Elon Musk and Austin Russell
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Austin Russell said Tesla will not become autonomous without using LiDAR technology.
Russell’s company makes LiDAR tech, but Elon Musk has continually spoken out against the radars in the past.
The 27-year-old also took a jab at Tesla’s FSD, calling its marketing “pretty questionable.”
While Elon Musk has been promising for years that autonomous cars are on the horizon, Austin Russell — the world’s youngest self-made billionaire — has built an empire betting against him.
Russell founded Tesla self-driving rival Luminar Technologies in 2012 when he was a 17-year-old. The company listed on Nasdaq in 2020 and made Russell a billionaire virtually overnight.
Luminar uses high-tech lasers called LiDAR to help cars navigate and already has contracts with several major automakers, including Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, and Nissan. LiDAR uses pulses of light to create a 3-D map of a car’s environment, allowing it to determine the best course and avoid obstacles.
In the past, Musk has spoken out against LiDAR technology. In 2019, the Tesla CEO described Luminar’s technology — which is used by most other self-driving-car firms — as “doomed.” Instead of LiDAR, Tesla relies on a suite of external cameras and other sensors for its autonomous-driving efforts. In October, The New York Times reported that Musk repeatedly instructed the company’s Autopilot team, which works on self-driving car tech, to ditch radar and use only cameras instead, as it most closely emulates the human eye.
In an interview with Time, Russell said he believes Tesla will not be able to fully achieve self-driving technology until it embraces LiDAR technology.
“From an autonomous standpoint, if you want to be able to get to a point where you’re truly autonomous, that’s where LiDAR comes into play,” Russell said.
The 27-year-old also took a jab at Tesla’s Full Self-Driving program, which has come under fire in recent months from regulators due to the potentially misleading nature of its name. In reality, the beta program acts as an add-on that can switch lanes and stop at lights, but still requires a licensed operator behind the wheel.
Russell said Tesla’s FSD has “so much room for improvement,” even as a driver assistance feature.
“There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of what they’re trying to do,” Russell said. “The only discrepancy is the advertising of what it actually is, and some of the manipulation [of] consumers, which is pretty questionable. Calling it ‘self-driving’ at all, much less ‘full self-driving’ is a fundamentally inaccurate statement.”
Unlike Musk, Russell has said he believes a future with fully autonomous vehicles is decades away, calling himself “the chief autonomous vehicle skeptic” and saying there’s always been an “assumption” that the issue of self-driving would be solved within the next few years.
“Even today, it’s still not within grasp,” Russell told Time. “There’s no commercially viable business that’s centered around all that.”
Instead of focusing on creating an autonomous car, Russell said Luminar has made the “right bet” in focusing more on creating better driver assistance tools and moving toward what he calls an “uncrashable car.”
“We effectively have more major commercial wins than any other LiDAR company, and probably any other autonomous vehicle industry company,” Russell said. “We won most of the game.”
Read Time’s full interview with the Luminar CEO on its website.