- Elon's the iOS.
By the way, he paved
the way for all of us.
- [Interviewer] Right, he's the iOS truth.
- I would not be doing Comma.ai today,
if it was not for those
conversations with Elon,
and if it were not for him saying,
I think he said, like,
well obviously we're not gonna
use LiDAR, we use cameras,
humans use cameras.
- So what do you think about that?
How important is LiDAR?
Everybody else is, on L5 is using LiDAR.
What are your thoughts on
his provocative statement
that LiDAR is a crutch?
- See, sometimes, he'll say dumb things,
like the driver monitor thing,
but sometimes he'll say
absolutely, completely,
100% obviously true things.
Of course, LiDAR's a crutch.
It's not even a good crutch.
(Interviewer laughs)
You're not even using it,
oh, they're using it for localization.
Which isn't good in the first place,
if you have to localize
your car to centimeters
in order to drive,
that's not driving.
- Yeah, they're currently not doing much
machine learning without the LiDAR data.
Meaning like, to help you in the task of
general task of perception.
- The main goal of those
LiDARs on those cars,
I think is actually localization
more than perception.
Or at least that's what they use them for.
- [Interviewer] Yeah, that's true.
- If you want to localize to centimeters,
you can't use GPS.
The fanciest GPS in the world can't do it.
Especially if you're under
tree cover and stuff.
With LiDAR, you can do this pretty easily.
- They're not taking on,
I mean, in some research
they're using it for perception.
And they're certainly not, which is sad,
they're not fusing it well with vision.
- They do use it for perception,
I'm not saying they don't
use it for perception,
but the thing that,
they have vision-based and radar-based
perception systems as well.
You could remove the LiDAR and keep around
a lot of the dynamic object perception.
You want to get centimeter
accurate localization?
Good luck doing that with anything else.
