[madamelic]

> How much more expensive is it that it seemed like such a splurge?

LiDARs at the time Tesla decided against them were $75k per unit. Currently they are $9,300 per car with some promising innovations around solid state LiDAR which could push per-unit down to hundreds of dollars.

Tesla went consumer first so at the time, a car would've likely cost $200k+ so it makes sense why they didn't integrate it. I believe their idea was to kick off a flywheel effect on training data.

[jjice]

Holy - okay never mind, I didn't realize just how expensive LiDAR was...