I work in the AV field: Across all the real competitors (not Tesla) sensors are things like LIDAR, Cameras (visible spectrum and infrared), radio radars (yes radar already includes radio, but for laypeople LIDAR is confused with radar), microphones.<p>-<p>Tesla doesn't have them for two different reasons...<p>Claimed reason: Humans have eyes and make driving work, so cars won't need more than that.<p>Real reason: Tesla wants to make money by selling the package to the public today. It needs to be cheap enough to be mass produced today, and sold at an accessible cost.<p>And it doesn't really matter to them if the current stack will be enough because regardless of what they claim, they're not averse to screwing over current owners and releasing a new stack and abandoning people who paid for an untenable one (note: I've been saying this since before they did exactly this with HW4 a few week ago...)<p>The sensor stacks alone the actual AV players use are worth more than the average Tesla. That's why they're mostly initially aiming for ridesharing, where the company can own the vehicle.
Lidar point clouds, high resolution imagery and driver inputs mostly. The high level idea being you want to train the neural network so that when it sees x on the sensors it should do y thing the human did.<p>As for why other self driving cars don't have lidar that's... A contentious topic. The argument for lidar is that it captures the environment in 3d unlike cameras that only capture in 2d and thus you can save on computation trying to convert 2d images into a 3d scene. On the other hand lidar is very expensive, has limitations like not being able to see through rain and maybe most importantly is believed to be unnecessary since "humans drive with just their eyes".<p>My personal belief is its a matter of cost vs time to market - lidar makes locatization and object recognition a little bit easier and if for example it saves 1 year of development time at a cost of 100k per car produced it's worth it if you're only making a small fleet of cars anyway.
The balanced take on autonomous vehicles is that there are degrees of merit in most of the major approaches, but you'll almost never hear that opinion because this topic has somehow become akin to a religious debate.
Hey! a question I know something about :)<p>Waymo is banking on Lidar being the solution to autonomous vehicles, the reason tesla doesn't use them is that Elon thinks Lidar won't work and that we need Ai for driverless cars (or more accurately a highly advanced AGI).<p>At first, I thought Elon was being too radical, he's known for overcorrecting for the sunk cost fallacy, but after more time, I share his view.<p>Personally, I think Waymo is a joke. Just because they came from Google they think they're too big to fail before even having a product for market. They've already lost 170 billion in just a year an a half. The CEO got charged with stealing tech and selling it to tesla, then got sued by tesla when he made a competitor to the stolen tech he sold them.<p>Take it as you will, personally I'm pretty bias against google these days, Pichai has ruined the company for me. I feel he's turned google into Microsoft, there's nothing wrong with Microsoft, but we already have one of those, it was nice when we also had a google.