The issue isn't that it's wildly expensive for cars. But rather for Tesla.
Because the company has promised that existing Tesla owners would be able to use FSD.
Having to retrofit them to add LiDAR sensors would be cost-prohibitive.
Also he wants to reuse the foundational machine vision tech in Optimus bot, which probably won't have lidar.
Based on presentations we've seen what sets Tesla apart are its datasets not the core technology.
And those don't translate across to the Optimus bot.
I think they will though, I think the enormous corpus of video data and the supercluster that powers self driving development are the machine vision analog of internet scale text data that gave rise to LLMs. We'll see the same moment for vision models that text prediction models had once the data is there, where an enormous foundation model becomes much much better, especially at zero-shot tasks.
FSD is already using the fruits of this today with their end to end NN.
And based on what we've seen the results haven't improved enough to put them close to Waymo.
Optimus should probably have LiDAR more than a car…
I would guess the plan is to have the foundational machine vision tech that becomes the core of robotics sensors. Not just Optimus but every robot arm in a factory, robot mule, etc. I don't think everything will have LIDAR if its proven to be unnecessary.
The foundational tech Tesla is using is the same as everyone.
We know this because there have been public presentations about it.
And inventing groundbreaking new tech is so far the domain of academia and large, well funded R&D labs. And almost always shared.