Ye I have a hard time imaganing how a car radar image looks like.

On boat radars it seems like the radar have really high resolution (can see much further than lidars) but have worse accuracy. I.e. things looks like blobs.

A lidar image at 50+ meters is very sparse.

If you want more points downrange, you design your scanner to work on a smaller FOV. Some things change - you need an optical design that scans a small area in front of it somehow (faceted mirrors are popular), and at some point you need a laser source of higher quality, possibly moving away from diode lasers and towards things like fiber laser sources. This isn't conjecture BTW, this is what players like Waymo do and is evident from studying the sensor package if you're curious.

Roughly like in this paper https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/RadarScenes:-A-Real-Wo...