Low-cost LIDAR is a problem that can be solved with money and a customer ready to buy a lot of units. So far, no car company has said "we'll take a million units a year at $100 if they meet these specs." It's lack of demand, not lack of technology. It's a risk for the LIDAR maker. There are automotive radars available better than those currently on cars, but they don't have a volume buyer yet.
Statement A: Tesla is just hyping autonomous driving since no technology can deliver fully autonomous driving right now.
Statement ~A: Low-cost LIDAR is available to any high-volume customer, of which Tesla is one, given Model 3 demand. And LIDAR can deliver fully autonomous driving.
The point simply being, I have a hard time believing that even with good-looking, cheap LIDAR being a possibility, as you claim, Tesla chose to go with an inferior sensor suite, for no apparent reason.
Volvo already has a concealed LIDAR in their self driving car.[1] Volvo will put 100 self-driving cars in the hands of ordinary drivers in Sweden in 2017. This is self-driving by the pros. Makes Tesla look amateurish.[2]
And Volvo is way ahead on marketing self-driving.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q00jIBhkq4 [2] http://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/our-innovation-brands/in... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDB6fFflTVA
R&D doesn't make top-level budget decisions.
If the product fails, that's on Musk and Musk alone.
He takes credit for its successes. He can take responsibility for its failures too, as we would expect from any respectable CEO.
> ...expect to see better design.
> ...costs too much until one of the three companies claiming to be building low-cost automotive LIDARs Real Soon Now manages to deliver.
All I see is future promises. Tesla wants to do this now, that too at mass market costs, independent of whether those promises materialize or not.
It also depends on how much you trust their R&D team. If they thought this was a week sensor suite and something else was just around the corner, they won't risk fitting their cars with inferior technology which would be obsolete in a couple of years, making all the collected data worthless. Yes I am aware they did this to existing cars lacking the full autonomy hardware, but I find that OK, since, for them, they never promised full autonomy to begin with.