Tesla bought over $2M worth of Lidar from Luminar

In order to make vision-only depth sensing work well, you need ground-truth data. Buying a few thousand lidar to get a ton of ground-truth training data for the NN to learn distance on its own from vision is an obvious move. They&#x27;re not switching to Lidar.<p>source: i debugged lidar and built localization and behavioral planning algorithms for self driving cars

$2M doesn&#x27;t seem like a lot for a company the size of Tesla. Sounds like R&amp;D.

Tesla R&amp;D budget is $4B.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usnewsfile.moomoo.com&#x2F;public&#x2F;MM-PersistNewsContentImage&#x2F;7781&#x2F;20240128&#x2F;0-63371776b6ce7c95662198a34d2aa699-0-7e5d12bce5710b99be4d69f2e34bd7d0.png&#x2F;big?imageMogr2&#x2F;ignore-error&#x2F;1&#x2F;format&#x2F;webp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usnewsfile.moomoo.com&#x2F;public&#x2F;MM-PersistNewsContentIm...</a><p>2M? Hahaha....<p>&gt;_&gt;

They might be using them to train robots like Optimus, given Musk&#x27;s statement.<p>Also why is the tone of the article so toxic.

My reading is this is only for their own taxi fleet. $2M at $1000 per car = 2000 cars.<p>Waymo has fully autonomous self driving that actually works for their taxi fleet. Waymo uses lidar. Tesla building a taxi fleet, Tesla now needs to spring the extra dosh for a bit of lidar.

Data collections for model training.

Somewhere there is a CEO or head of engineering reading this headline thinking: I guess we are on the right track! LOL

2.1 million not exactly ‘stocking up’ for a company the size of Tesla. That’s barely pocket change.

How much Lidar does $2 million buy you? Probably, what, a year&#x27;s worth of Tesla&#x27;s manufacturing output?

Musk used to argue that since humans can drive without Lidar, cars could as well.

Very confused to why they&#x27;re not just acquiring.<p>If they&#x27;re representing 10% of revenue are they&#x27;re doing a pilot and then considering outright buying them?