Musk's argument "Humans don't have LIDAR, therefore LIDAR is useless" has always seemed pretty dumb to me. It ignores the possibility that LIDAR might be superhuman with superhuman performance. And we also know you can get superhuman performance on certain tasks with insect-scale brains. Musk's just spewing stoner marketing crap that stoners think is deep, not actual engineering savvy.

(and that's not even addressing that human vision is fundamentally a weird sensory mess full of strange evolutionary baggage that doesn't even make sense except for genetic legacy)

Musk's argument also ignores intelligence of humans. The worst case upper bound for reaching human level driving performance without LIDAR is for AI to reach human level intelligence. Perhaps it is not required, but until we see self-driving Teslas performing as well as humans, we won't know this. Worst case scenario is that Tesla unsupervised self-driving is as far away as AGI.