- [Hawkins] So if you'll
recall, way back in 2018, Waymo sued Uber for
stealing trade secrets. - So there's no trade
secrets gonna be shown today. If that's what you came for, too bad. - [Hawkins] Waymo is the self-driving car spinoff of Google. Uber was also working on
self-driving cars at the time. Uber's chief tech bro, Travis Kalanick, was questioned on the stand about a weird phrase that
he wrote on a whiteboard during a late night jam sesh. A phrase I don't really appreciate having to say out loud on
camera, but here it goes: Laser is the sauce. I also don't really enjoy
having to say jam sesh, but that's beside the point. That phrase spawned some terrible memes, but it got to a core belief that's helping power the
development of self-driving cars, a huge multi-billion
dollar science experiment.

that could potentially change
the way we get around forever. And that core belief is
that lasers, or rather LiDAR, is the secret sauce
that could really crack this incredibly complex
problem of autonomous vehicles wide open. There's a big debate between
companies who use LiDAR and the one company that doesn't, and it all comes down to a question: how self-driving do we need
our self-driving cars to be? I'm Andrew Hawkins, and
this is your status update. (upbeat, funky music) Before we get to that, we have to address the
autonomous elephant in the room. A lot of people think that self-driving cars
are just fully a scam. That they're basically vaporware from billion-dollar companies who have been promising a fully driverless future for decades, but never deliver. All those viral clips of self-driving car fails in San Francisco certainly help paint this picture. - [Thorn] Yeah, we got a Cruise vehicle.

Nobody in the car, no place for us to go. - [Cameraperson] Everyone's
getting off the bus. There's no one driving the car. - No, self-driving cars are not poised to suddenly take over the world. And yeah, the AV industry is struggling. Thousands of employees have been laid off, timelines has stretched into the future with no visible endpoint. Some companies have even
shut down completely after losing all their funding. But true driverless cars,
companies like Waymo and Cruise, they're in San Francisco and Phoenix, and they're picking up real passengers and taking their money
for trips, right now. And part of the reason that they're able to navigate
these complex environments is because they use a lot of sensors, including cameras, radar,
and ultrasonic sensors to create 3D renderings
of their environment. But most critically, they use LiDAR. Travis Kalanick's laser sauce. LiDAR stands for light
detection and ranging.

It works by sending out
a pulse of light waves that bounce off of objects
and return to the sensor. LiDAR uses the time it took for each pulse to return to the sensor to calculate distance traveled, and that way, it can measure
how far away an object is. A typical LiDAR pulse contains thousands of beams of
infrared laser light. These pulses create point clouds, which can be used to create 3D renderings
of the environment, and the result is a much more
detailed 3D map of the world than cameras and other
common sensors can offer. It even works at night, when cameras alone are essentially blind. Cars like Waymo's still use
the full complement of sensors, and the vehicle's brain
fuses all the data together to get the best possible view of reality. LiDAR isn't just for autonomous cars. Lately, it's been showing up
in a lot of different places, like iPhones and iPads.

and the new Vision Pro augmented reality headset that Apple just unveiled. It's being used in farm equipment, in warehouse vehicles, and in aviation. LiDAR companies like Luminar are working to put their sensors into vehicles that you can buy yourself. LiDAR is going mainstream, but not everyone thinks that LiDAR is the sauce. (door slams) (seatbelt buckle clicks) Tesla, the most aggressive company in pushing autonomous tech on its customers, doesn't include LiDAR in its vehicles. And Elon Musk has been talking all kinds of trash about LiDAR in recent years. Here's what he said in 2019. - And anyone left relying on LiDAR is doomed. Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It's like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. - And he's criticized Google's approach, which includes LiDAR. In a CNBC interview from earlier this year, he bragged that Tesla's vehicles

are more powerful than Google's because they can drive in more places. So if LiDAR is so powerful, what's that about? Well, Tesla's vehicles used to include a bunch
of different sensors, but Elon Musk decided it was too complex and too expensive, so he ripped everything
out but the cameras. The truth is that LiDAR just doesn't work for
Tesla's business model. Elon Musk wants to sell
cars to lots of people, cars that he promises will
become fully autonomous someday. But including LiDAR would just make them too expensive for most people to afford. Now, the price of LiDAR has dropped dramatically in recent years, from around $75,000 a
pop to now around $6,000. But the tech is basically incompatible with Tesla's balance sheet. For all of Elon's claims about the future, Tesla's present tech is
still just driver assist. Autopilot and full self-driving still require the driver to
pay attention to the road

and take over when something goes wrong. And when it does, the driver's the one liable
for whatever happens. If a Waymo or Cruise crashes, the companies are liable for the damage. In other words, robo-taxi companies aren't
selling cars to people, so they can afford to add
LiDAR to their vehicles. Tesla still needs people behind the wheel because it needs people to buy its cars. Waymo and Cruise just need
people to ride in them. That's the difference that LiDAR makes. Another difference is car crashes. More specifically, the
severity of the crash. When Waymo vehicles crash, they tend to be pretty minor, like low-speed rear-end collisions. The company only reported two crashes and 18 minor contact events after driving 1 million
fully driverless miles in California and Arizona. The number of people
injured in those incidents? Zero. The number of people injured in Tesla vehicles using autopilot? Very much not zero.

According to federal crash data, Tesla vehicles using autopilot were involved in 736 crashes since 2019. 17 people died in those crashes, including 11 since May 2022. Experts told the Washington Post that the removal of some
sensors, including radar, appear to have contributed to the increased number of incidents. Now, there are a lot more
Tesla vehicles on the road than Waymo vehicles, and Tesla's aren't geofenced
to specific areas like Waymo. And we're not saying
that radar or even LiDAR would've prevented any of these
crashes from taking place. But if you're comparing the two companies, Waymo's cars arguably can see more of
the world than Tesla's, and that's partly because of the sensors. (mellow music) So what happens if LiDAR suddenly becomes so cheap it pays for itself? Will Elon flip flop on
his LiDAR skepticism? Musk isn't anything if not unpredictable.

but that would be a huge
reversal on his part if he went and added LiDAR to his cars. But if he wants Tesla to
ever be fully autonomous, not just use fancy driver assist systems like autopilot and full self-driving, he may have to accept LiDAR in his heart. It doesn't have to be the whole sauce, but it certainly could be one of the most important ingredients. I'm sure you're tired of
listening to me talk about sauce, but we'd love to hear from
you about self-driving cars. Do we need self-driving cars? There's lots of questions about the relevancy of driverless technology, so let us know what you
think in the comments below.

Lidar vs. Tesla: the race for fully self driving cars

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