Why Elon rejected LiDAR for cars while personally spearheading LiDAR development at SpaceX “LiDAR is lame. They’re all going to dump LiDAR. Mark my words” And years later, the industry is starting to realize just how massive that mistake that was Automakers spent years piling expensive sensors onto cars while Elon took the opposite path: Solve vision People acted like Elon hated LiDAR He literally spearheaded the development of SpaceX’s own LiDAR system from scratch Dragon uses LiDAR to navigate and dock with the International Space Station Because in space, LiDAR actually solves a real problem But for cars, once vision is solved, LiDAR becomes expensive, redundant hardware That became Tesla’s entire autonomy architecture: Cameras, Neural networks, Massive real-world training data........AI doing the driving And Cybercab is the purest version of that philosophy. It comes with no LiDAR or giant rooftop sensor array or a hardware circus Just cameras, onboard AI and FSD Elon chose this path more than a decade ago while almost everyone else was throwing more sensors at the problem Now Cybercab is being built with pure vision from day one Solve vision well enough...and autonomy becomes dramatically simpler, cheaper and infinitely easier to scale The industry kept building autonomy around more hardware. Elon built Tesla around better intelligence