I think you might be under-estimating the importance of not hitting things.

If you look at the statistics on fatal car accidents, 85%+ involve collisions with stationary objects or other road users.

Nobody's suggesting getting rid of machine vision or ML - just that if you've got an ML+vision system that gets in 1 serious accident per 200,000 miles, adding LIDAR could improve that to 1 serious accident per 2,000,000 miles.

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ModernMech 5 days ago | parent [-]

Because LIDAR can detect the object at the beginning of the perception pipeline, whereas camera can only detect the object after an expensive and time consuming ML inference process. By the time the camera even knows there's an object (if it does at all) the LIDAR would have had the car hitting its brakes. When you're traveling 60 MPH, milliseconds matter.

	▲	losvedir 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Just to put numbers on it, 10ms at 60mph is just under a foot. I don't think that matters too much, but if we're talking 200ms that's 10-15 ft which is substantial. I have no idea how long the ML pipeline is, though.