r/SelfDrivingCars • u/walky22talky Hates driving • 9d ago
News Musk explains why Tesla Robotaxi is not running at night, and lidar is the answer
https://electrek.co/2026/10/03/tesla-robotaxi-pets-night-musk-lidar/73
u/FruitOfTheVineFruit 9d ago
You might be able to get away with this in Austin, but wait till he tries this in Seattle. In December, the sun rises at 7:50 and sets at 4:20. On a rainy day, dawn and dusk are pretty bleak. A lot of Northern Europe has similar daylight hours.
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u/left_lane_camper 9d ago
High contrast from deep shadows are also a big problem for vision-only systems, as their sensors have fairly limited dynamic range compared to the human eye (and humans can still have trouble with said shadows despite their superior DR). More northerly cities compound this problem in winter as the sun is always fairly near the horizon. You have a mixture of low light conditions and high contrast conditions that significantly stress vision-only systems.
I’m not convinced vision-only will ever be fully ready until hardware limitations on DR (and, to a lesser extent; angular resolution) is improved.
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u/HALtheWise 9d ago
Based on some quick research, it seems like the latest automotive vision cameras like the IMX490 have substantially better dynamic range than the human eye (20-24 stops instead of 10-13 stops) within a single scene, and pretty similar dynamic range once you include dark-adaptation range (30ish stops).
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u/Kuriente 9d ago
The system likely has better dynamic range than what you actually experience while driving. People like to compare it with human's total dynamic range, but that's not a fair comparison. Our total range includes our night vision, which we never truly experience while driving.
Not only is its range likely better than what we experience while driving, it has the added advantage of viewing details from multiple angles. For instance, occasionally my eyes will lose track of lane lines at night if it's raining and white scattered light of oncoming traffic obscures the details. I open the camera view and I can still see the lines on the cameras (superior dynamic range), but especially the side repeaters since they are looking away from the scattered light sources instead of at them (advantage of additional angles).
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u/Total-Buy2684 9d ago
Hmm yea isn't this why driving at dusk is the most dangerous period? Your eyes haven't adjusted to the dark.
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u/Kuriente 9d ago
Your eyes can never fully adjust while driving at night because of the abundance of white/blue light. You're always in a degraded night-vision state while driving in low light. At least at night you gain a contrast advantage to help with that vision degradation, at dusk there is no such advantage.
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u/Adj-Subs-Luku2 9d ago
In December, the sun rises at 7:50 and sets at 4:20. On a rainy day, dawn and dusk are pretty bleak. A lot of Northern Europe has similar daylight hours.
09.24 - 15.22 in Helsinki, Finland. In the Northern part of the country the Sun doesn't rise at all for 50+ days during the winter.
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u/DrJohnFZoidberg 9d ago
A lot of Northern Europe has similar daylight hours.
I actually disagree with you here.
Everything north of Milan has fewer hours of daylight in the winter than Seattle.
Milan isn't 'northern europe', if anything, it's southern Europe.
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u/FruitOfTheVineFruit 9d ago
Milan is at latitude 45.5. Seattle is 47.6.
Zurich is 47.4, so about the same as Seattle. But you're partially right - Paris is 48.9 which I don't think people would call Northern Europe.
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u/left_lane_camper 9d ago edited 9d ago
Milan is pretty close to Portland’s latitude, so it’s south of Seattle but still in the PNW’s range.
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u/LoneStarGut 9d ago
It runs till 11pm. It gets dark at 7:30pm this time of year, and in a month or two at 6pm. I suspect the real reason they don't run past 11pm is staffing, or not want to clean up pukes from when the drunks get in after the bars close. House cats are far more likely to be out at 8 or 9pm 3am.
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u/bking 9d ago
I totally buy this, but it seems very un-Musk-like to throw the car's technology under the bus. Lying to say "of course the cars can see perfectly in the dark, we just don't want people puking in them" would somehow be more on-brand.
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u/Tirztrutide 9d ago
He didn’t throw the car’s technology under any bus, that was electreks take on it… in a year when it runs 24/7 nobody will care what BS fred wrote.
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u/bking 9d ago
Musk: "The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. "
Saying that It's hard for the cars to see things at night is not his usual flavor of claiming his technology is perfect.
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u/zach978 9d ago
I’ve taken it in the dark many times, weird headline
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u/somethingofaraddad 9d ago
Elektrek is about as reliable a source of Tesla news as Sawyer merritt is, but for opposite reasons. The guy behind elektrek does nothing but post inflammatory discussions about Tesla. There is no nuance or critical thinking behind any of it, it's literally just low brow attempts at discrediting Tesla.
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u/WallStreetBoners 9d ago
Yep. And the increased bad PR from increased collisions - even not at fault would be bad this early in the rollout.
They were all over the place last night after ACL in downtown Austin… I compared against Uber, $38 for cybercab and $58+tip for uber.
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u/OligarchyAmbulance 9d ago
We went to Austin Thursday and I couldn't believe how many of them there were driving around downtown. The article says they haven't scaled since launch, and I don't know how many there were to start with, but currently it seems like there's plenty.
And same, cheaper (and way less sketchy) than an Uber, with shorter wait times.
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u/OpalVanguard 9d ago
Both of those prices are ridiculous.
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u/LoneStarGut 9d ago
Depends on the distance. Was that downtown to Cedar Park or Downtown to Hyde Park.
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u/catfromgarfield 9d ago
If Elon does cave at some point and add lidar, how easy would it be for Tesla to add it to their existing solution? Would it make a huge difference almost immediately or would it be like starting over?
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u/ChrisAlbertson 9d ago
I've worked in this field. Tesla uses an end-to-end network. It is a multi-headed network attached to the common vision backbone. Tesla coined the term "hydranet" because of the multi-heads, and the term kind of stuck. At a big-picture level, the network has a place on top for each pixel in each camera. With eight cameras, the top is wide. At the very bottom, the important things that come out are just two numbers: steering and acceleration.
Lidar data is composed of a set of points in 3 dimensions: two angles and a distance. The data is MUCH lower resolution than video and is refreshed a bit more slowly. Tesla cameras run at 37 frames per second, while Lidar is slower, but it varies a lot. A $30 Lidar on a Home vacuum cleaner is different from the $1,800 automotive Lidar.
The simplest way to add Lidar is to make the network even wider and place the 3D points into the top alongside the video (this is oversimplified but logically OK). One critical design decision is when to fuse the Lidar and video. How far do you go before you mix the data? Today, the answer seems to be "mid depth". Just after you have done some feature extraction. This means you don't try to match up Lidar and video pixels, but you also don't wait until you have reconstructed the world. In the mid range, you have just shapes and areas.
OK, this means the driving logic is not changed, but only the model of the world used to inform driving has better distance estimates.
Some parts of the model need to be retrained. This means Tesla needs data. Tesla uses a combination of real and simulated data for training. It is easy to simulate LIDAR data, but it would take them a good long time to collect a lot of real LIDAR data.
Ask me about the LIDAR debate. My opinion is the LIDAR makes my job much easier, but it might add $10,000 to the price of a car, which means you sell fewer cars.
I like Radar. Radar is cheaper and can see in fog and at night. Most cars use Radar for automatic braking at a cost of only about $150.
Bottom line: Adding Lidar or Radar does not mean a start-from-scratch rewrite of FSD and much could be left unchanged. It could be integrated into the current system. It would take a lot of work and, I think, made to fit inside the current computer HW4.
(Disclaimer: I wrote this in 5 minutes and left a lot out.)
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u/Flightwise 9d ago
But you did a good job of making a complex discussion comprehensible to people like me.
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u/jfong86 8d ago
My opinion is the LIDAR makes my job much easier, but it might add $10,000 to the price of a car,
Isn't Lidar a lot cheaper than $10,000 nowadays?
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u/ChrisAlbertson 8d ago
The retail price of a car is not just the sum of the parts cost. Lidar has to be mounted on the car, wired, and likely requires modifications to the AI computer. Engineering costs have to be spread over the number of cars built, and, of course, Tesla has to make money, so add their profit margin to the above. Lidar can be cheap. I have a few $30 units on my desk. But better Lidar that has a long range and works in bright sun is still $1,000 and up, maybe $1,800. You would need at least two of them. So close to $10K at the retail level.
On the other hand, if you are only trying to detect cats and dogs that are directly under the front bumper, then sensors used in public restrooms to detect your hands under the water faucet or paper towel dispenser could work. Those are under $5 each (plus the cost to run wire and engineering).
I think Wamo-style Lidar is $10K, and restroom hand-detection style is $10. So the cost could be anything.
But I am with Elon on this. "AI photon counting" can nearly see in the dark, and he already has the hardware for that on the car (unless there is a blind spot where a suicidal cat could hide).
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u/watchyourback9 8d ago
Rivian is putting a LiDAR sensor on their R2 next year and it's only costing them a couple hundred bucks. The cost of LiDAR has gone wayyy down. But sure, Waymo's hardware stack costs a lot.
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u/ChrisAlbertson 7d ago
Which LIDAR? Do you have a model number of a link to the spec sheet. As I wrote, I can buy LiDAR sensors for $6.63 each, and I have a pair of them right here that cost $30 each.
It is easy to find low-cost units. But is that what the "Needs LIDAR" group wants? It seems as if they don't know one from the other, so just "anything" to make them happy. Or do they want one that can detect small potholes on the road 10 or 15 seconds in advance at 65 MHP?
Wamo pays $20K for their in-house-produced 6th-gen system. You can pay anything you like. $6.63 if you like.
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u/watchyourback9 7d ago
Rivian has not publicly disclosed who their manufacturer is or specs, so we won't really know till next year. All we know is it's costing them a couple hundred dollars.
As for Waymo, the cost of individual LiDAR sensors themselves have dropped significantly. This article says that MicroVision is supposedly launching a high quality long range LiDAR sensor that will only cost $300. The costs have come down significantly.
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u/fricks_and_stones 6d ago
I think I read somewhere Rivian’s lidar uses a solid state sensor mounted on a vibrating mirror system which is simpler/cheaper than a mechanical spinning one. (Unless that’s what a solid state sensor is)
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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO 7d ago
waymo does not pay 10k for lidar, and hasn't for years. the cost for the lidar they use today is a small fraction.
the cost for lidar tech holding quality constant, has gone down massively.
the tesla strategy for fsd was bad, insofar that it wants to achieve actual self driving.2
u/ChrisAlbertson 7d ago
I've been reading any primary sources I can find. There are not many. Reddit posts do not count. Yers the cost has gone down. It used to cost Waymo well over $100K per car but now only abot $20K. Remeber the cost is not just the raw matrials but incldes all the work up to and including the salesman's commission. best and most recent quote is this: from ""The Verge". I would like to know EXACTLY which made and model LIDAR Waymo uses.
"Estimates put it at $20,000 to $25,000 per vehicle for its sixth-generation hardware. While that’s a huge decrease from the fifth-generation’s estimated cost of $100,000 to $125,000 per vehicle, it still shows how Waymo’s continued expansion could be hampered by high hardware expenses. " This is from mid 2026 article. But we still don't get a BOM.
As said, LIDAR can be very cheap, under $10. I personally own a few $30 units. But Waymo does not use these. Theirs seem to be very capable units with 300-meter daylight range, that sell for about $1,800 each. (But maybe Waymo buys at discount?)
Yes, the cost has gone down to usedr $10 but there are asl MUCH nicer $5,000 units too. Wamo uses a mid-range unit.
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u/BoofMasterQuan2 9d ago
Radar is the move, and the fact that these cars don’t have it is absolutely laughable
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u/phil_thrasher 8d ago edited 8d ago
In addition, the gray cat on gray tarmac problem can be solved with infrared. No need for lidar… but there are same-temp problems like potholes and speed bumps where nighttime contrast is probably still a problem even then, but it would be far less of a problem. Other sensors can help but sensor disagreement is another really hard problem. When lidar and cam disagree who do you trust… it’s not always the same answer. Depends on myriad factors and that’s another failure point. Hard problems are hard.
One other challenge… adding a sensor means dramatic changes to training and vehicle hardware. Those changes likely make all existing hardware basically obsolete.
If there’s a path forward that doesn’t involve doing that, it’s always the more desirable path forward.
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u/MalarkeyMcGee 9d ago
Great question. The thing they would be missing would be all the historical data. They would have 0 miles with lidar point clouds. That means training a new perception model to integrate the new signal. This isn’t trivial but is doable.
The real gap would be getting vehicles out with the new sensor suite and collecting data. They could do it presumably faster than most competitors, but it would take time for sure. I dunno how long exactly, but I would guess something like months to a year or more to get to parity.
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u/GuildCalamitousNtent 9d ago
Well not zero. They have tons of test cars with lidar, but yeah, nothing like Waymo, or even quite a few of the smaller ones.
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u/HVT2994 9d ago
So if you know this is the case please share how you know so well, Tesla only drives LiDAR cameras on towers on top of the cars to geofence the service areas of the service area for Robotaxi’s.
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u/HairpinGosu 9d ago
They do have Teslas with LiDAR on the road. Just not the customer vehicles.
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u/psilty 9d ago
Those cars with it mounted very high up have not been optimized for how lidar would be deployed in a production vehicle. Remember how long it took for Cybertruck to get FSD presumably because camera positioning was too different from existing models.
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u/BGaf 9d ago
Can you tell me any more about this? I have never heard that before
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u/JrbWheaton 9d ago
They mount a giant LiDAR on the roof. It’s for “ground truth mapping” or something like that
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u/drillbit56 9d ago
Every time you change hardware versions or software in such a system you are really starting over.
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u/andresopeth 9d ago
If they add lidar to a fleet of cybercabs that are running during the day, would that do it? Lidar doesn't care about luminosity, right?
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u/bking 9d ago edited 9d ago
Out of the box, lidar plainly says "a surface is x meters away from me" for every point that it measures. Tesla is already doing depth estimation and semantic segmentation (here's object 1, here's object 2, etc) from the cameras, so in theory, they could add a function to compare those numbers and see if they're relatively close. If the numbers disagree, they'd have to pick a winner.
This gets a little spicier in the dark and in lens-flare situations where cameras can't see shit, and lidar is still 100% functional. That logic would have to understand the situation and lean on one sensor over another. "It's dark out, but the Lidar sees a pedestrian over there. Better trust it and not hit the pedestrian"
Super simplified: it wouldn't be plug and play, but it wouldn't be like their entire stack is re-written. They could start collecting and comparing the numbers as soon as lidar units deploy and then refine the decision machine as data rolls in. Once the sensor-fusion decision machine is more accurate than the current hardware, they flip a switch to include the lidar data in the depth perception and semantic segmentation.
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u/mcot2222 9d ago
It’s likely they already use lidar at least on some test vehicles. Even if just for benchmarking and calibration of the vision only stack. They are not dumb.
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u/bking 9d ago
They absolutely do. I live near Palo Alto and see them roaming around in little gangs with lidar all the time.
Those test vehicles don't do any good for regular Teslas relying on cameras in the dark, though. From the OP:
"Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”
Lidar does not care what color the kitten is.
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u/DrJohnFZoidberg 9d ago
Given his behavior on other fronts, I'm not sure that musk wants to avoid the kittens
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u/ocmaddog 9d ago
I mean the entire premise has been leveraging the large fleet, so probably like starting over. That said, if they shipped lidar Ys tomorrow they’d have a pretty big fleet pretty quickly.
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u/bobi2393 9d ago
The 2016 historical “premise” was a large fleet of consumer cars earning money for Tesla owners through the “Tesla Network” while they slept. That seems like it’s more or less been abandoned for current and previous consumer models.
But for their driverless Robotaxi fleet, they’re already practically starting over, retrofitting new Model Ys and building new Cybercabs. Their existing consumer cars aren’t in need of lidar, since they offer only level 2 features that require supervision.
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u/SocialSuicideSquad 9d ago
They would pretty much have to start over.
Their hardware and software stack can't just attach a lidar.
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u/ys2020 9d ago
Exactly. Their trained models only have visual data. Lidar would require retraining
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u/nordernland 9d ago
Not just retraining, their onboard computer needs more processing power to ingest the lidar data.
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u/account_for_norm 9d ago
That would be like accepting that you lied to thousands of customers about fsd, by charging them 10k in hardware - so a huge lawsuit. Which tesla is close to having when they accepted hw3 cant do fsd.
This whole gimmicks of robotaxi and all is to buy time to get fat done one cameras.
As for practical things, they can fix lidar, and even if they are starting at 0 for the new sensor, they have a lot on algorithms for navigation, which dont change only the location of objects chaged. They can get it done fast.
But again that will only be available on new cars. And it will be expensive. Elons been braggin that lidars are expensive, and 'only i can make fsd at 35k', so he has accept defeat.
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u/OpalVanguard 9d ago
What he should have been doing is reducing the cost of LiDAR by applying some of that Tesla technology magic to it but he decided to be a fuckin idiot instead. Many such cases.
Instead the Chinese manufacturers lowered the cost of LiDAR and they’ll probably win the autonomy race as a result.
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u/account_for_norm 9d ago
They already have won it.
Its only because of tariffs that chinese cars are not sold in US. That and the brand name of Tesla and Elon, which will erode slowly but surely.
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u/ancientPrintr 9d ago
Chinese cars are available in many countries other than the US. Do the people in those countries agree that Chinese autonomy has won over Tesla fsd?
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u/Moist-Army1707 9d ago
I live in Australia and Tesla is still the only fsd available here
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u/OpalVanguard 9d ago
They haven’t won a damn thing but they’re positioning themselves to.
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u/ArtieLange 9d ago
Anyone who’s driven both Teslas and Chinese EVs will attest the Chinese cars are good and cheap. But no where need as refined as teslas systems.
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u/vibe_assassin 9d ago
The whole “buy a Tesla and it’ll be a taxi at night while you’re sleeping” bs from Elon won’t really work if the cars are required to have a giant rack on top lol
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u/gc3 9d ago
It won't work anyway. People will vomit in your taxi. So if your taxi is making money while you are sleeping you will be servicing it while you are awake. Also the price will get very low
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u/WeldAE 9d ago
Everyone keeps saying LIDAR is cheap but most of these people have never built a single consumer hardware product in their life. I've not built a car, but I do build things at consumer scale and adding LIDAR is expensive. Everyone keeps talking about $300 lidar units like they would work but so far these have been unworkable for what Tesla would need. Today at 1m+ unit scale it's still probably closer to $1000 per unit. Then you have to redesign the front end of 6x platforms; Model 3, Model Y, CyberTruck, CyberCab, Roadster and Semi. That's going to be hundreds of millions just in the design and production line changes. Then you need a completely new wiring harnesses and compute board and compute chip.
Then there is the matter that you have a $16B contract to produce AI5 chips that won't work with Lidar. AI5 is reported to have 2500 TOPS, but it's highly optimized for FSD workflow so take those numbers with a big pile of salt. Waymo has a 1000 TOP custom ASIC just for camera and Lidar processing and fusion and then a ton more compute behind that. It's highly unlikely that even AI5 could fuse the all the cameras and lidar data well enough to beat HW4 performance. Not to mention the obvious problem of there being no where to plug it into existing design that I'm sure they already have completed. So this would be an AI6 level change which is 3-5 years in the future. Would probably want to do what Waymo did and split the processing out so you can pick and choose when you use Lidar as not all applications need it even if you think cars do.
So I don't know...Lets just say $30B when your all done with it. It's the downside of having a consumer car company you're leveraging for AVs. On one hand you get $32k per unit AVs. On the other hand you can't just throw hardware at things.
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u/TurnoverSuperb9023 9d ago
He never will. If not due to ego, the due to the legal / financial impact. They would have to retrofit millions of vehicles, or offer a trade-in incentive that was generous enough to avoid class-action lawsuits. Yes, he has talked about retorfit mini-factories, but we’ve seen no progress on that because once you they looked at the true cost involved, it’s didn’t math.
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u/automatic__jack 9d ago
They can’t do sensor fusion so it’s a re-design from ground up. He is a terrible engineer.
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u/lee1026 9d ago
Assuming they have been prepping for it behind the scenes, it wouldn’t be lidar. It would be the high def radar.
On model S/X, they have installed a high def radar. And awkwardly, it isn’t being used for FSD.
But if they have been prepping, they would have been recording the data from the radar along side the camera and human input data. Then it is a straightforward process of retraining the NN with the radar+camera data to predict the human inputs.
And the cybercabs would need that radar, which they presumably know how to use because they have been installing it for years.
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u/jrherita 9d ago
Starting over -- the AI models would need to be re-trained with data that doesn't exist yet (no Lidar captures).
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u/spicy_indian Hates driving 8d ago
Would it make a huge difference almost immediately or would it be like starting over?
As someone who works in the field, once the hardware exists, it could probably take less than six months to add depth info from LiDAR to FSD. The vision system will still do the heavy lifting, but could use information from the LiDAR to improve perception for uncertain regions where it turns pixels into the internal representation. Depending on the LiDAR, you could also add other useful information, like velocity from a FMCW approach, and multi-return information.
The harder part would be adding LiDAR hardware.
- You would need to pick a laser frequency, which sets you down a path of different lithography processes. Tesla would probably need to buy patents.
- Then you need a fab with capacity for that process, which is hard especially if you want to make a unit for every vehicle you plan to sell FSD with. Currently camera sensor production scales much better than LiDAR production.
- Then you need a dedicated ASIC to process the raw output of the LiDAR sensor.
- Then you need to extra hardware to your compute, probably a 1000-BASET1 interface.
It's non-trivial, and assuming they start from scratch and don't buy the IP from someone, even with the incredible pace that Elon's other companies can rev silicon, would take a couple years.
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u/snkscore 9d ago
What happened to all his talk about "Direct photon counting" making for his cars having incredible night vision?
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u/DrJohnFZoidberg 9d ago
i mean, photon counting is what every digital camera has done since kodak invented them
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u/Right-Video6463 9d ago
no, most sensors are analog devices that accumulates a current proportional with the amount of light hitting the photosites. They cannot count photons directly.
There are photon counting sensors available on the market for example SPAD, they are digital devices that outputs a signal every time a photon is received by the pixels, almost like a geiger counter. They are starting to be utilized for special purposes like very light sensitive cameras, X-ray and CT.
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u/JuculianD 9d ago
Yes but that's avalanche photo diodes and not really useful for more light. That's Elon musk marketing bullshit anyway I guess
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u/psilty 9d ago
Teslas are not using those special purpose sensors, they’re using consumer RGB CMOS sensors and playing a semantics game.
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9d ago
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u/jackiebrown1978a 9d ago
It's electrik. It's not even worth giving it a click
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u/Express_Objective615 9d ago edited 8d ago
It should have said "and Fred says lidar is the answer".
Edit: ok I held my nose and read the article. The title should be modified to "and Fred says lidar and radar are the answer".→ More replies (2)5
u/_badwithcomputer 8d ago edited 8d ago
It is a hit piece article.
Waymo with its amazing Lidar actually killed a cat, so Musk decided to make sure the vision AI was properly trained to prevent that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/waymo-kit-kat-san-francisco.htmlYou can see here the amount of raw data processing the cameras are doing to actually see at night
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2053181971644416080?s=20Edit, it also looks like Electrek used a fake AI generated LIDAR cat image in the article lol
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u/Ragnarok-9999 8d ago
People with cataract usually avoid driving in nights. So, Cybercab is like old man with cataract ?
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u/eldoogy 7d ago edited 7d ago
I love all the voices here trying to suggest you could drive a car with just lidar when the RGB cameras are blinded… sorry. You just can’t. Waymo can’t, and no one could.
Driving is not just a game of obstacle avoidance. There are signs. Lane markings. Without awareness of those you would make critical driving errors almost immediately, even with secondary sensors such as radar or lidar. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a bill of goods.
Also, If you watched a video of teslas that are blinded by the sun you’d know that they still very much see, just not as well as they would otherwise. But of course that’s a problem for any autonomous vehicle on the road, as it is for people. In face, accidents happen frequently due to drivers blinded by the sun (look it up!)
In other words, I’m sorry but this scenario isn’t remotely the lidar smoking gun some of you Tesla haters on this thread have been looking for.
To FSD drivers describing how FSD complains to you: yes. It doesn’t see as well, therefore it cannot drive as well as it would normally. That’s why they warn you! For the vast majority of relevant concerns, lidar wouldn’t matter because there are fallback cameras that see very clearly up ahead (such as the bumper camera which isn’t as affected by the sun up ahead given its low mounted position). So its vision up ahead is affected, but not to the degree that it’s going to crash into something.
I am arguing that this problem will exist on all of these systems because none of them can actually drive with just radar or lidar.
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u/doakills 5d ago
This. Worse part is these clowns replying to this fred Lambert bs thread also fail to realize that lidar ALSO suffers from the same situation that was mentioned regarding degradation of visual at night, aka the grey dog, on grey asphalt, in pitch black situation. Nothing changes this, must of been same reason why Waymos lidar hit and killed that dog recently.
The lack of understanding across media and socials on this stuff is astonishing to me.
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u/esteemedSub 4d ago
"There are signs. Lane markings. " Native color LIDAR can read signs, brake lights, lane markings, etc. It just became commercially available this year from one U.S. company and one Chinese company. So, actually you could drive a car with just LIDAR.
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u/eldoogy 4d ago
Interesting, hadn't heard of that. You mean like Ouster and such? Sounds like very cool tech, but that is brand new, right? Meaning, it wasn't available when Tesla or Waymo were architecting their solution.
Certainly they should consider such solutions, and I think the way to determine that is to run a bunch of miles with vehicles that have the current camera-based solution, coupled with something like this Ouster or whatever, and compare the accuracy of the data.
Ultimately, the question is how frequently does it see something the RGB cameras miss, how significant that something is to driving safety, and of course, how much incremental cost these sensors introduce over the current camera-only setup.
Living in the SF Bay Area, I gotta tell you I think I've seen Tesla test vehicles that seem to be doing exactly that... :-)
In other news, check out this reddit thread. I thought this was a pretty good demonstration of Elon's "photon counting" claims -- the car reacts to that deer quite a while before it becomes visible in the video, and also before the driver noticed it. Not saying it's as good as lidar, but it can clearly extract details that aren't visible to the eye (and act on them in a timely manner), and that very well may be good enough.
Time will tell.
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u/eduardo929292 9d ago edited 9d ago
Waymo’s have been out of service for 2 days in Dallas because its mildly rainy
Teslas are working normally
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u/watchyourback9 8d ago
But it shut down at night during those events, and literally every other single night it shuts down due to visibility issues. I'd say the system that can't operate at night is far less capable than the one that can't handle severe weather storms - and also, it's likely Waymo is just being extra cautious here to avoid lawsuits.
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u/Seventy4K 9d ago
Cant Teslas just use their headlights?
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u/CDpov 9d ago
Waymo has shown several examples of their camera images not outputting enough information for the prediction and planning model to make a good decision, where the lidar lit up the scene perfectly. Lidar goes in all directions, where headlights do not.
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u/NoaLink 9d ago
Yep. I'm surprised the gray cat thing is even a problem given that these cars put out quite a bit of light.
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u/ChunkyThePotato 9d ago
It's not a "problem" in the sense that it doesn't work at all. My car on FSD 13 over a year ago avoided a black cat at night that I didn't even see. He likely means that they're trying to get the reliability up to extremely high levels, or just validate that it is already at extremely high levels.
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u/PenelopeJude 9d ago
Saw one really confused when a chain was blocking the entrance to the parking lot. It was going backwards and forwards over and over again. Almost broke through the chain, but finally backed up and fully parked…not sure if it ever left. I had to move on. I do have video of it though.
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u/chickenAd0b0 9d ago
gonna get downvoted but waymo equiped with 500 lidars had few incidents killing animals:
Austin family seeks answers after Waymo robotaxi kills beloved cat
Waymo hits dog in S.F. weeks after killing Mission bodega cat
Waymo Was Thriving in San Francisco. Then One of Its Driverless Cars Killed a Cat. - The New York Times
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u/Stock-Platypus6146 9d ago
LiDAR is Not the saint in detection. I worked for years with lidar systems and their problems are many.
First lidar is light yes at a specific frequency but this does not mean that it only sees that. In specific morning or lense flare situations lidar also can easily be blended.
Second lidar resolution is much less than camera resolution. That means practically a cat would be 3 or 4 dots best. But these 3 or 4 dots could also be noise.
Three lidar is an active system. That means it sends something and then it receives the reflection. This is fine if you are one sender. If every car used lidar and most probably more than one to overcome blending situations see first, they start to distort each other. Yes with frequency changes and algorithms this is somehow optimized but if you have multiple lidars eg on a crossroad shooting at each other believe me the resolution and accuracy drops drastically.
Fourth cameras have not also higher resolution they have more data per pixel. Color is extremely important to be able to do object separation and preventing wrong classification.
Fifth there is a solution that cameras can see more, it is called ir. Technically all cameras can see ir. They add filters to prevent them from seeing it because it looks wrong. If you look at the Mercedes cameras that are working with visible light filter and explicitly ir, they can see the cat much better than lidar would.
The “lidar image” you see in the article is not nearly accurate. It is a filter to make it look dotted so it seems to look like lidar. In reality lidar is much much worse.
See attached image.
So yes there are solutions necessary. I mean better solutions than human eyes who also can’t see a cat in the dark. But as an engineer with a lot of lidar experience, I can tell you lidar is not the solution. See Waymo who has lidar and still kill cats.
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u/Express_Objective615 9d ago
Get out of here with your facts and reality. No one wants to hear it. /s
But it's so cheap. Even if it's useless, it's so cheap? 🤷♂️
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u/bobi2393 9d ago
Robotaxis should be able to offer longer service on clearer nights with full moons than during new moons, which could really benefit werewolves.
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u/Seaker42 9d ago
I'm guessing this was taken out of context. I use FSD for 99% of my driving and I usually do 30 miles on rural roads every night. I've had FSD stop or slow for every animal I've seen, and almost every time FSD saw the animals before I did - even small dark animals like raccoons, black pigs, and dark cats.
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u/AgeSafe3673 9d ago
Elon would have to admit he was wrong though. He said multiple times lidar wasnt needed. Camera only. Kind of how he said a flame trench wasn't needed for starship. At least there it was so obvious after the first launch that it was, he folded.
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u/Flyward_Aerospace 8d ago
People are treating the sun glare replies and the night replies as the same failure and they're kind of opposites. Washout is a dynamic range problem, too many photons in one part of the frame and not enough in another. A cat at night is a sensitivity problem, not enough photons anywhere. The only real knob for the second one is exposure time, and spending it buys you motion blur and a lower effective frame rate, so detection latency gets worse exactly where stopping distance matters. That's sensor physics, not something more training data reaches. Which is why I read the night restriction as an envelope call rather than a lidar argument.
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u/anikazai 8d ago
Musk fan girls will not like this. Quick we need to cover this up, market it more like too much crime in the evening ? or maybe too many drunk people requesting rides late nights.
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u/Zieprus_ 8d ago
What a moron, and yet people hold him up as some genius. All he does is spit out word salads that are not even coherent.
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u/lotofry 7d ago
I use fsd at night regularly. Hasn’t been an issue a single time. Also he definitely didn’t say that
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u/Homer4598 7d ago
Wow, an automated car that can’t drive at night. With any luck, Elon will invent a plane that can’t fly in the rain.
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u/Mundane_Analyst9994 7d ago
That man sure is an idiot. You sure vision only is the way to go still Elon?
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u/TrA-Sypher 7d ago
Have these people even heard of headlights? The robotaxis have headlights too...
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u/greenpowerman99 6d ago
That’s quite a disadvantage if you can’t use it when it’s dark. You can understand why every other self driving system uses Lidar as well as cameras.
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u/trail34 9d ago
The aperture of the low cost lenses they picked is too small. Vision-only isn’t a problem if you have super-human low light capabilities as some other systems have.
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u/OpalVanguard 9d ago
The size of the sensors are smaller than pretty much any modern cell phone main camera too.
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u/gc3 9d ago
Lidar gives you very precise range estimation although it loses color information. It also has shadows: glass windows, reflections under ground (I have seen trees under the road) , rain (looks like particles in the air) but there are a lot fewer aberrant conditions to fix up with intelligence than in cameras. In fact compensating for heavy rain is a cheap noise filter
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u/bking 9d ago
Lidar can choose which return it's looking at. In the case of precipitation, you can specify only taking the last returns of a given point, and then it ignores anything that's "too close" to the sensor. Same for many reflections. It's like a noise filter with depth understanding.
People think that rain or fog bone those systems, but it's literally one setting in the visualizer to make it disappear.
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u/Cunninghams_right 9d ago edited 9d ago
And most lidar-first systems can add cameras as a secondarylidar-using systems add cameras as a sensor because they're cheap. The only real argument for a camera-only system is BOM cost for mass production.edit: clarity
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u/dfreshness14 9d ago
He picked the smallest cutest inconsequential animal. In reality, it’s your kid it’s running over in the dark.
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u/Ok-Zookeepergame4391 9d ago
Dead by a thousand edge cases. Thats why Waymo works while FSD is years behind
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u/somethingofaraddad 9d ago
Ironically, waymo was out of service due to weather when I was in Texas recently while rovotaxi was running fine. Sorry that reality doesn't always align with your sad hopes and dreams.
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u/airfield20 9d ago
Personally I believe self driving cars should have lidar, especially with how cheap they've gotten. But this specific problem could be solved with adding an additional wavelength to the vehicle headlights that the cameras are sensitive to and increasing exposure.
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u/CommunismDoesntWork 9d ago
As a computer vision engineer, imaging systems are almost universally mismanaged in this industry. I had to fight management tooth and nail to get and maintain responsibility of the cameras, lenses and lights because they think the hardware team should own the hardware. But the hardware team isn't responsible for accuracy of the system and don't have to deal with the images every single day like the computer vision team does. Image quality is the foundation of any computer vision system and sets a hard ceiling on capability of the system.
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u/airfield20 9d ago
I've been on both ends of the spectrum, initially dealing with poor image quality given from the hardware team and then later taking on the responsibility of designing the camera systems. Getting good image quality at a low enough latency for you to drive at higher speeds safely is actually pretty difficult. Especially when your form factor requires you to use a high distortion lense for FOV. For me the limitation has never been the resolution of the sensor I have access to but rather the bandwidth needed to get the image frames into the computer at low latency.
You can increase the cost and size of the computer to get more data lanes for cameras, but that gets expensive quickly and adding more than one computer introduces timing and synch issues. Obviously encoding and decoding drastically increases latency, but completely solves the throughput problem. Maybe Tesla custom silicon already solved this issue
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u/gc3 9d ago
Still glare has always been an issue. It seems like HDR cameras should be used but there are too many people involved.... in the past the camera's HDR qualities were not accessible from the output so you didn't know the base exposure for relative offsets between frames of video so trying to reconstruct a drive from car video involved unpredictable color changes. I don't do this now but it seems like perhaps now you can get a more detailed stream.
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u/weelamb 9d ago
Maybe add some sensors next to the cameras that measure the reflections too. Could even make the light coherent at 1550 nm and time the return. Idk, might be onto something here 🤔
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u/CesiumSalami 9d ago
Workshopping names here…. Beam-Assisted Laser Localization System? BALLS? I think that would have traction at Tesla.
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u/Rudacris 9d ago
The issue is they’ve sold millions of cars with the promise they can do it without. They are in too deep. The real cost of adding LiDAR is the cost of refunds or lawsuits on years of fsd payments
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u/bobi2393 9d ago
Visible light frequencies on vehicles are restricted by both state and federal laws. Tesla’s CMOS camera sensors can “see” from near-ultraviolet to infrared light, with autoexposure tech, and more active lighting could help with low-contrast, low-light conditions, but carmakers could still run into problems with invisible lights. Ultraviolet lights cause different materials to fluoresce, which could be distracting/obstructing to drivers, and high power IR can leak into visible red, which trips up against existing statutes. (Maybe that’s solvable with filters).
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u/gc3 9d ago
So you are saying that these lights would cause problems, not the cameras. This is also why the LIDAR has to use the frequency it does: theoretically LIDAR could be at different frequencies. In space based satellite imaging, they can use the difference between visible light and infrared light images to detect where vegetation is.
If you could have visible light lidar and infrared light lidar you could analyze the results to detect the difference between wood and metal and leaves if you wanted to reconstruct the car route: but you can't use passive visible light and active infrared light. Visible light lidar is forbidden as it might blind a driver temporarily
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u/IndoorSurvivalist 9d ago
My tesla does OK at night but it certainly does phantom brake way more often.
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u/RottenBananaCore 9d ago
I hate that my Tesla doesn’t have real backup sensors. The cameras are not as good.
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u/VirtualPercentage737 9d ago
Electrical engineer here...
"Cameras need light and contrast. Lidar and radar don’t"
Lidar generates light in a beam and thus it "needs light". A car with headlights is essentially the same thing but broader. Lidar can use frequencies people cannot see and thus might be better in scenarios where headlights are not allowed. You can do the same thing with IR lights for most cameras.
We use Lidar to get fine tuned details of cities and small objects. To determine "hey, there is a cat in the road" does not really require Lidar. It is a yes or no question. If you wanted to go home and 3D print the thing, it would be a great solution.
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u/Express_Objective615 8d ago
Musk just made things worse by opening his mouth at all. How many people even knew or really cared that it stopped at 10pm? By even mentioning this and the cats, pets or whatever, he brought attention to it. They could have just said, after further testing, we extended it by an hour. Done. Or even better, say absolutely nothing and extend it.
It was better that he wasn't at the Robotaxi launch event. He just invites controversy.
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u/CDpov 8d ago
I agree. Now everybody knows FSD has a problem in darkness that the Tesla staff is aware of. This won't help them in court if they have a nighttime incident.
Investors should be asking Musk on earnings calls about why he hasn't solved night driving yet, after so many years of saying it's solved.
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u/Express_Objective615 8d ago
However you want to read it. I'm saying don't read much into what Musk says. My car has been avoiding lots of animals after dark up in the windy dark roads where I live, for the past two years. So from my experience FSD has had no problems detecting animals in the dark, at all.
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u/dpcthpost 9d ago
Night? Mine also won’t run on FSD in hard rain. It’s a HW 3 model so that probably has something to do with it , but I also have a Radar as well as ultrasonic sensors they turned off. The adaptive cruise control was much better using radar instead of “Tesla vision”. Elon seems to thrive on doubling down on bad decisions
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u/Express_Objective615 9d ago
Hw4 has worked great for me in rain so hard I probably wouldn't drive at all if it was much harder.
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u/_ii_ 9d ago
More sensors = more data, no one is denying that. But i don’t find the article’s argument convincing. It says LiDar is active sensor while camera is passive, and make it sounds like it’s a solved problem with active sensor. Headlights shoot out light beams that bounce off objects too. Adding LiDar shifts the problem, it may shift it in a way that’s easier to solve, i don’t know. But just say having LiDar solves pets at night problem is not convincing.
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u/JimmyGiraffolo 9d ago
Headlights shoot out photons, but that doesn't make cameras an active sensor. Lidar is an active sensor because it both shoots and receives the photons, measuring the time they take to return. That (and being able to measure return intensity, etc) is what makes lidar an active sensor.
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u/drumboy206 9d ago
Didn’t a Waymo run over a cat in San Francisco last year? Why didn’t their 5 lidars prevent that from happening?
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u/thnk_more 9d ago
I believe the cat ran under the car from the side, then got run over.
Similar thing happened to me when I was a new driver. Stupid beagle got loose and ran out of its yard from the side barking at my car. Ran his dumb ass head right into the side of my car.
Nothing I could do. Not even a second to react.
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u/dollfaceashley 8d ago
Light pollution on the road drops significantly as it gets later in the night. There’s a reason why it’s not running 24/7
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u/ace-treadmore 8d ago
I’m wondering if people can think for themselves rather than just reposting things they read online.
Somehow robotaxis running to 10PM already means they can’t run after dark. Where is this existing fleet, above the article circle?
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u/MentalRental 7d ago
When Tesla launched Robotaxi in Austin in June 2025, the app took ride requests from 6 AM to midnight. Fifteen months later, the service closes an hour earlier than it did on day one.
6am to midnight? That's 19 hours so two 8-hour shifts with a half hour lunch break for each shift. Upping the lunch break to an hour per shift means you get a
service closes an hour earlier than it did on day one.
Sounds like these robotaxis are still far from autonomous and are being remote controlled by humans but the economics currently don't make sense for hiring a third overnight shift especially since they have trouble seeing things as soon as it gets dark.
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u/Uglie 9d ago
I drive in the mornings to work and there’s a stretch of road that is really shinny and with the sun coming up and the angle of the road, FSD freaks out every time. It’s not just night time.