True, true. We may see a change of heart for them if solid state LiDAR ever actually hits the market, but last I checked Velodyne/Ouster keep announcing things and then letting them disappear. I did see them saying they have samples available for 2025 model years cars so perhaps Tesla could be testing with that now. I don’t see them deploying mechanical LiDAR but solid state is similar enough to a camera they may do it.

Edit: then again for such a critical component Tesla might want to make their own solid state LiDAR, or at least license someone’s technology so they can produce them on their own terms.

LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.