Lets look at this properly.

Lidar has already dropped below 10K, and it will keep dropping for some time before it his a place of diminishing returns, so they WILL be cheap enough to put in all cars, and they will be in those cars (even Tesla's car).

Now in 2020 they are NOT cheap enough to put into all Tesla's. But vision is. And putting vision in his cars today allows him to gain 10x or 100x the data of anyone else.

And you are right, that vision can handle certain things better than LIDAR, but this require collossal training data. He will be the only one who has that data.

Then once the price of LIDAR is driven down he can reverse himself and add this to his car, yielding a car that is more accurate than any other on the planet.

I doubt he honestly believes that cameras alone are better than cameras plus lidar. He just does not want to say... right now I cannot afford to put "free" lidar on every car I sell just get the get data I need for tomorrow.

And your argument that vision is better 'cause that how humans do it, is just silly nonesense. Should we locomote using retracting fibers instead of combustion engines since that is how humans do it?