This has been my take too. The whole hackathon and hiring effort screams to me of "we have finally concluded that a LIDAR-less implementation is impossible wit

This has been my take too. The whole hackathon and hiring effort screams to me of "we have finally concluded that a LIDAR-less implementation is impossible within our lifetimes. We hope one of you has at least a Hail Mary that we can burn money on so we can at least pretend that it may still be done. Anything to keep us from having to refund millions, dealing with a huge class action, seeing the stock halve, and Elon having to admit that he's something of a charlatan." And that's just on the decision to not use LIDAR because "it's dumb", not the whole concept of self-driving as it has been marketed being decades away.