alt Hacker NewsDisagree. The current limitations of Tesla self driving are not around difficulties in judging distances that lidar solves. They're around inference deficiencies with accurate geometry.
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LIDAR provides dense point clouds from which you can derive geometry that Tesla's vision methods struggle to perceive.
(Subtle things, like huge firetrucks parked straight across the road.)
If the AI was good enough, vision-only self-driving would be at least as good as the best human.
The AI isn't good enough. I'm starting to suspect that current ML learning rates can't be good enough in reasonable wall-clock timeframes due to how long it takes between relevant examples for them to learn from.
It's fine to lean on other sensory modalities (including LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever else you fancy) until the AI gets good enough.
It must be a bit embarrassing having Waymo and Baidu cracking ahead with the driverless taxis while the Tesla ones still don't work well though.