Under $100 cost to the car company, with no start-up costs (or with start-up costs factored into the $100), and maybe it'll be worth it. Maybe not though. Depends how good computer vision is by then, and how good that cheapo lidar is. But hey, if the cost to number of lives saved ratio of lidar can approach that of, say, airbags or antilock brakes, I have no doubt Tesla (and all the other car manufacturers) will add it to their new models.

At $1000, it's still questionable. Yes, there have been crashes, some of them fatalities, but it's not clear how many would have been prevented with lidar. As far as crashes averted because a human took over, again I'd question how many would have been averted without human intervention had Tesla used lidar. But in any case, I think people would much rather pay $1000 less for their car than have a slightly lower rate of interventions. As I understand it, you don't even have full self-driving on your car. Yet you are judging it as though it's a robocar. Lidar right not would bring Tesla from not-a-robocar to...still-not-a-robocar. It might have saved a handful of lives and prevented some crashes. That is, if the money to pay for the enormous cost had fallen from the sky. Instead it probably would have driven Tesla out of business.

Yes, they have maps. And yes, they've come out against "high definition maps." As I understand it those maps are created with lidar, and I'm not sure how useful they'd be for Tesla. Detailed maps, with enough details so that the car can figure out that the area next to it that looks like a lane isn't actually a lane - yeah, they should have that. (There's no need to map the barrier, certainly not in 3D, and in fact that might have confused things because most of the barrier was actually not there that day.)

Maps are really important for situations like the one where Huang was killed. It's easy to see how even a human could mistake that gore area for a lane (I wonder why there are no chevrons in it). The human would probably not crash all the way into the barrier. But they very well might think it's a lane the first time they drive there. At which point they'll add it to their mental map, so they don't make the same mistake next time.

I'm not sure what I said that gives you that impression.

I do believe Tesla will eventually use its AI chip to make at least some driving decisions.

I also don't think the problem they are trying to solve (level 5 autonomy, give or take some really exotic driving conditions) can be solved without using AI (specifically, machine learning) to determine the "rules of the road." But it's important to note that this statement is separate from my previous one. Much of the machine learning will probably be done "offline," i.e. when not driving.

(What are "path prediction hints"? When I google that term the only hit I get is a message from you here.)

I don't think anyone can write down all the practices of driving (to the level of detail where it doesn't require human intelligence to understand what's written down). That's exactly why I think this problem (a computer that can drive almost anywhere humans do) is only solvable by having those practices determined by a computer observing how people actually drive. And that in turn is why I think that Tesla, with its billions of miles making such observations, is very well positioned to solve the problem.

I encounter situations quite regularly when I think to myself, "I wouldn't have thought to tell a self-driving car how to handle that."

If anyone could write down all the practices of driving, why is making a self-driving car so hard?

I'm not sure I could even write down all the practices of driving in a form that only a human could understand. Try not crash into anything. Try not to harm humans. Try not to harm animals, at least not significant animals. Try to get to your destination quickly. Try not to break the law, at least not laws that are likely to be enforced. Try to be courteous to other drivers.... But the problem is when those goals contradict, which they frequently do. In fact, to some extent they are constantly contradictory (driving always involves some risk, and the quicker you try to get to your destination, the higher the risk).

Do you think the unwritten "rules of the road" are universal? Probably not, but do you even think we could get everyone in a single state to agree on what they are?

Hint: No, we can't. I can point you to heated discussions on the Internet over how you're supposed to make an unprotected left turn. But that's just one example, and it's easy to specially code a single example. (Hopefully we can get all the state legislatures to approve the technique of pulling out into the intersection and then finishing the turn when the light turns red, if you can't finish it sooner.) Even then, there's often intelligence, and sometimes communication, involved in figuring out what the other cars and pedestrians are going to do (not everyone knows that you're supposed to yield to a vehicle already in the intersection, even if you have a green light and they have a red light). And how aggressive you can and should be depends on where you are. Are car companies going to hand code the rules of the road in NYC vs. Chicago vs. Atlanta vs. Austin? Even if I could write all the unwritten rules of the road down for the cities I've regularly driven in, I couldn't write them down for the cities I haven't regularly driven in.

(Another possibility to deal with tricky situations like making an unprotected left turn, or making a U-turn, is to simply avoid them. That's usually possible, and usually possible without adding too much time to your drive. Of course you have to be able to deal with them in the cases where it isn't reasonable to avoid them, but you can be extra cautious during those relatively rare cases.)