And now that Model S engineering mule spotted a few months back with lidar sensors on it makes sense.I've just read the patent. Quite difficult (though not impossible) to get around. This is basically using radar/lidar to find distances and velocities of objects, associate them with optical, use optical to disambiguate (using time) then using those distances to objects to train a vision only model which is then used in the cars.
IIRC Tesla had a few cars with LIDAR, data collected by them were probably used by this algorithm.
(Several of us opined it was likely used to validate the other sensor perfomance...)