"Its particular superpower is that it can generate high resolution images of its surroundings much better than radar can."

Is this true tough? Car radars are fixed. I guess a comparable lidar would be fixed too and have n points for n lasers.

A rovolving radar would have continuous resolution around while a lidar samples?

I thought the advantage of lidars were accuracy and being better at measuring heights of objects, where as radars flatten the view.

The issue isn't one of fixed vs rotation, it's that radar can't fundamentally achieve the resolution necessary to distinguish important features in the environment. It's easily fooled by oddly-shaped objects, especially concave features like corners, and so while it's great for answer the question of "am I close to something" it's not reliable for telling you what that something is, especially at longer ranges.

I believe automotive radar has a cone of sensitivity that is read as a single "pixel" worth of data. Even if the radar spun like lidar, the radar cone of sensitivity is thousands of times wider than the lidar beam so you can't make much of a picture with radar.

Very high tech radars can generate amazing imagery, but they'll never top what lidar can do. Conceptually they're both doing the same sort of thing using EM radiation, but lidar uses a much smaller wavelength which gives it an intrinsic resolution advantage. Particularly at distances and with hardware sized relevant to cars.