It seems to me that we want to make self-driving cars safer that human drivers. And to make them safer, you want them to use every kind of sensor that is practical to avoid accidents. LIDAR alone isn't the path. Neither is visual alone.

Also, suggesting that a car with cameras is equivalent to a human with a human brain that has eyes attached to it is a little silly.

The eye is the fucking whole argument for the stupid creationism. The most complex piece of machinery in the human body and shit.

That man thinks he's god, to create similar functionality.

Has he fucking tried to keep his eyes open in fucking cold weather?

Why not just use humans eyes outside of earth's atmosphere?!

He's just so fucking stupid. Rich and stupid. The shit he spends his "hard earned" money would be so much better and efficient if spent controlled by mostly anyone else.

Humans don’t just use eyes when driving. Sound, and touch also play big roles, for example when it comes hearing ambulances nearing or to feel road conditions. And we have a really good sense for depth and distance, that’s much harder to replicate with just cameras. And even Humans aren’t allowed to drive with headphones on (at least here in Germany), because it’s dangerous to limit the amount of sensors available to us.

Besides that, even our sight is faaaar from perfect either and there are quite a lot of accidents caused by drivers just not seeing another driver or some other obstacle. Our vision is pretty good, yes, but the amount of guessing our brain has to do for us to actually see what we do isn’t exactly small.

I don’t know about you, but I would prefer a self driving vehicle to be safer than a human. Because if it isn’t, why bother? And how could it be safer, if it uses less information than humans, who are shit drivers already?

And yes, lidar is more expensive but so what? It’s cheap enough to add it to phones. Expensive phones, yes but in the grand scheme of things, they’re still quite a bit cheaper than a car and Teslas aren’t exactly cheap cars either. And Tesla used to include radar in their cars until they didn’t. And the cars didn’t get that much cheaper…

And to give a positive example: Mercedes Benz are the first to launch a Level 3 autonomous vehicle. And guess what? It uses Lidar, audio sensors, road condition sensors, etc. and actually achieved L3 autonomy, while Tesla’s FSD is constantly tested to be one if the worst performing Level 2 systems in the industry, despite their claims of greatness…

The obvious argument is that eyes are far from perfect and fail us all the time, especially when going fast. We are quite good at making up for it, but saying "We have eyes so my self driving cars will have eyes too" is pretty fucking dumb.

Human vision is not too different from just a camera.

Oh yeah, human vision also causes people to mistake a blue truck for the sky and drive right into it. /s

That argument doesn't make sense because human vision isn't that great either. When it's dark or raining or snowing or foggy our vision is pretty shit.

I'm not saying LIDAR is better but rather point out that actually you want different types of sensors to accurately assess the traffic, because just one type of sensor isn't likely to cut it. If you look at other manufacturers they're not using only LIDAR or only camera. Some use LIDAR + camera, some user RADAR + camera, some user LIDAR, RADAR and camera. And I'm pretty sure that as manufacturers will aim for higher SAE levels they will add even more sensor into their cars. It's only Tesla who thinks they can somehow do more with less.

Think of that Coyote and the roadrunner cartoon. If there's a graffiti that looks like a tunnel the coyote may run into the tunnel based on vision alone, but a secondary sensor will help telling that there's a wall.

Irl, If the vision failed to recognize that there's something on the road, at least a secondary sensor will protest that there's something on the road.