I'm surrounded by waymos every time I go out and I can tell you that if they "almost hit you" three times then that's very likely a you problem -- and a reason for more waymos, not fewer.

Anecdotally, only once have I been in a situation where I've said, "do better, robot" because I was slightly inconvenienced by it.

By the numbers there are very few waymo incidents compared to human drivers and those include waymos being hit by bicyclists who aren't paying attention.

Small correction here: they never had LIDAR. Cars with LIDAR have big racks on top with a spinny thing measuring the surroundings. Teslas had radar but removed during the chip shortage (and disabled it on existing cars) and acted like it was an improvement. The radar was used for distance keeping on cars and could actually detect the car in front of the car by bouncing signals off the ground, it was really slick.

Humans cannot, in fact, drive cars well. Humans kill tens of thousands of other humans with cars every year in the US alone.

That statement of him is not entirely wrong. But we humans have a very powerful bio computer that is perfectly tuned to process those visual inputs in realtime. Until a comparable performance is possible, removing LIDAR is very stupid.

And let me just add, Musk ordered the LIDAR removed against the engineers better judgement.