Musk's words made many people shake immediately, thinking that it really looks like an "appendix", but is it really just a joke?
If you think in a different direction, you can roughly understand, because the first one mentioned expensive, if according to Tesla's 1.81 million sales last year, 3000 lidars are 1810000×3000=5430000000, this number is huge, and 100 billion investment in research and development of AI large models is inevitable, because intelligent driving needs training.
Another point is even more important, if domestic manufacturers blindly follow the trend, they will eventually suffer if they are not ready to break into the field of visual driving technology.
Because I only know the advanced and don't know the efforts behind the advanced, I ignore a fatal pain point, that is, Tesla can buy NVIDIA H100 and H200, two AI chips with super computing power, for large model training, while domestic manufacturers can only buy a castrated version of H20, or choose Huawei Ascend 910B, but the current limited production capacity has led to a certain delay. As for the reason why the Zhijie S7 launched the visual driving version is not to follow the trend, but as an entry version choice, this point has really been taken crookedly.
Unless you cooperate with a third party, such as DJI, you have also launched a visual driving solution, and Huawei's ADS basic visual driving solution, not that Huawei does not have it, but that it is high-end and more advanced!
The world once again staged a thrilling scene of returning to the original in a flash, telling everyone not to always think that foreign technology is advanced, and domestic cars already have good technology in front of them!
Visual driving is really good, but ignoring a very critical shortcoming, that is, "visual misalignment" even the human eye will cause visual confusion due to the dimming of the ambient light and similar colors, not to mention the picture capture of the machine, which may be the reason why the old horse adds radar to the vision in the later stage, but at the same time, it has a lidar that can actively emit light points to explore whether there is a risk of collision ahead, this is the key!
So lidar is still very useful, it should be said that it is a long-term useful configuration!