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veen  ·  3034 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The $75,000 problem for self-driving cars is going away

Not at all the same thing. Subaru has an entirely different system with an entirely different purpose: assistance instead of full control, meaning it can do with a cheap sub-$1000 intelligent camera.

The kind of LIDAR that Google needed -the one on their Lexuses and Priuses - was the $75k Velodyne. They're now working with a sub-10k model, I think. While I don't think it is a hurdle to the development of self-driving cars, it is definitely necessary to develop better and cheaper models. There's a reason they haven't announced the specs of the budget lasers yet because that's when people will likely become sceptical. You really do need a high level of precision, quality assurance and speed for full control, none of which is cheap at the moment but inevitably will be.