Rivian‘s VP of Autonomy and AI James Philbin has joined the discussion regarding autonomous vehicles and the use of LiDAR — to which Tesla‘s CEO Elon Musk firmly opposes.
The EV maker led by founder RJ Scaringe is preparing to adopt LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology in its upcoming models as sensor costs continue to decline sharply.
Speaking with Business Insider on Wednesday, Philbin stated that Tesla‘s “rigid point of view” on different sensor modalities isn’t “fully explainable just from an engineering point of view.”
“On the good side, they’ve really sort of pushed the OEMs forward in the sense that they took a very ML [machine learning]-based approach early on,” the executive noted.
However, he believes the Elon Musk-led company’s approach to autonomous driving is “a mixed bag.”
Philbin has been Rivian‘s Vice President for AI and Autonomy since 2022.
He has an extensive background on AI software, having “developed core computer vision and machine learning algorithms” for Google between 2010 and 2015.
From there, he moved to the Amazon-backed autonomous driving company Zoox, which was developing “autonomous driving in complex urban environments such as San Francisco.”
He was a Senior Director in the company from 2015 to 2020. He then moved back to Alphabet, specifically as a Software Engineering Director for Waymo, the company’s autonomous driving subsidiary.
Both Waymo and Zoox use LiDAR in their sensor mix.
Waymo‘s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said earlier this year that she sees LiDAR as a crucial safety feature, stating, “I think it’s been really important for us to prove out the safest path to doing this.”
“For us, there’s no reason to eliminate aspects that make it safe,” she added, referring to Elon Musk’s suggestion that automakers should eliminate LiDAR entirely.
In April, when questioned on how Tesla‘s robotaxi would compare against Waymo’s offering, “especially regarding pricing, geofencing and regulatory flexibility,” Musk mocked the company’s approach.
“The issue with Waymo’s cars is it costs Way-mo [way more] money,” Musk joked.
The use of LiDAR is one of the reasons that Tesla‘s CEO cites for the higher costs.
In 2019, he had already referred to the sensors as “friggin stupid,” “expensive and unnecessary.”
“Once you solve vision, it’s worthless. So you have expensive hardware that’s worthless on the car,” he added back then.
Musk recalled these comments on X in March, comparing it to Tesla‘s camera-based approach.
“People don’t shoot lasers out of their eyes to drive,” Musk wrote, telling people to “just try Tesla self-driving today, which just uses cameras and AI, and you will understand.”
Last week, Rivian‘s CEO RJ Scaringe was questioned about his stance on the sensor debate by Stripe co-founder and President John Collison, on the Cheeky Pint podcast.
“I think for some reason, this has been a lightning rod issue in ways that I wouldn’t have expected,” the chief executive said.
He added that “if you look at sensor theory, and even if you have noisy sensors, just mathematically it proves that having more sensors is a better approach.
At the same time, Scaringe noted that the cost of LiDAR has decreased significantly: “15 years ago, a LiDAR was $75,000. Today, a LiDAR is like 200 bucks. So it’s a very low cost sensor.”
Rivian has adopted a neural net based approach, which combines both cameras and LiDAR sensors to collect data about the environment and then processes it to detect objects and decide how the car must move.
“The view of the entirety of the science community is that having multiple sensors is helpful because you build a more accurate view of the world,” Scaringe had said earlier, on The Verge‘s Decoder podcast.
“Ultimately, the way that that information is fused very early, if you have multiple cameras coupled with radar, coupled with potentially lidar, as you said, it gives you a more fulsome and accurate picture,” the CEO added.
“It also allows you to train your model better.”
A job posting published in mid-August for Rivian’s Pose Team — the group responsible for mapping, localization, and sensor calibration — confirmed the plans to integrate LiDAR.
The listing included the development of algorithms for calibrating the company’s “Autonomy sensor suite which includes cameras, IMU, lidar, and radar.”
