[michaelt]

Waymo have all the StreetView data - practically every road in the country, complete with lidar and high-precision GPS. All labelled in detail by recaptcha 'volunteers'

And lidar wouldn't be expensive if manufactured in automotive volumes. Certainly less, per vehicle, than Musk charges people for "full self driving" at the moment.

California allows autonomous vehicles to be tested on the road, so long as every disengagement is reported (along with total miles driven etc). Waymo is testing, reporting mileage and disengagements. So are Toyota, Nvidia, Mercedes, BMW, Cruise, Lyft and Apple.

Guess who's too shy to have driven a single autonomous mile in California, where faults have to be reported? That's right, Tesla!

Tesla might be able to make vision-only driving work. But Musk has been promising deadlines then failing to achieve them for years. They've put all their chips on 'no lidar' and they've had a bunch of problems that lidar could trivially solve - such as detecting a fire truck or concrete barrier right in front of the vehicle. So it's far from obvious to me that they've got a winning approach.