Why does Tesla bother with radar and ultrasonic sensors? Humans can drive without them.
Why isn't every car body made from carbon fiber? It's lighter and sturdier that alternatives. It's also more expensive so you can put it in $60k car but not in $25k car.
Radar and ultrasonic sensors are cheap, low power and plentiful.
Putting several lidars on a car would be too expensive, would use too much power (less range) and there isn't a supply chain to make 2 million a year just for Tesla (500k cars x 4 lidars per car).
It's just isn't possible to put a lidar today on a mass market car and Tesla wants to solve self-driving before lidar becomes cheap enough.
On the other hand, Waymo et. al. are not risking anything by using lidars. If they turn out to be redundant, it should be easy to remove them cheaply.
BTW, all companies that can, use lidars. Even MobileEye says that their L4 system will use lidars and they've been working on a camera based system for 2 decades. Tesla doesn't use lidars because they can't.
1. Lidar is expensive for everyone. It’s not like Tesla will pay more than other manufacturers. They’d prefer not to use Lidar, but if cameras just don’t cut it, I don't think they would die on that hill.
2. I’m sure there is some fine print around the current FSD being for camera based sensors only. They can easily say the car tops off at L4 for cameras, and L5 needs Lidar, if we come to that bridge