But why is Elon so opposed to Lidar? I don't get it.

At that time Lidar was too expensive and ugly to be putting in every car. Robust Lidar for SAE level 4 autonomous vehicles is still not cheap. Tesla's computers were hopelessly underpowered as well, but that has always been a less interesting subject for discussion.

But that's what's needed. Tesla could have developed an effective and cheap lidar if they decided millions of their cars needed it.

Not too long ago there were over 5 dozen startups in the automotive grade lidar space. Lidar is now much cheaper and smaller, but still very conspicuous and still too expensive to be putting in every vehicle.

He argued the case in 2016 iirc.

The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to ultimately have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case.

I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem.

If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off. His model is all this sort of first principles thinking, it's why his companies pull off things like starship. I wouldn't bet against it.

If humans had radar they would reverse into obstacles less often, and not be blindsided or T-boned as readily so long as their radar could still reach the object moving rapidly in their direction.

Elon is being foolish and weirdly anthropomorphic.

If humans had ten eyes always looking simultaneously and never got tired they would also not hit stuff.

And yet ... Tesla is backtracking (read TFA) while Waymo is steadily getting there.

It’s amazing people heard that argument and didn’t immediately write him off as having zero clue what he’s talking about.