I thought Teslas had radar for awhile though and they took it out?

They decided radar was superfluous at one point during the pandemic. By sheer coincidence by the time supply chains were getting fucked. Hitting delivery targets were more important than safety.

And they could have added radar and sonar to assist the cameras at least. The radar couldn’t give 3d data, but it could say “yo bro that’s a solid object, not the skyline” at least.

They did do that. It can be pretty difficult to make sense of conflicting data like that. Tesla may have decided to not bother to solve such issues and hope less sensor data makes it easier to interpret.

This is what Elon had to say about Tesla’s sophisticated radar data interpretation capabilities in 2016:

In fact, an additional level of sophistication – we are confident that we can use the radar to look beyond the car in front of you by bouncing the radar signal off the road and around the car. We are able to process that echo by using the unique signature of each radar pulse as well as the time of flight of the photon to determine  that what we are seeing is in fact an echo in front of the car that’s in front of you. So even if there’s something that was obscured directly both in vision and radar, we can use the bounce effect of the radar to look in front of that car and still brake.

It takes things to another level of safety.

I guess the ability to see around cars in front of you got lost in some software update along the line. Otherwise removing radar necessarily meant reducing the safety of the system, or Elon lied in 2016.

Was lidar that expensive in a car though? Because Infiniti started adding it in 2014 for the cruise control and those cars usually sell new for $50k if you get it fully loaded.

It depends on what you want to do with the sensors. Somewhat accurately mapping what’s immediately in front of the car to slightly improve speed matching and false positive/negative rates for emergency breaking comes at a cheaper price than the capability to fully map the surroundings fast and accurately enough for a computer to make correct decisions.

Hell every iphone has lidar and the pro models have two lidar cameras. The tech is not very expensive, epecially not for a $80,000 car.

Around the time Elon made the claim Lidar for automotive purposes was quite expensive. That additional cost would make the self driving product a lot less desirable. Up selling cruise control into “self driving” earned them a lot of money.

Funnily enough all other aspects where Tesla has taken the expensive option the cult retail investors would claim it was brilliant decisions because economy of scale would kick in and make it cheaper in the long run.

Lidar was obviously exempt from any such scale and future tech improvements, because reasons.

My partner’s econobox has lidar for its cruise control, but Tesla can’t seem to figure out how to make it work.

It could be very expensive for Tesla to start using Lidar, because they’ve sold a lot of cars with the promise that they have the hardware for self driving. Retrofitting a million cars would not only cost a lot in terms of gear and work, but it would put additional stress on an already poor service network.

They have painted themselves into a corner. All because leadership thought self driving was a more or less solved problem almost a decade ago.

There’s a 50k word novel that doesn’t use the letter E. Doubling the word count while only using A, C, G, T, & U is on another level.

The rating system that Tesla’s mechanics in Sweden are judged by seems to incentivize poor service. Troubleshooting is discouraged and pushing the car out the door in shortest time possible encouraged.^1

It’s pretty much the opposite of what we did in a similar field of work. Getting things right on the production line, even at the cost at stopping it, usually saves money long term. I’d wager it’s similar with car service, repeat visits eats unnecessary resources and makes customers dissatisfied.

There’s a decent chance unionisation at Tesla Sweden would improve Tesla by improving the rating system used for wage negotiations.

1. https://da.se/2023/11/vi-skickar-ut-trasiga-bilar-tesla-anstallda-slar-larm-om-pressat-schema/