Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promising for years that self-driving cars are coming. But his opponent, Austin Russell, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, argues that Elon Musk is over-bragging about his Full Self-Driving System (FSD) and that he can’t be truly autonomous without lidar drive.
Figure 1: Elon Musk and Austin Russell
In 2012, Russell founded Luminar Technologies, Tesla’s competitor in autonomous driving, when he was 17 years old. 2020 saw the company go public on the NASDAQ, making Russell a billionaire almost overnight. including Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan.
Elon Musk, however, has spoken out against LiDAR technology. He said in 2019 that Luminar technology, which is currently used by most other self-driving car companies, is “doomed to fail. Tesla does not use LIDAR, relying instead on a set of external cameras and other sensors to enable autonomous driving. In October, it was reported that Elon Musk had repeatedly instructed his Autopilot team to abandon radar and use only the camera, which comes closest to simulating the human eye.
Figure 2: Tesla FSD test version
Russell said in an interview that he doesn’t think Tesla will be able to fully implement autonomous driving technology until it adopts LIDAR technology. “From an autonomous driving perspective, if you want to get to true autonomous driving, you have to use LIDAR.” He said.
He also slammed Tesla’s FSD system, a program that has come under fire from regulators in recent months because of its potentially misleading name. In reality, the beta version of FSD is like an add-on program that assists in switching lanes and stopping at red lights, but still requires a licensed driver to drive.
Even as a driver assistance feature, Tesla’s FSD “has a lot of room for improvement,” Russell said. “The fundamentals of what they’re trying to do are fine,” he said, “the only inconsistencies are the veracity of the advertising and some consumer manipulation, which is highly questionable. Calling it ‘fully autonomous’ for a moment is a fundamentally inaccurate statement, not to mention ‘fully autonomous.”
Unlike Elon Musk, Russell has said that the future of fully autonomous cars is decades away, calling himself the “chief self-driving car skeptic” and saying there has been an “assumption” that the self-driving problem will be solved in the next few years. The problem will be solved. “Even today, it’s still out of reach. There’s no commercially viable business around it all,” he said. He said.
