Sensor cost is a lame excuse, especially coming from a company that's one of the leaders of EV world. Battery prices are decreasing, but sensors wouldn't?
Tesla put constrain on themselves, because they wanted to sell product years before they existed, and they were super cheap on HW, to optimize their costs.
They optimized their solution, before they even had a slightest idea what's needed to make it work.
core to tesla's strategy is to do massive data collection from consumer-owned cars using beta software (and hardware, that the consumer pays for). that model is not compatible with expensive lidars, which contrary to some other comments in this thread, are still very expensive (just because the entry-level pucks are cheap, does not mean full lidar coverage is cheap). there is no way they could push $100k of sensors on consumers to build out their data collection pipeline. when tesla was first starting out, affordable lidar did not even exist so it's hard to call that a lame excuse.
all that said, I'm still pessimistic about tesla's chances at making camera-only L4 work in any short time horizon. we will see if they pull it off, but it's such a severe disadvantage compared to fully-kitted competitors.
I don't think it's a lame excuse at all. Tesla barely managed to get a profitable car on the market given battery costs, and had to bet their company on a strategy of massive investment and reducing costs over a decade+ period.
They are also ahead of every other auto maker in commercially purchasable L2 autopilot.
With that context, it doesn't make sense to add $50k+ to the price of their cars (e.g. doubling the cost of a Model Y) just to get slightly better autopilot performance. Lidar would help them in some cases (e.g. stationary objects), but it's not a panacea. Their strategy makes perfect sense given they want to sell semi-affordable cars to the public.
On the flipside, Cruise & Waymo's strategy of "geofenced L4 at any initial cost" makes perfect sense for their short term robotaxi ambitions.
Maybe in ~10 years these strategies will intersect, but for the time being they are completely different products.
> Tesla barely managed to get a profitable car on the market given battery costs, and had to bet their company on a strategy of massive investment and reducing costs over a decade+ period.
Numbers came out a few days ago showing that Teslas had some of the highest margins in the mainstream auto segment.
Tesla put constrain on themselves, because they wanted to sell product years before they existed, and they were super cheap on HW, to optimize their costs.
They optimized their solution, before they even had a slightest idea what's needed to make it work.