The issue from my (admittedly little) experience is that it's all about edge cases and reliability. It's easy to make a demo with cameras only but to deal with

The issue from my (admittedly little) experience is that it's all about edge cases and reliability. It's easy to make a demo with cameras only but to deal with the countless unimaginable edge cases, you need LIDAR. The other factor is that you need damn near six sigma accuracy for ML algos for robust SDCs, and while it's theoretically possible to match LIDAR with cameras and current DL, it's impossible to do so with the needed 99.99 percent accuracy for autonomy.