It seems Tesla is finally starting to get serious about L4 autonomy, but they don't have much to show for it yet. What's extraordinary is how many people have fallen for Elon's bullshit and remain committed to it in spite of it being obvious bullshit.
In any case, many journalists are still trying to spin it as cameras vs lidar when it's really single modality vision systems with no redundancy versus multi-modal vision systems that conventionally include camera as well as lidar.
Various Lidar startups have also made inroads in deriving vision from laser range finding technology. It's hard to speculate on what will win in the end, but nitpicking these things is a form of bike shedding. Ultimately it comes down to the software, which is a much bigger problem and not as straightforward to wrap one's brain around.
I assume the downvotes are about mentioning that one person that gets mentioned a lot? Factually this post is pretty accurate IMHO. As a human you can almost always extract "this could have been seen" from fusion sensor data. That does not mean the computer can (some of this also vibes from you judging post mortem and typically having additional information about the scene). Neither hand made nor trained classifiers master the "long tail" that is needed for L4. This does not change with some percent improvement of one sensor.
In a single small extremely constrained geofenced area using vehicles with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sensors each. Those companies are complete dead ends. They are not even remotely solving for the general case.
>Geofenced is the definition of level 4. Tesla doesn’t have a level 3 car on the market.
And levels 3/4 are useless, better served by public transit. There's a reason the Japanese/Korean manufacturers are skipping them. You either have really good level 2 (i.e. LKAS+ACC), or you go to full level 5. And Waymo/Cruise will never solve for level 5 with their approach. Tesla (and Comma) are at least working on the general solution to it.
Toyota partnered with Pony.ai and have a fleet of level 4 taxis operating in all major cities(eg: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen) in China. Honda has level 3 self driving cars on the market in Japan that you can buy today. Kia is working on a level 3 car and also announced level 4 taxi plans. Hyundai also has plans to add level 3 functionality to their cars.
