LIDAR has been advancing rapidly in the past year. While Elon Musk has famously denounced the merits of LIDAR here, here here
That said, I don’t think you need LIDAR. I think you can do this all with passive optical and then with maybe one forward RADAR… if you are driving fast into rain or snow or dust. I think that completely solves it without the use of LIDAR. I’m not a big fan of LIDAR, I don’t think it makes sense in this context.
However, we now have LIDAR that captures millions of points per second and can handle fog and other unclear conditions here
Expect to see the uptake of LIDAR to increase.
Toyota and GM just made large purchases of LIDAR companies. here and here