They haven’t announced anything like that - they’re just using LiDAR rigs to validate data from their vision based approach, particularly distance. It actually even mentions something about it at the bottom of the article you referenced.

My claim:

> they’re using lidar to develop FSD.

Your comment:

> they’re just using LiDAR rigs to validate data from their vision based approach

In 2019, Elon called lidar a crutch:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is...

No public announcement. They merely have some lidar equipment for testing. I'd be shocked if they haven't already had lidar units for years. After all, you can't compare your approach to lidar if you don't have a lidar unit to compare to.

This might be for improving their camera-based vision system by collecting both camera inputs and accurate ground-truth data via LIDAR to train the system with.