Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

That's what Zipline uses for their fully operational medical delivery system in Rwanda.

The drones are completely blind, directly, but they travel in pre-defined flight paths and communicate with one another and follow directions from flight control.

For self-driving cars, a similar situation may be extremely good GPS geolocation combined with network-wide sensor fusion and mapping. In principle, you could even do real-time optical or synthetic aperture radar from orbit or via persistent aircraft to allow the central controller to identify hazards and obstacles and to update maps in real time without much at all happening on-board except low-latency reactions. Most highways already have much of their length covered by cameras for the local Department of Transportation, and even many intersections and sidestreets have surveillance cameras. A low latency connection to that system, upgraded with higher fidelity, could significantly help autonomous systems. Might be another very helpful public good for cities to provide, much like GPS is provided.

...and on the engineering side, you can have vehicles designed specifically to reduce pedestrian injury, such as not having those large, boxy grilles on SUV. Such things are almost entirely cosmetic and reduce efficiency, so Tesla doesn't have them on their cars. Going beyond that, external airbags may help as well. Zipline uses a foam body and a fail-safe parachute to stop the vehicle if there's a problem.

I’ve been driving for 40+ years, millions of km, 1/2 during winter.

Now, Elon is a Saskatchewan boy, so he should know better. Perhaps he’s forgotten. Winter driving is at best 1/2 vision dependent, often much less. Many times, you have to actively ignore your vision (everything you see is “moving” sideways). Quite often, you’re modulating your throttle to maintain a tiny ratio of +/- acceleration that maintains static friction; as soon as 1 or more contact patches achieve dynamic friction, you’re entering a spin due to yaw forces induced by your other driven wheels.

Much of the time, the road surface adhesion characteristics are best detected by sheen, vibration, sound and guesswork/prediction based on temperature, sunlight, recent weather, etc.

Unless the vehicle has sound, vibration, and vision sensor integration — it cannot hold a candle to human driving, except in the most trivial driving scenarios.

Winter is a complete non-starter for any autonomous driving technology that I am aware of.

I don’t know if Lidar would really help much. It can’t punch through heavy rain/snow, at least not as well as radar anyway. Maybe it would help in trivial driving conditions. I think vision, sound, vibration, and radar with a powerful ANN trained by professional all-season winter drivers in challenging conditions might be useful, and eventually even good. It should be able to perform super-challenging evasion and recovery maneuvers that could save lives!

Sure, but only about 0.000014% of that time occurred while cars existed. It's not like we evolved to control big metal objects hurtling down artificially made flat surfaces.