Lidar Not Ruled Out
If you're like me and think/hope those prominent cutouts in the R2 frame above the windshield are for long-range Lidar, which would be used with other short-range Lidar sensors around the vehicle's body, to get a wholesome 360-degree reading of the environment, you will like what RJ has to say on the topic.
Of course, RJ is modulating what he is saying because he doesn't want to give anything away, or you may interpret his comments as he doesn't want to get locked into anything and leave his options open. I choose the former interpretation.
"So not ruling out lidar, is what I’m hearing?
No, I wouldn’t rule out lidar. And there’s another thing I’d just say, which is important to note. I think a lot of the debate around lidar was born out of [autonomous vehicles] 1.0, where you actually had a rules-based environment, where this idea of an early fusion or building of a neural net that wasn’t there. In a rules-based environment, it was more complex to do some of these fusion activities because the fusion typically happened a little later.
Now, what’s happened is that we no longer run the models like that. So the models benefit from the maximum amount of information on the front of the model. The cost of lidar used to be tens of thousands of dollars. It’s now low, a couple of hundred bucks. So it’s a really great sensor that can do things that cameras can’t."
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Posted Oct 6, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC