Ego. Lidars are expensive, fairly large, power hungry and depending on what your using them for, noisy. Musk doesn't like them because they are expensive. Not

Ego. Lidars are expensive, fairly large, power hungry and depending on what your using them for, noisy. Musk doesn't like them because they are expensive. Not because they don't work. He's spent billions trying to polish the turd that is their monocular depth estimation + radar system. Sure its impressive, but its nowhere near good enough for safe autonomy. (I am sceptical that they ever will with that sensor layout. Thats neatly avoiding the issue that there is no redundancy) If you want ground truth data from a moving vehicle, then there is no real alternative to lidar[1]. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either: 1) an idiot 2) a musk fan 3) trying to sell you something. Now, sure for "autopilot" (cruise control) where there isn't that much to do, radar and basic object detection is good enough. But any sign of danger and it backs off, leaving you no time to unfuck the situation. [1] I work for a mapping company, There are other ways to get to <50cm accuracy point clouds, but its not fast and requires a boat load of GPU (in the order of thousands of hours per km driven)