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> Google's self driving car project depends on a Lidar system that costs $75,000 today.

I believe you're multiple orders of magnitude off here. Google's LIDAR is surprisingly cheap. I believe they used expensive Velodyne units in earlier versions.

Heck, even brand-new Velodyne devices are only $8k.

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That's not multiple orders of magnitude; it's, at most, one.

IIRC Google has an in-house unit that is considerably less expensive, at least in the sense that they project it would cost considerably less to manufacture in volume.

I'm not sure of the specifics, but I think it's fancier than the $8000 unit you're referring to. The vpl-16 only has 16 vertical channels. The next up has 32 vertical channels and costs closer to 30k. The biggest one with 64 channels seems to be around 70k.

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