Why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

Elon has tricked himself into thinking the automated statistics machine is capable of human level cognition. He thinks cars will only need eyeballs like humans have and that things like directly measuring what's physically in front of you and comparing it to a 3D point cloud scan is useless.

Welp, he's wrong. He won't admit it. More people will have to die and/or Tesla will have to face bankruptcy before they fire him and start adding lidar (etc) back in.

Real sad because by then they probably won't have the cash to pay for the insane upfront investment that Google has been plowing into this for 16 years now.

Back when they started, lidar cost a lot of money. They could not have equipped all cars with it.

The issue came when he promised every car would become a robotaxi. This means he either has to retrofit them all with lidar, or solve it with the current sensor set. It might be ego as well, but adding lidar will also expose them to class action suits.

The promise that contributed to the soaring valuation, now looks like a curse that stops him from changing anything. It feels a bit poetic.