Way more than 3 companies. The reason I'd want to see a vision-only mappless demo is because Lidar and HD maps are a crutch, which make it easy to create a 90%

Way more than 3 companies. The reason I'd want to see a vision-only mappless demo is because Lidar and HD maps are a crutch, which make it easy to create a 90% functional demo, yet are insufficient to cover the long tail end, which is inherently a computer vision problem. There is not enough information density or semantics in Lidar data to make high level judgements, which makes it useless for many relevant corner cases. Meanwhile, vision has all the information but it's a hard yet necessary AI problem to extract it. The goal is a working product indeed, but if it involves teleoperation, human annotation for maps, and over-relies on Lidar, it will be a slow and unreliable AI granny driver, which will penetrate at most 1% of the market. There is a whole lot of unscalable human effort being swept under the rug in most autonomous demos, so don't believe everything you read in the media.