John Collison

radars way many years ago used to be

bulky, complex, very expensive, you know, when we're putting them on planes and, you know, but then we start putting them on cars, now you can get a decent automotive radar for, you know, tons of dollars.

There is, you know, a variant of the automotive radar, and it's called the imaging radar, and it gives you a richer thing.

So that is also, you know, has come down in cost drastically, but it's a little bit behind your standard automotive radars.

LIDARs are following the same very predictable, very well-known trend.

So we're writing that and we're also learning from the previous generation to just make improvements and simplifications and optimizations.

You know, it's all blasting, you know,

Effectively, like blasting photos out there, and then they bounce off of something, they come back, you measure what comes back.

The frequencies are very different.

So laser gives you, it's very, very high resolution.

So you can think of it as like a laser beam that goes out, spins around, it shoots out millions of these laser pulses.

you know per second and then each one comes back and you can you know kind of you're kind of sampling the 3d structure of the world with very high resolution a lot of very fine grain map that's right radar has much lower resolution but because of you know the physics of it it can uh it degrades much better in uh adverse weather conditions so fog

snow, heavy rain.

So that could be occluded by verticals between it and the target.

So imagine driving in super dense fog.

Yes.

We're close to San Francisco, so probably don't have to think that hard.

It can be really hard to see.

So cameras degrade.

Laser, depending on the size of the particulates, can degrade better or worse than camera.