Your post suggested that missing any obvious obstacles casts doubt on Tesla's claim that lidar isn't necessary, but I'm saying their claim will indeed be proven true if the overall safety level of vision-and-radar autonomy is far better than that of humans, even if they sometimes crash in ways that seem obviously avoidable to humans.

> I didn't say anything about humans vs self-driving cars. I'm arguing about self-driving cars with LIDAR vs those without.

The status quo is humans so the first question is whether it can do at least as well as humans even without LIDAR. It seems to be doing that, even if the things it does get wrong are different things than the things the humans get wrong.

The question of LIDAR vs. not is a separate issue which is purely cost/benefit. Even if LIDAR has some value, it remains to be seen whether that value is ultimately more than its costs, in the same way that we know how to make cars safer by making them weigh 8000 pounds and yet in general we don't do that because the cost is more than the benefit.