Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot
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.
A simple example. I was coming out of a business driveway, turning left onto a two lane road. It was dark out with no nearby street lights. There was a car approaching from the left. FSD could see that a car was coming. However, from the view of a camera, it was just a ball of light. There was no reasonable way the camera could discern the distance given the brightness of the headlights. I suspected this was the case and was prepared to intervene, but left FSD on to see how it would respond. Predictably, it attempted to pull out in front of the car and risked a collision.
That kind of thing simply can not be allowed to happen with a truly autonomous vehicle and would never happen with lidar.
Hell, just this morning on my way to work FSD was going run a flashing red light. It's probably 95% accurate with flashing reds, but that needs to be 100%. That being said, my understanding is the current model being trained has better temporal understanding such that flashing lights will be more comprehensible to the system. We'll see.