They also have Lidar cars in Fremont that drive around every so often, that doesn't mean they plan to go into every car anytime soon. It'd be short-sighted to not continuously evaluate solutions that previously had constraints (despite what Elon says, they'd add Lidar if it made economic sense and it showed an improvement over camera-only, as their camera detection is pretty accurate these days in FSD).
I’ve seen their LIDAR cars in SF too - if I had to guess they’re gathering ground truth data to train monocular depth models on.
And even really naive integrations of LIDAR will show big improvements over camera only. You can do something as simple as overlay the returns from the most recent LIDAR spin over a camera image as a fourth channel and feed it into your models and most of your depth prediction/spatial predictions will improve dramatically.
