I think once you get to "overhaul civil infrastructure" vs "install lidar on cars" you've lost the thread a little bit here. Those suggestions are at least an order of magnitude harder to accomplish than simply installing a better sensor suite on the car.

Lidar isn’t a silver bullet. Google has been at it for over a decade and their taxi service still gets confused by traffic cones.

The cheapest Tesla is the base Model 3 at $49,000. How much more expensive would it be with lidar? It’s already inaccessible to the masses.

I'm not sure Tesla was ever aiming to have cars "Accessible to the masses" as their initial target. They seem, at least to me, to always be aiming at the more luxury end of the market.

Regarding lidar itself not being the silver bullet, that's true. The real silver bullet will be when we have an actual AI and not just stacked ML models. The difference between parsing visual and other sensor data and using that to navigate the world and understanding that visual and sensor data is a very sizeable one and I suspect until we get a reasonably decent task-focused AI capable of understanding we're going to see lots of these kinds of shortcomings.

Well I called out the Model 3 specifically as it was supposed to have been the car for the masses. I consider it way too expensive for the masses, but it’s likely one of the most affordable pure EVs you can buy, even at the high price.

I suspect actual self driving to follow the Pareto principle. The last 20% will take 80% of the time. And I’m not even convinced we’ve hit the 80% yet, anyway.