They pair it with a forward facing radar which is inexpensive and good at depth perception.
Elon predicts all competitors will eventually drop lidar. He mentions it's expensive, but also not as good in a lot of cases (and all roads/signs are designed for vision).
He argues that getting vision to work is a prerequisite for getting self-driving to work and once you have it working, lidar is worthless (and unnecessary).
Elon Musk is noted for his premature optimization.
Case in point: both the Gigafactory (vastly overbuilt for the quantity of batteries actually produced) and the Alien Dreadnought (vastly overbuilt for the number of cars Tesla current produces...assuming that Tesla is ever able to get the fancy automation working). Boring Co digging a two-mile tunnel in West LA without bothering to learn how to pour concrete smoothly, or to make the "rails" the proper width, or learning about ventilation, or access points....
Often reverse is true. Trying to optimize system with million lines of code may require serious change in architecture and much harder because of backward compatibility and all the legacy baggage. As many people would describe it, it much harder to fix an airplane that must also continue to stay in the air.
It's not easier to optimize a working system for consumers if "optimization" == "not dying". What will happen is you will deoptimize your brand's safety and find yourself regulated.
“In my view, it’s a crutch that will drive companies to a local maximum that they will find very hard to get out of,” Musk said. He added, “Perhaps I am wrong, and I will look like a fool. But I am quite certain that I am not.”
Their forward facing radar has failed to avoid crashes into big, stationary objects (at least 2 semi trailers, a fire truck, and more). The explanation I got was that radar is rather noisy, so it's handy to filter-out stationary objects (like road signs, broken down vehicles on the shoulder, and fatally, any any semi trailer crossing your lane)
Elon predicts all competitors will eventually drop lidar. He mentions it's expensive, but also not as good in a lot of cases (and all roads/signs are designed for vision).
He argues that getting vision to work is a prerequisite for getting self-driving to work and once you have it working, lidar is worthless (and unnecessary).