For all their faults, one thing you can't say about Google is they don't know how to scale. Prior to Google Maps, Street View would have seemed impossibly expensive, but now we take it for granted. If they need to do a LIDAR run with a car over every public road in the US for them to deploy it, it seems like they could just do that. All they'd have to do is add LIDAR sensors to the existing Street View imaging fleet and continue running them.
