I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again
From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer.<p>This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only.<p>Somebody at Cruise commented that their intention is to drive down the cost of LIDAR units through economies of scale and better technology.<p>My personal belief is that the data acquired from LIDAR representing a at-this-moment-in-time snapshot of a vehicle's surroundings is very valuable, and Cruise is probably going down the right path with this.<p>Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a <i>human</i> who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene (eg: a pedestrian wearing a black or dark blue jacket who is walking a black or brown labrador retriever across an unmarked crosswalk in Seattle level mid winter rain, at night time, something I literally saw just two nights ago).