But lidar is basically a cheat code, whether or not optical is sufficient. Why wait for end stage driving AI? Why not use cheat codes and wait for cheaper technology later?

Behavioral and pattern analysis is always in full overdrive when I drive. I drive in Africa, people never follow rules, red lights at crossings mean go for bikers, when there are no lights you can't just give right of way, or you'll never move. When nearing intersections, people accelerate so they can cross before you, and it's a long line, and they know you have right of way, so they accelerate to scare you into stopping. Amateurs freeze and hold up the line for a very long time, usually until a traffic officer shows up to unblock (multiply this by every intersection). In order for you to get anywhere, you have to play the same game, and get close enough to the point where they aren't sure you'll stop, and will hit you and will have to pay. So often at crossings you're always in near misses and they realize you're not going to stop, so they do. Everyone is skilled enough to do this daily. Your senses, your risk analysis, your spider sense are fully overclocked most of the time. And then there are all the other crazy things that happen, like all the insane lane zig zagging people do, bikers our of nowhere et night with no lights, memorizing all the pot holes in all roads in the city bc they aren't illuminated at night so you can drive at 80-120km/h, etc. So no, it's not just your eyes. Lots of sensors, memory, processing, memory/mapping are required.

Personally, I can smell a left turn signal from nearly three blocks away

And which ones can't be replicated with hardware?

Yeah, but you can drive on vision alone. Deaf people are allowed to drive just the same as anyone else.

> You use more senses than just vision when driving a car

Deaf drivers (may include drivers playing loud music too) don't, unless they're somehow tasting the other vehicles.

But we allow deaf people to drive but not people who are entirely blind. This means vision is necessary and sufficient.

The problem is clearly a question of the fidelity of the vision and our ability to slave a decision maker and mapper to it.

Vision is almost certainly not the main issue with humans as drivers.

Cameras are better than human eyes. Much better. There are areas in which they are worse, but that's completely outweighed by the fact that you are not limited to two of them and they can have a 360 degree field of vision.

The best cameras are surely better than most peoples' eyes these days.

Sensory processing is not matched, sure, but IMO how a human drives is more involved than it needs to be. We only have two eyes and they both look in the same direction. We need to continuously look around to track what's around us. It demands a lot of attention from us that we may not always have to spare, especially if we're distracted.

I don't think it's a sensors issue - if I gave you a panoramic feed of what a Tesla sees on a series of screens, I'm pretty sure you'd be able to learn to drive it (well).

yeah, try matching a human eye on dynamic range and then on angular speed and then on refocus. okay forget that.

try matching a cat's eye on those metrics. and it is much simpler that human one.

The human sensor (eye) isn't more advanced in its ability to capture data -- and in fact cameras can have a wider range of frequencies.

But the human brain can process the semantics of what the eye sees much better than current computers can process the semantics of the camera data. The camera may be able to see more than the eye, but unless it understands what it sees, it'll be inferior.

Thus Tesla spontaneously activating its windshield wipers to "remove something obstructing the view" (happens to my Tesla 3 as well), whereas the human brain knows that there's no need to do that.

Same for Tesla braking hard when it encountered an island in the road between lanes without clear road markings, whereas the human driver (me) could easily determine what it was and navigate around it.

And what driver wouldn't want extra senses, if they could actually meaningfully be used? The goal is to drive well on public roads, not some "Hands Tied Behind My Back" competition.

Because any active sensor is going to jam other such sensors once there are too many of them on the road. This is sad but true.

Cost, weight, and reliability. The best part is no part.

No part costs less, it also doesn't break, it also doesn't need to be installed, nor stocked in every crisis dealership's shelf, nor can a supplier hold up production. It doesn't add wires (complexity and size) to the wiring harness, or clog up the CAN bus message queue (LIDAR is a lot of data). It also does not need another dedicated place engineered for it, further constraining other systems and crash safety. Not to mention the electricity used, a premium resource in an electric vehicle of limited range.

That's all off the top of my head. I'm sure there's even better reasons out there.

problem is, expensive cameras that Tesla doesn't use don't work either.

Chimpanzies are better than humans given a reward structure they understand. The next battlefield evilution are chimpanzies hooked up with intravenous cocaine modules running around with 50. cals

There's laws about mis-treating animals. Driving a taxi would surely count as inhumane torture.

they can't understand how to react to what they see the way humans do

it has to do with the processing of information and decision-making, not data capture

This is plainly untrue, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdXbf12AzIM

And yet deaf people regularly drive cars, as do blind-in-one-eye people, and I've never seen somebody leave their vehicle during active driving.

that's (usually) because our reflexes are slow (compared to a computer), or we are distracted by other things (talking, phone, tiredness, sights, etc. etc.), not because we misinterpret what we see