Waymos crash less than human drivers

I was initially skeptical about self-driving cars but I've been won over by Waymo's careful and thoughtful approach using visual cues, lidar, safety drivers and geo-fencing. That said I will never trust my life to a Tesla robotaxi that uses visual cues only and will drive into a wall painted to look like the road ahead like Wile E. Coyote. Beep beep.

Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot

I started digging into this rabbit hole and I found it fairly telling how much energy is being expended on social media over LiDAR vs no LiDAR. Much of it feels like sock puppetry led by Tesla investors and their couterparties.

I see this whole thing is a business viability narrative wherein Tesla would be even further under water if they were forced to admit that LiDAR may possess some degree of technical superiority and could provide a reliability and safety uplift. It must have taken millions of dollars in marketing budget to erase the customer experiences around the prior models of their cars that did have this technology and performed accordingly.

Tesla sold a million Model Ys last year. So having a safety increasing part like lidar would reduce the profit by hundreds millions. Removal of ultrasonic sensors saved Tesla tens of millions. Ok, model Y is a big car and I don’t aim for tightest parking spots anymore. But basically removal of anything is very profitable for Tesla. And vice versa adding something useful is very expensive.