Just so no one mistakes the above as hyperbolic, musk actually said this during an engineering meeting. His engineers kept telling him why Tesla needed the extra sensors, and he replied "people just have eyes and they can drive."

Anytime someone tries to play him off an engineer or anything but a lucky gambler and flim flam man, just remember the above.

Not a fan of Musk at all, but Lidar is quite expensive. A 64 line lidar with 100m+ range was about 30k+ a few years ago (not sure how prices have changed now). The long range lidar on the top of the Waymo car is probably even higher resolution than this. It's likely that the sensor suite + compute platform on the waymo car costs way more than the actual Jaguar base vehicle itself, though waymo manufactures it's own lidars. I think it would have been impossible to keep the costs of Teslas within the general public's reach if they had done that. Of course, deploying a self driving/L2+ solution without this sensor fidelity is also questionable.

I agree that perception models will not be able deal with this well for a while. They are just not good enough at estimating depth information. That being said, a few other companies also attempted "vision-only" solutions. TuSimple (the autonomous trucking company) argued at some point that lidar didn't offer enough range for their solution since semi trucks need a lot more time to slow down/react to events ahead because of their massive inertia.

LIDAR isn't even that expensive.

Even my cheap chinese vacuum cleaner has it.

Of course humans also have a brain whereas computers don't exactly think about things. Perhaps we should have given them a competitive advantage

Also it's such a shit excuse anyway, I am perfectly capable of driving a car myself, but I would like it to drive itself so I don't have to, so clearly just because humans do it without additional aid does not mean the additional aid is not warranted or desired.

More money tho.