Elon Musk had a very negative view of lidar, but he didn't really explain himself very completely.
Lidar sensors are around $10k and up, and the waymo cars I've seen have many of them.
Additionally, they only sort of say how far away things are, which sort of overlaps with the ultrasonics and radar.
So, maybe the roi on lidar would not be great.
That said, the engineer in me thinks lidar would be a nice add-on (sensor fusion). But it depends on someone actually
shipping one of those dirt cheap solid state sensors we see in press releases (but not in real life yet).
Lidar sensors are around $10k and up, and the waymo cars I've seen have many of them.
Additionally, they only sort of say how far away things are, which sort of overlaps with the ultrasonics and radar.
So, maybe the roi on lidar would not be great.
That said, the engineer in me thinks lidar would be a nice add-on (sensor fusion). But it depends on someone actually shipping one of those dirt cheap solid state sensors we see in press releases (but not in real life yet).