Musk: Our FSD system does not need lidar

Recently, lidar technology company Luminar Technologies revealed in its letter to shareholders that Tesla became its largest lidar customer in the first quarter, contributing more than 10% of quarterly revenue.

Specific data shows that Tesla purchased lidar equipment worth more than US$2 million.

However, Elon Musk responded by saying that Tesla no longer needs lidar technology to collect the "baseline real data" needed for autonomous driving.

He further clarified: “We don’t even need them to do this anymore.

This echoes Musk's position in 2015, when he publicly criticized lidar as "pointless" and unnecessary for self-driving cars.

Since then, Musk has continued to express negative views on LiDAR on many occasions, describing it as "expensive, ugly, and unnecessary" and comparing it to "a bunch of appendices growing on a human body", implying that it has no practical use.

He also said that companies that rely on lidar may not succeed and that those who use lidar are "fools."

The data released by Luminar Technologies seemed to contradict Musk's position, and some saw it as a rebuttal to Musk's remarks.

However, it should be clarified that the "uselessness of lidar" emphasized by Musk is aimed at the use of lidar on a single vehicle. The actual purpose of Tesla's procurement of lidar is to equip it on vehicles used to collect "benchmark real data."

The so-called "benchmark real data" refers to data collected in the real world and manually annotated and known to be correct or reliable. This data is crucial to the development of autonomous driving technology.