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Tesla’s Elon Musk Trashes Lidar For Self-Driving Cars, But Waymo Is Rolling Out A New One

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The Alphabet Inc. unit, with a decade of driverless car R&D under its belt, is shifting to an entirely new, in-house developed set of sensors.
Waymo has begun testing a next-generation laser lidar unit as the company shifts to an entirely new sensor set, including modified cameras and radar, all designed in-house.
Elon Musk packed a lot of audacious claims into Tesla’s “Autonomy Day” conference this week, including a bombastic pronouncement that “lidar is a fool’s errand and anyone relying on lidar is doomed.” Waymo, the Alphabet Inc. unit with a decade of driverless car research under its belt, sees things differently: It’s rolling out a next-generation version of the sensor that uses lasers to create 3D, 360-degree views of the world.
The company isn’t sharing details of its latest lidar unit, designed and built entirely in-house, but began testing it in the San Francisco Bay Area in recent weeks. Human-driven Chrysler Pacifica minivans outfitted with the device and modified cameras and radar–also created in-house–are readying the upgraded vision system for use on electric Jaguar i-Pace SUVs that begin entering Waymo’s fleet later this year in metro Phoenix (where Waymo began its on-demand robo-taxi service in late 2018).
While Waymo wouldn’t tell Forbes if the new device has more range than the current version’s 300 meters, better durability and lower cost than the lidar it replaces, CEO John Krafcik has previously said sensor performance needs to improve, particularly to operate in areas with snow and inclement weather.
«We’re going to have new lidar, radar and cameras, which is pretty much the whole thing,» Krafcik told CNET last October. «One of the things to really focus on is ensuring four-season robustness. And that means that sensor cleaning is a critical, up-front design parameter.»
Waymo wants better performance, particularly in snowy conditions, as well as lower cost for its lidar system.
Musk has disparaged lidar in the past, a technology he appears to dislike as much as hydrogen fuel cells and the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission. His comments this week, however, were a remarkable line in the sand as his belief that cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors are sufficient for self-driving car visions systems isn’t just at odds with Waymo’s but with the approach of every major autonomous vehicle program.
To Musk, they are “expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. One appendix is bad, now we’ll put on a whole bunch of them. That’s ridiculous. You’ll see,” he told analysts on Monday.
While lidar has challenges, including how well it distinguishes between soft and hard objects, cost and electric power consumption, its ability to generate detailed, ghostly 3D point-cloud maps of a moving car’s surroundings in all lighting conditions, working in tandem with cameras and radar, gives self-driving cars awareness of road conditions that’s superhuman.

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