Elon Musk: “Anyone relying on Lidar is doomed.” Experts: Maybe not

The take home point here is this:

"But if Tesla ultimately succeeds, it won't be because it's easier to achieve full autonomy without lidar than with it. It will simply be because Tesla began large-scale data collection from cameras long before other carmakers.

In short, the fact that Tesla backed itself into a corner by promising customers full autonomy without lidar doesn't prove that other companies won't find lidar helpful to their own self-driving efforts."

A great summary. The only thing it misses is that lidar is getting more and more like a depth camera. SPADs can sense ambient light and create 2D images that are perfectly correlated to 3D images, making it possible to apply 2D algorithms to 3D data [1].

[1] https://www.ouster.io/blog-posts/2018/8/31/the-camera-is-in-...