During Tesla’s Autonomy Day last April, Director of AI Andrej Karpathy joked that the attendees of the event only used a pair of cameras to navigate themselves to the venue. Emphasizing this point and Tesla’s aversion to LiDAR, the AI Director even joked that the attendees must not have shot lasers from their eyes when they were making their way to the event. These jokes, while lighthearted, show Tesla’s all-in bet on Elon Musk’s idea that a suite of cameras and a Neural Network are enough to teach a fleet of vehicles how to drive autonomously.

Unlike self-driving companies such as Waymo and Cruise, Tesla is intent on not using LiDAR, a component that is pretty much ubiquitous among firms developing FSD technology. Musk has proven quite unforgiving for LiDAR, calling it a “fool’s errand” and “stupid” if used for cars. This is a lot coming from Musk, especially considering that SpaceX, the Tesla CEO’s private space company, uses LiDAR for its spacecraft. Musk explained that LiDAR makes sense in space, but it’s foolish to use in regular cars.