I agree it's possible to make a lidar unit for $25 down-the-line; there's nothing fundamentally expensive. However, it's not just a question of volume. It took decades of Moore's Law before computers became cheap. Optical disk drives took a decade or two as well for reading, and more for writing. Display technologies were a little bit faster, but not fast.

I'm pretty convinced if we wanted to make 100 million lidar units in 2023 or 2024, the cost would be approximately* the same as it is today.

* From a computer science big-O perspective. Simple volume economics might drive the cost in half, or even a quarter, but not down by an order-of-magnitude.