Even amongst traditional manufacturers, Ford, Nissan, and Volvo have all opted for use of lasers along with mmWave. Volkswagon also has laser sensors on at leas

Even amongst traditional manufacturers, Ford, Nissan, and Volvo have all opted for use of lasers along with mmWave. Volkswagon also has laser sensors on at least some models. And normal CAS are merely final emergency backups to normal involved human driver. They're added systems to help cover gaps in attention, and many simply depend on alerting the driver, not even doing breaking on their own. Whereas Tesla has been marketing autopilot as on the path to full level 5 since the beginning right down to the branding (vs "advanced driver assistance" or something), and whatever asterisks they've added since drivers keep depending on autopilot and autopilot vehicles keep crashing into stationary objects. Sure, maybe better software could avoid that, but the fact on the ground is that it hasn't. And for a life safety critical system, throwing hardware at a problem vs pure software is not wrong just because it's more expensive. Tesla may be trying to optimize costs and be aggressive as they have been in other areas, doing the whole MVP/iteration thing, but this is one place where that just isn't necessarily the greatest strategy. They should be aiming to be better than human drivers not just as-good-as, and the challenges and limitations of ultra complex software based systems development are hardly some new revelation. They should have been prepared for that too with more hardware backstop.