full self driving why is everyone else using  lidar is lidar good is it bad let's discuss  

that in this video different companies are taking  different approaches to full self driving no one  

has actually reached level 5 full self driving  yet so really it's just anyone's game at this  

point but right now as it stands tesla seems to be  the one in the lead if you haven't seen any of the  

videos that owners are actually posting on youtube  twitter or other social media platforms about the  

fsd beta the rewrite that elon said would be a  quantum leap then you are greatly missing out  

those videos that owners are posting show how well  the car actually handles most of the situations  

now you can argue and say well waymo already has  their full self-driving system active in a city in  

arizona and to that i would say yes it's working  but there are big issues with lidar now what is  

lighter in the first place lidar stands for light  detection and ranging and what does that basically  

mean well there's a spinny thingy i'm just gonna  call it a spinny thingy because that's that's  

literally what it is and in that spinny thingy it  shoots out lasers or light beams and what it does  

is it waits for the light beam to return back and  calculate how far that item is or object is from  

its location and this can be very useful this is  basically what radar does except using light waves  

visible light spectrum and this is not necessarily  a bad thing the iphone 12 hasn't they're using it  

for a completely different purpose rather than  full self driving and obviously they're using  

something that is much less precise whereas the  lidar used for cars is millimeter precision it  

can measure something up to a certain distance  with millimeter accuracy the iphone does not do  

that i don't even know if it does centimeter  precision but that is highly possible and i  

think reports have also came showing that the  iphone only does it up to about 16 feet so not  

that far that'd be like a car driving about three  to four miles an hour and i've seen this argument  

made well why can't cars use lidar if the iphone  has it because of this reason i'm pretty sure you  

don't want to be in a car that only goes three  miles an hour because it can only see 16 feet  

in front of it so why is tesla not using lidar  so tesla is very engineering based they want to  

simplify things as much as possible and everyone  working there has a sort of engineering mindset  

thinking from first principles and there are  some issues with lidar that present themselves  

before you even get started number one is cost  and here's what i think about cost cost can drop  

dramatically over time before it costed about  seventy eighty thousand dollars to just buy the  

equipment for lidar let alone actually installing  it on a vehicle and that is very expensive that's  

just the entire cost of the car itself but now  cost of lighter is dropping i think it's about  

25 000 and so cost is something we can get over  if it proves to be a valuable asset now the second  

reason why tesla doesn't use lighter is because  it's quite unreliable i mean think about this  

you have physical cameras that don't move don't  do anything like the ones you have in your phone  

pretty much and what they're doing is they're just  there like they just work you could take a 10 year  

old phone and open up the camera and obviously  maybe the image quality is not that good it's  

all for processing but as long as the phone works  the camera should also work as long as everything  

works properly and that's exactly the benefit  using cameras you have cameras that can detect  

everything and obviously lidar isn't a replacement  for cameras it's just an add-on but cameras can do  

the same thing that lidar can and lidar is a  spinny thing it's literally something that is  

spinning outside of the vehicle which means it's  more prone to damage so because of that reason  

lidar is not really practical because first of  all if it breaks it's quite expensive to replace  

secondly even if it does not break it's just  something that is waiting to be broken and that's  

quite useless and also ruins the design of the car  i mean you look at any tesla out today especially  

any model 3 or model y which all have the sensor  suite to make full self driving viable on those  

vehicles you look at those cars and they're pretty  much like every other car on the road well maybe  

they look nicer than every other car on the road  that's subjective but they don't have some next  

external factor that distinguishes them from other  vehicles on the road necessarily for example if  

you look at waymo or google self-driving  cars first of all google self-driving car  

it looks like an orange it looks like a ball  with something on top of it like it's weird what  

then you take waymo for example waymo uses a  chrysler pacifica which is a pretty nice minivan  

if i have to say myself but you look at the sensor  suite and you can tell that car is special it has  

some self-driving equipment and whatnot whereas  tesla does not do any of that it's all just built  

into the vehicle and with lidar you cannot get  that so it's just something to think about now  

the third reason why tesla doesn't use lidar is  because it's redundant there's no need to use  

lidar because lidar does not work in most of the  situations where you want something to actually  

work and help the cameras lidar does not work  in fog it does not work in snow it does not work  

in rain does not work inhale it basically doesn't  work in most of the natural climates we have here  

on earth and because of that limitation for lidar  what you need is a beast of a vision system and  

that's what elon has been referring to lidar is  useless in that sense because during those times  

lidar won't be used and if you try to use it  it can't see anything it's like driving blind  

essentially even in a light rainstorm and so what  you need with lidar is a really good vision system  

which you need even though you're not using lidar  so really lidar just becomes a secondary option  

for something that is less relevant and actually  even less useful because it doesn't even work  

most of the times when you need some sort of help  now radar is different radar uses radio waves to  

determine the distance between the vehicle and  front and what radio waves do is they can see  

through rain fog hail snow just anything pretty  clearly if there's any rainfall it can see other  

cars pretty clearly and so that's why they use  radar for adaptive cruise control to keep you a  

safe distance away from the car in front and radar  is actually useful it's not that expensive it  

doesn't break easily there's no real moving part  and it actually aids the cameras it can actually  

detect distance with pretty good accuracy and see  through most of the natural climate we have here  

on earth so radar makes total sense lidar not so  much even though it's trying to compensate for  

radar if that makes any sense so why is every  other company using lidar well for one no one has  

actually reached full self driving yet so we don't  really know what's the right method it could be  

that tesla's method is completely wrong and they  just have to start from scratch and add lidar and  

whatever you know mission failed full self-driving  capabilities not coming to any of the cars that  

elon promised it would tesla would probably refund  their money at that point but i see that as a  

highly unlikely scenario i mean think about it  humans drive with two cameras their eyes and  

this is what elon argues all the time we have  two cameras on a pretty bad gimbal system our  

neck or head and we drive pretty badly but pretty  well for how we should be driving i mean with two  

cameras only looking straight with a little bit  of peripheral vision we should be driving much  

worse than we are right now so in that sense you  can say that cameras do a really good job and now  

tesla has the 360 degree cameras looking all  around the car with a computer that reacts  

in milliseconds not at the second time scale your  brain reacts at the second time scale if something  

happens it takes a fraction of a second for your  brain to compute and perform that task whereas for  

a computer it takes milliseconds it's a thousand  times quicker than you are and here's going to be  

my final point about lidar what everyone else is  doing other than tesla and comma ai is using lidar  

and mapping out the roads so what you do with  mapping is you have a vehicle or many vehicles  

that actually map out the road beforehand measure  exactly to millimeter accuracy where everything is  

and then the car would drive kind of like in  a video game but real life isn't a video game  

random things happen all the time for example  if there is construction on a mapped road  

the car is likely to have a much harder time to  comprehend how to navigate that situation versus  

a car that relies on vision and that works like  your brain when you arrive at a situation when  

there's construction or pylons or really anything  you know how to navigate that situation maybe not  

well because the humans you know we create traffic  jams but we know how to navigate those situations  

we're not just completely stuck we don't just turn  off our cars we're like oh we're done that's it  

we just have to wait for this construction to go  we're not like that tesla's system will be exactly  

the same it'll work more like a human brain than  a computer and this can be seen by all those fst  

beta videos the owners are putting out it behaves  a lot like a human it waits it navigates roads and  

navigates around other cars other objects around  people much more like a human and it drives much  

more like a human rather than what you would  assume a computer would drive like so when the  

waymo vehicle approaches a construction zone in  its path it has to essentially rely on vision  

and just rely on everything that whoever coded the  system taught it and what to do in that situation  

whereas tesla system it works like that it's  literally intended for it doesn't even have to  

think about it it's almost like it doesn't even  care that there is construction its main purpose  

is to navigate the system and the tesla vehicle  is just gonna go through it like it's nothing  

whereas waymo might get stuck and this is exactly  why waymo looks to be ahead when it actually isn't  

right now it's only working in a city in arizona  on certain streets try taking that exact system  

just take it outside of the city where their  roads aren't mapped and it would essentially fail  

not saying would necessarily fail entirely  but it won't be able to do as good of a job  

or even close to as good of a job or remain as  safe as it was in that playground as i call it  

what you have to do is take the car out of the  playground once the car is out of the playground  

you can determine if the car can navigate  certain situations that humans can navigate  

without even thinking about you have to design a  full self-driving car like a human and lidar just  

sort of restricts you like that we don't have  any sort of system that determines distance we  

just have two eyeballs and we just know okay this  is how far we are from the other cars and so far  

we should remain and we do a relatively good job  sure some people get killed on accidents but based  

on what computers have taught us there should be  a lot more accidents so we're a lot more safer  

than we were intended to be with driving so in the  end it looks like tesla is actually going to be  

first to achieve complete full self driving  just because of what they're doing and it also  

seems like lidar may not be the right approach  i think england was right the entire time that  

lidar is just not the right approach but we  have yet to see real full self driving with no  

human supervision and whenever that happens  times can change maybe waymo will decide to drop  

lidar entirely tell me what your thoughts  on this in the comments down below and i'll  

talk to you there thank you for watching hope you  enjoyed this one and i'll talk to you later peace

you