It’s funny that you’ve got several teams of thousands of engineers working on this and you label the one as “snake-oil” that has deployed their beta to hundreds of thousands of cars. Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
What do you want me to do? Pretend?
Perhaps MDS is real ...
You don't get brownie points if you deliberately hamstring yourselves (no sensors, no maps) and make the problem harder than it already is. It's like trying to jump higher and higher to fly to moon instead of using rockets. It doesn't mean you're tackling a fundamentally harder problem.
He repeatedly claimed that having contradictory radar and camera data means the system won't know what data to trust. Anybody who has worked with data in any capacity can tell you that is complete nonsense. In the past, people would call combining this data "sensor fusion." These days, even high school kids know you just throw all your features into a model. You don't discard red channel data from your cameras because it might conflict with green channel data. Tesla Insurance doesn't throw away all features except driver age when calculating premiums.