How much does a chauffeur cost for 100,000 miles?
As I mentioned in another post: cars already have these sensors in the form of short range (ultrasound?) sensors for parking. These are regularly covered with ice if you live in a winter climate, and in that situation the parking sensors will continuously beep when you have the car in reverse. A human driver just ignores that and backs out anyway, because you look with your eyes and see nothing, so you assume the warning is false and due to ice. The device isn't even broken, it's just temporarily not able to work until the ice has melted, which is a few hours away when the sun comes up.
An autonomous car could just say "I don't trust the readings from the sensors so you are on your own kid" and I'd drive. And that would be sort of fine (although it can't be several dozen mornings then it's annoying).
But an autonomous taxi can't do that. This is why I think assistant drivers such as teslas autopilot, that can just defer driving to a human, will be around for a very long time (Decades) before we have fully autonomous cars that can drive without backup driver.
Nobody wants to buy a car which requires a new LIDAR to be installed after 100,000 miles for the sum of $7,000.
Hopefully once production starts and yield rates increase the unit costs can shrink small enough to being becoming feasible for integration into lower-end products like cell phones or laptops. I think there are a lot of cool applications for LIDAR which have been blocked by the current expense.