Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument was more that to do it generally you need vision to work, lidar will always be a narrow solution and redundant when you have vision. It might end up that solving the narrow city problem with high res maps is valuable enough to tackle anyway, but it could still be true that will never solve the general case. Of course, it could be true that Tesla was be unable to solve it also. Though at some point attach…
Just because humans can generally do it without lidar and other sensors, does not mean that lidar and other sensors, would not improve human driving, if we could somehow integrate them seamlessly (and well reduce their price). A car equipped with more sensors, will always be better at handling more situations, than the one without them, no matter how "smart" their drivers become.
Yes, integrating seamlessly is the hard part.
For Tesla, they found the increased sensor fusion complexity made the overall system less reliable, which was what informed their attempt at vision only. Karpathy went into this on Lex Fridman's podcast.
Only with better sensor fusion algorithms that worst case the overall system performance doesn't degrade with additional sensors. Tesla could have hit compute bounds in order to meet latency requirements for example (or they couldn't find the right technique/algorithms).
Sounds like a hard problem but I imagine this would eventually be overcome in the future. More sensors is definitely the future.