I never really got into the "politics" of Tesla so I'm asking this question sincerely (because I don't know the answer). I know Elon Musk has always been against lidar but how long has he been against radar? When did he take the stance that vision-only is a better way to go? I wasn't really paying attention to it but I haven't heard about him being "anti radar" until it was convenient for him to take that stance: when Tesla had 10,000+ cars waiting for radar units they couldn't get. So is his new-to-me anti-radar vision-only stance just a PR stunt based on convenience? Or has he been talking about getting rid of radar for a while?
As far back as 2018 he said it would be purely vision based, with radar as a plus:
And it would seem that since then they decided that radar wasn't a plus. There are more recent examples of him saying they were going pure vision, so it isn't like this was a last second direction change.