Admitting this would be admitting their Tesla will never be self driving.
Having more sensors is complicating the matter, but yes sure you can do that if you want to. But just using vision simplifies training a huge amount. The more you think about it, the stronger this argument is. Synthesising data is a lot easier if you’re dealing with one fairly homogenous input.
But the real point is that cameras are cheap, so you can stick them in many many vehicles and gather vast amounts of data for training. This is why Waymo will lose - either to Tesla or more likely a Chinese car manufacturer.
I do not like Elon because I do not think nazi salutes or racism are cool, but I do think Tesla are correct here. Waymo wins for a while, then it dies.
So the "we can train cheaply because of lots of cameras" falls down when, for example, BYD has all of its cars with lidar for ADAS but can collect the data for training as well as the vision from cameras and whatever other sensors like tyre pressures and suspension readings and all the other sensors that are on a modern car.
The argument that we can make the cars cheaper in the future by not collecting the additional data now has been proven wrong by the CN and KR manufacturers.
That's also independent of the whole EV side of things.
It's just that the cost of lidars are falling like crazy, with new automotive lidars using phased-array laser optics instead of what waymo started with (mechanically scanned lidars)
Which seems like a very bad assumption, I'm not even sure it was ever true and is getting less and less true.
Waymo gets limited data from very limited locations, and will have a harder time synthesising data than others.
But (some) humans have the ability to handle difficult situations, and no autonomous system gets anywhere close to that. So this is more of a "robots handle the easy 80% better, but fail hard on the rest of the 20%". Humans have a possibly worse 80% performance, but shine in the 20%.
If you include minor fender-benders and unreported incidents, estimates drop to around 100,000–200,000 miles between any collision event.
This is cataclysmically bad for a designed system, which is why targets are super-human, not human.
