You are correct, but the problem is nobody at Tesla or any other self driving company for that matter knows what they are doing when it comes to AI

If you are doing end to end driving policy (i.e the wrong way of doing it), having lidar is important as a correction factor to the cameras.

So far, end to end seems to be the only way to train complex AI systems that actually works.

Every time you pit the sheer violent force of end to end backpropagation against compartmentalization and lines drawn by humans, at a sufficient scale, backpropagation gets its win.