"While Waymo is now providing over 150,000 autonomous rides every week, Tesla still has a long way to go until its controversial “Full Self-Driving” software is ready for the EV maker’s competing robotaxi service.
Just this week, a Tesla driver plowed through a deer without even a hint of slowing down with the $8,000 add-on feature turned on, and another smashed into someone else’s car when its owner employed its Summon feature."…
Yeah we used to joke that if you wanted to sell a car with high-resolution LiDAR, the LiDAR sensor would cost as much as the car. I think others in this thread are conflating the price of other forms of LiDAR (usually sparse and low resolution, like that on 3D printers) with that of dense, high resolution LiDAR. However, the cost has definitely still come down.
I agree that perception models aren’t great at this task yet. IMO monodepth never produces reliable 3D point clouds, even though the depth maps and metrics look reasonable. MVS does better but is still prone to errors. I do wonder if any companies are considering depth completion with sparse LiDAR instead. The papers I’ve seen on this topic usually produce much more convincing pointclouds.