning the title of Most Lethal Car Brand on the Road.

    This does just impact Teslas, because they do not use LiDAR. To my knowledge, they are the only popular ADAS in the American market that would be fooled by a test like this.

    Near as I can tell, you’re basically wrong point by point here.