You seem to have misunderstood what the lidar team refers to. The Lidar team laid off is not part of Cruise's essential engineering team. It belongs to a small

You seem to have misunderstood what the lidar team refers to. The Lidar team laid off is not part of Cruise's essential engineering team. It belongs to a small, research/demo-focused company that Cruise bought a long time ago which claimed they would make solid-state Lidars that costs 99% less than currently available lidars, which would cut most of the cost to self-driving cars using lidars today. They function as a separate entity from Cruise and have very little to do with Cruise's core self-driving technology team on a day to day basis. As the article has made clear, within Cruise's engineering team, only the non-essential teams (i.e. not core self-driving technology) have been impacted by this layoff.