Why Musk rejected LiDAR for Tesla while building it from scratch at SpaceX
XFreeze · x · 2026-09-07
The thread argues Musk's LiDAR stance is more nuanced than assumed: SpaceX built its own LiDAR from scratch so Dragon could dock with the ISS, where it solves a real problem. For cars, though, Tesla bet that once vision is solved, LiDAR is expensive redundant hardware — hence an architecture of cameras, neural nets, and massive real-world data, taken to its purest form in Cybercab. The author contends solving vision makes autonomy simpler, cheaper, and easier to scale, though the framing is openly pro-Musk.
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