Look at the dates of the papers I linked. The quote: Approaches based on cheaper monocular or stereo imagery data have, until now, resulted in drastically lowe

Look at the dates of the papers I linked. The quote: Approaches based on cheaper monocular or stereo imagery data have, until now, resulted in drastically lower accuracies --- a gap that is commonly attributed to poor image-based depth estimation. However, in this paper we argue that data representation (rather than its quality) accounts for the majority of the difference. Is from December 2018. Your knowledge of what smart people think is currently outdated, because the new results are so recent. I also agree that Musk was making claims about no need for LIDAR based on his intuition. He could have been terribly wrong, because it was just his intuition. But he is not wrong. BTW - Smart people were wrong about AI many times. They were wrong about ANN being dead end in eighties, they were wrong about symbolic AI. They were also wrong about necessity of LIDAR. In a year of two they will update their believes as more evidence will be piling up.