Tesla limited themselves to cameras because Musk said “humans can do it with two eyes”. He also didn’t like the look of LiDAR on cars. Such an idiotic decision. Good to see Cruise is not lead by a mega-maniacal CEO.
Currently Tesla is charging $12,000 for access to their self-driving package. Even if we assume that the price would increase to $19,500 if they included a lidar (I'm skeptical), it would be the difference between paying $12,000 for a feature that doesn't work versus $19,500 for a feature that might work. This is a luxury option no matter which way you swing it.
Definitely a luxury option for showing off at this point, as a status symbol, lots of people out there daily drive cars that don't have a bluebook value anywhere near $12k for the entire vehicle.
Problem isn't how much LIDAR used to cost or costs now. Problem is that customers paid for a product, and they still don't have it, many years later. And what is being showed nowadays is nowhere close to what was advertised.
A more accurate summary of Tesla's position is that they beleive that the incoming data from different systems (lidar, radar, visual, etc) must be merged and very often there is contradictory data.
Resolving that correctly takes time (in ms), adds complexity and will sometimes be incorrectly judged.
Since the visual data is the more accurate the vast majority of the time, it will anyways take precedence over the other input. As humans have proven that visual is technically enough, they decided it makes more sense to squeeze the most out of the visual, rather than collecting other data, crunching it, then (in most cases) discarding it.
I am not sure they are right, and am pretty sure that even if so - they need better cameras.
But misquoting them doesn't really help your argument.