Oddly convenient that the removal of radar and the push for pure vision came at a time when there was a radar shortage. Meanwhile at that time S/X cars continued to get radar installed.
FWIW, Elon had mentioned the system would be vision based years before they actually removed radar.
It's possible they accelerated the removal somewhat based on parts but it's not like they just decided earlier this year "Hey we can't get enough radar guess we'll just decide vision is fine" then.
The more points of truth that exist for the vehicle to make a decision, the more confident it will be.
Unless those "truths" disagree of course.
This is also why there are redundant systems internally in HW3, to basically seek some level of agreement or failover to whatever the tiebreaker needs to be.
No such thing exists in HW3.
It's physically redundant- in that there's 2 largely identical SOCs so in theory you COULD run software on one that can fail-over to the other.
But the software doesn't actually work that way.
Nor is there any sort of "agreement" between cores, or tiebreaking, because again they're not running anything redundantly in software.
It's one of the reasons we can be pretty sure that we'll need HW4 (at a minimum) before we see anything from Tesla released at >L2.
Lidar and radar is superior to vision-only for obstacle detection in 2021. Prove me wrong.
They're superior in a way that's not at all needed for self driving. Ever. (and COULD be counter-productive- an argument Andrej Karpathy makes in some detail, with data to demonstrate it, during AI day)....Prove me wrong
Ultimately you don't need mm precise measurements to drive a car. Humans sure don't have that kind of precision when they drive.
Even if all you have is vision-as-good-as-a-human but able to look in all directions at the same time you ought be able to achieve better-than-human self driving once you get the SW up to speed.
And it's a helluva lot easier and cheaper to scale that too
.
Not comparing who's ahead or not. Just pointing out that it clearly works.
As long as you never need to go anywhere outside the tiny waymo service area in a tiny suburb in AZ.
Which is a somewhat narrow definition of "works"