Tesla and Elon Musk outline why they believe cameras (vs lidar) are all that is needed for Full Self Driving during the Tesla Autonomy Day for Investors on April 22, 2019. Elon also touches on why they don't consider HD Maps and precision lane markings to be

Elon Musk says lidar "is a fool’s errand" and that anyone using lidar is "doomed." He goes on to say that they are "expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see."

There quite a bit of debate in the self-driving world whether lidar is truly required for Full Self-Driving capabilities on autonomous vehicles. Lidar provides very a very accurate, high precision depth map of the world around the car, but is currently still fairly expensive and also has challenges seeing through occlusions, like rain, snow and fog. Tesla's argument is that roads were built for human drivers with vision and that vision systems, such as cameras will do a better job traversing that environment than other sensors, reading all the vision queues meant for drivers, like road signs, etc. In addition, Tesla believes their vision system (plus radar) accurately handles depth sensing problems and that lidar is not needed for that function.

For more on Cameras vs Lidar for Self Driving Cars:

https://www.autopilotreview.com/lidar...