Will Tesla's camera- only autonomy prove its mettle?

I'm still not convinced that Tesla's camera-only approach will work well in all situations.

- JAMES HEIN

According to a quick AI search, Elon doesn’t like Lidar based on “cost, complexity, and philosophical disagreement with its necessity”. Other manufacturers seem to have no problem with the first two of these and I challenge his last reason. I would have thought that a combination of available technologies would give you the safest options for all circumstances. As someone who's done software testing, I'm always thinking about the edge cases. Something like a small child running in from the side of the vehicle, a runaway beer keg or something falling off an adjacent work site. Perhaps Elon is right and a camera array backed by an AI may be able to handle all cases but let's see just how well this plays out over the next few years. To date there have been around 50 fully autonomous Tesla taxis tested and based on the videos they still had their share of issues. By comparison Waymo has been operating commercial rides in self-driving cars in San Francisco since 2023, and in Austin since March with no safety monitor. According to the CEO, the cars have made 10 million trips safely so far.