[bydo]

It seems insane that Tesla continues to shun LIDAR. Is it just pride at this point? Apple sells an $800 tablet with it built in, so while obviously the Tesla unit would have to be a lot larger and more powerful, I can’t see the cost argument making sense when the cheapest car they sell costs 50x as much (and the most expensive will be 250x).

[giantrobot]

I think at this point Tesla's camera-only system is an issue of pride for Elon Musk more than anything. He makes declarations and then refuses to backtrack on them ever unless he is literally forced to do so.

In theory a camera-only autonomous system can work effectively but in practice there's innumerable edge cases where it doesn't work well and edge cases are where catastrophic failures happen. If you had infinite processing power and error free AI you might be able to cover many edge cases but Teslas have neither.