alt Hacker NewsA Chinese TV channel spent a bunch of money doing ADAS tests and Tesla came out on top of all the Chinese brands, including all the LIDAR systems. Although tests were all in the day time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xumyEf-WRI&t=1203s
https://electrek.co/2025/07/29/another-huge-chinese-self-dri...
XPENG (major chinese ADAS brand) recently decided to copy Tesla's vision-only+AI world gen data approach, after originally focusing only on LIDAR https://electrek.co/2026/04/29/xpeng-vla-2-test-drive-tesla-...
There's also been talk of companies pushing a hybrid LIDAR+vision approach using custom hardware since it's complex to merge the two datasets. So the answer might eventually be somewhere in between instead of companies choosing one or the other depending on costs.
My god, from this video I learned two things:
- Tesla's vision only approach seems a lot more competent than the Lidar suites from smaller Chinese makers. Perhaps I misjudged how necessary Lidar was to achieve safe driving.
- Virtually all of the Chinese car infotainment were basically a 1:1 copy of Tesla's. I couldn't find any that genuinely tried something unique lol