> ...expect to see better design.
> ...costs too much until one of the three companies claiming to be building low-cost automotive LIDARs Real Soon Now manages to deliver.
All I see is future promises. Tesla wants to do this now, that too at mass market costs, independent of whether those promises materialize or not.
It also depends on how much you trust their R&D team. If they thought this was a week sensor suite and something else was just around the corner, they won't risk fitting their cars with inferior technology which would be obsolete in a couple of years, making all the collected data worthless. Yes I am aware they did this to existing cars lacking the full autonomy hardware, but I find that OK, since, for them, they never promised full autonomy to begin with.