The most pertinent point here being that although collecting lots of self driving car data is easy, the tail and unexpected events that you care about are surprisingly rare. And many of these events can also be entirely new (never seen before). Current AI SOTA techniques simply require too much data and cannot reason well enough to solve this.
Leaving Musk aside, amongst those who are serious about self driving cars, e.g. Waymo, there is still a clear emerging picture that current AI techniques are too weak to get there right now. The limitations of current sensors and compute hardware are not helping either. Going the other way and eliminating LIDAR isn't going to help.
Leaving Musk aside, amongst those who are serious about self driving cars, e.g. Waymo, there is still a clear emerging picture that current AI techniques are too weak to get there right now. The limitations of current sensors and compute hardware are not helping either. Going the other way and eliminating LIDAR isn't going to help.