Frankly, I think Tesla is going to win this. The new self-driving is remarkably good. Based on this alone, I estimate (actual) level 5 self driving in 2-3 years. I'm convinced that the lidar sensors are essentially unnecessary and the vision-only strategy is basically going to work and be much cheaper in the process.
How about we wait till they have given a single public ride before crowning them winners? At the moment Tesla's effort is nothing more than a marketing campaign.
Tesla FSD version 13 (new version) videos are starting to trickle out on YouTube and while they could be edited, it does seem to handle some crazy stuff fairly well.
If Tesla can do level 5 in 2-3 years as you say (and that might be a pretty big “if”), that places them 5+ years behind Waymo.
What leads to the win here, then? Waymo constrained by the cost of LIDAR? Is it truly such a massive % of build cost that they can’t succeed? Is it that Tesla is vertically integrated?
Apparently they have been surprised at how few photons are required to see for these sensors. They are skipping the image computer vision step and going from photons to car control in as few layers as possible.
It's not an event camera, so it's very much taking images, which are then being processed by computer vision algorithms.
Event cameras seem more viable than CMOS sensors for autonomous vehicle applications in the absence of LIDAR. CMOS dynamic range and response isn't as good as the human eye. LIDAR+CMOS is considerably better in many ways.
Next time you’re facing blinding direct sunlight, pull out your iPhone and take a picture/video. It’s a piece of cake for it. And it has to do far more post processing to make a compelling jpeg/heic for humans. Tesla can just dump the data from the sensor from short&long exposures straight into the neural net.
Humans can also decide they want to get a better look at something and move their head (or block out the sun with their hands) which cameras generally don't do.
