I've always read it as Tesla trying to do a paradigm leap. It seems everyone in self-driving knows you can do it pretty well with a huge variety of sensors, but what if you got extremely good at only camera-based then added in the new sensors.
Basically, if you can establish that the very worst case works, you can add in more sensors to go beyond that and have the cars become superhuman rather than having to depend on all sensors to consistently be working to have a safe vehicle.
I’m not sure how valid an assumption that is, they could wind up just adding complexity and creating noise.
And what if the best answer is being extremely good at lidar-only and then adding in cameras on top.
now is a terrible time to buy a new Tesla car.
But I do realize not everybody can wait it outI think that's debatable. There are plenty of stories of trying to force an outcome of a big software project and things not going as expected.
https://medium.com/@herbcaudill/lessons-from-6-software-rewr...
Naked cameras jutting out are no better.
Both of those reasons are of course flimsy, if true: form cannot always come before function.