Just because not needing lidar would be great for Tesla, doesn't make it real. That's wishful thinking. Tesla is not entitled to a well working lidar-free solution just because they need to sell cars right now.
Tesla has cars with Lidar on the road to check the models as well.
And who says anything about entitled, they have spent a huge amount of effort and therefore money into a solution that they think will be better.
Nobody with Lidar has delivered either so what is better is still an open question. Tesla has picked their strategy and working on it. Others do the same.
My point is simply, not that Tesla has the perfect solution, rather the idea that Tesla is operating based on 'ego' is idiotic. Elon Musk and his companies have repeatably shown that they are very willing, comically so, to throw away work and go back to the beginning if they have encountered a problem. E
lon is well known for not falling into the sunk cost fallacy. Consider the manufacturing of Model 3. Consider Starship being planned to be built from carbon fiber, and switching to stainless steel.
Do you really believe they know lidar would be better and they not changing because of what Musk said 4 years ago? That is literally the opposite of how his company have operated.
As a matter of fact, yes: self-driving Teslas have been crashing into emergency vehicles so often, they are being investigated[1]
The investigation you reference stems from previous versions of the softawre.
The broader context can't be ignored when discussing the new software, but it's reasonable to point to progress as demonstration that the chosen technology path is a viable one.
The sunk cost fallacy is stronger when it's not just R&D but thousands of people who paid 10k$ on the promise that their car had all the hardware required... Cars that shipped without a lidar.
And I believe waymo uses lidar and has, as far as I know, killed nobody. They also take a more cautious approach where bystanders are not turned into beta testers, of course :-)
Sorry, what’s your point? You need to prove that the autopilot software has killed more people than if the cars were driven by humans.
> And I believe waymo uses lidar and has, as far as I know, killed nobody.
With a footprint probably orders of magnitude smaller than Tesla. What do you want to bet is the difference in terms of miles driven by Waymo vs. miles driven by Tesla autopilot?