Elon Musk finds Lidar sensors useless, but still buys them for 2 million euros in the first quarter of 2024. A logic that baffles analysts, already imagining a change of strategy at Tesla.
Elon Musk often denigrates Lidar technology, stating that with his Tesla vision and artificial intelligence, they have become useless for autonomous driving. But then why does Tesla appear to be one of the main customers of a Lidar company like Luminar? It was no less necessary for Tesla to backpedal in this area to be considered by analysts, such as those from Automotive News in an article dated May 7.
With the robotaxi due to be announced on August 8, the planets seemed to align to imagine that Tesla had changed its tune on this technology. A conclusion that seems too hasty.
A very specific use of Lidar
During the “Autonomy Investor Day” conference in 2019, Elon Musk surprised the automotive industry by bluntly answering a question: “ Lidar is a foolish mistake. And anyone who relies on Lidar is doomed to failure. »
Tesla has chosen to remove Lidar sensors from its models, a choice diametrically opposed to all of its competitors. The brand’s vehicles evolve only thanks to cameras and neural networks which can analyze the environment in which the vehicles operate. A technique which is beginning to prove itself, even if many reservations still remain to be overcome.
As the Teslarati site indicates, Tesla uses Lidar units on very specific vehicles, which are not intended to be used by customers. These vehicles equipped with Lidar are used to validate the data collected and analyzed by the Full Self-Driving (FSD) autonomous driving system.
Tesla vehicles equipped with these Lidar sensors are currently circulating in Europe, which confirms that the brand hopes to be able to launch its autonomous driving on our continent. This is also the case in China.
“We don’t even need it for that anymore.”
Elon Musk inevitably reacted to these articles by commenting on on May 8. He indicated that Tesla no longer even needs Lidar for this use.
However, there remains an unknown factor in this laconic response message. Why spend 2 million euros in the first quarter on useless technology? Especially at a time when Tesla’s growth is slowing and the company is preparing to make drastic cuts in expenses, including those on staff.
As is often the case with Tesla, it will take a few months before we can put all the pieces of the puzzle in place. At the moment, it is difficult to know what purpose several thousand Lidar sensors could be used for, if they are not used to validate Tesla autonomous driving data.
Elon Musk does not like to go back on his word and it is certainly not on a subject such as the use of Lidar that he risks backpedaling. Lidar should be used for Tesla’s business, but probably not on the upcoming robotaxi. This would prove Elon wrong, which is unimaginable in the current context.
We need to sort through the rumors about Tesla. This is a subject regularly covered in our editorialized newsletter Watt Else:
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