But no, roads are not designed with just vision in mind. Designers use tecture not just for grip but to help communicate things to the driver. There's many subtler ones, but the most obvious one is the grooves you often find on the edge of highways that are used to warn you if you're veering off. This vibrates the car and creates a loud noise. That's two more senses that you're constantly using while driving even if you don't recognize it. Sure, I wouldn't rely on smell, but it is also a useful sense for some diagnostics and may help in some edge cases. But my point is that we're not just vision based creatures. You think about vision more, but the others are very important.
This is a red herring. None of these feedback mechanisms existed for decades of driving. The core problem of driving is vision and everything else is just gravy. If lidar can't solve all of the vision issues, which it can't, then it makes perfect sense to ask whether vision can cover lidar's purposes and thus whether having both is actually useful. Focusing on lidar is ignoring the core issue.
If so, do you think he's stupid? Do you think he thinks sensor fusion is a grand unsolved problem his cracked engineers can't implement?
I absolutely agree vision is very very important, given the roads + signage are designed for humans using their eyes among other factors.
Do I think we should take the abilities of human drivers with eyes as the gold standard for what we can achieve with autonomous vehicles? No, and I doubt he does either, but his ego can't backtrack. In fact, I'm pretty sure he finally accepted radar.
Do I believe that looking at humans driving and saying "they do it just their eyes (they don't) so we should!" is an example of his acclaimed first-principles reasoning ability? No, I think its shallow reasoning by analogy.
Also, I'm not aware of anyone going or championing full lidar. It was only musk who (apparently) believes more than one type of sensor is a negative.
What really gets me is that musk, the man who's proven just how good he is at scaling & supply chain, somehow didn't think lidar wouldn't dramatically come down in cost.
My most charitable interpretation is that he really saw the value in gathering as much data about driving as fast as possible, and the best way to do that was to build a bunch of cars with just cameras.(Smart) Somewhere along the way he got annoyed or jealous of the lidar-incorporating companies that were doing quite well with autonomy. Then some ego thing happened and he got ahead of his skis and said vision-only is the best(dumb) and his ego/brand value won't let him take it back.
I admire the hell out of musk based on his output, so I choose to believe that he can't possibly be stupid enough to not understand sensor fusion.
Oh back to the original subject. If he's never said that vision-only is first principles, I apologize for the misinformation. But you have to admit that the "reasoning" of saying humans can drive with vision only therefore no other sensors is quite firmly outside the realm of first principles, which is his m.o.
> Do I believe that looking at humans driving and saying "they do it just their eyes (they don't) so we should!" is an example of his acclaimed first-principles reasoning ability? No, I think its shallow reasoning by analogy.
Elon's understanding of "first principles" is "the first thought that came into my head". Unfortunately this is a common, and growing, bastardization of the phrase.
Maybe it can't be solved using current tech, who knows, but saying that fully autonomous driving in our current world isn't achievable without vision is a correct position. I have no opinion on anything else.
> see human drivers using only vision