race to real self-driving cars, you can't restrict the field to major car manufacturers. It's like wanting to find the best college football team but only looking at those that also have lacrosse programs.

I'm not trying to argue that lidar will never catch up. Lidar paired with AI, or even Lidar paired with some car to car communication might become more reliable/safer than Teslas solution. I'm just arguing that of the current solutions available right now, Teslas is the best.

Lidar doesn't need to "catch up" with anything. Lidar is not a system, it's a sensor. The fact that Tesla's L2 is better than some other car's L2 that uses Lidar doesn't tell you anything about Lidar, it tells you about how that company is implementing L2. What I'm saying is that cars that are trying to get to L4 *right now*, cars that have a suite of self-driving that are way, way beyond what Tesla has now, are all using Lidar.