Funny thing is, they removed Radar because it provided less accurate data on depth than their vision system. I doubt that there's much gain in including an additional source of depth information.

Sure, it might be more precise than what is possible with vision alone, but it's also not needed.

Source: Musk said so and provided no proof.

It is the absolute standard in any safety-critical industry to have multiple sensors all feeding data and making up for each other's weaknesses. Cars are not excluded from that.

I refuse to believe that Tesla's image-based AI can discern better distance and depth information than LIDAR (even if they're using cameras with calibrated positioning for stereoscopic vision or something) without better sources than "Elon said so."

And I am talking about LIDAR not RADAR, even though RADAR also could be used as yet another sensor in the stack. Using only regular vision is a typical dumb Musk thing; LIDAR was quite a bit more expensive when these self-driving things begun to take hold and Musk didn't want that cost so he went all-in with his own dumb solution of "software will fix it."

Reminds me a bit about how Musk originally wanted to fly people to Mars, by 2014, with a launch escape system on the rocket.

By now the launch escape system has been scrapped wholesale, the new approach; Just have to fly enough rockets, without exploding, until safety becomes a side-effect of economies of scale and improved tech.

It's a combination of "tech your way out of the problem" with "grow your way out of the problem". Which might be a viable approach for creating non-integral software products, but seems like a really bad fit when peoples lives are at stake.

No one "banned" LIDAR.. I think whatever comes to be will rely on more than just vision at some point in years to come. Regardless of what Elon says.

I agree it will need to go beyond cameras if it ever works. But the question becomes, will Tesla be on the hook to upgrade the sensors in cars that are camera only, or will they instead deploy unworkable software to those cars?