Small correction: LiDAR can’t literally see around corners — it’s still a line-of-sight sensor. What it can do is build an extremely precise 3D point cloud of what it can see, in all lighting conditions, and with far less susceptibility to “hallucinations” from things like glare, shadows, or visual artifacts that trip up purely vision-based systems.

The problem you’re describing — phantom braking, random wiper sweeps — is exactly what happens when the perception system’s “eyes” (cameras) feed imperfect data into a “brain” (compute + AI) that has no independent cross-check from another modality. Cameras are amazing at recognizing texture and color but they’re passive sensors, easily fooled by lighting, contrast, weather, or optical illusions. LiDAR adds active depth sensing, which directly measures distance and object geometry rather than inferring it.

But LiDAR alone isn’t the endgame either. The real magic happens in sensor fusion — combining LiDAR, radar, cameras, GNSS, and ultrasonic so each sensor covers the others’ blind spots, and then fusing data at the perception level. This reduces false positives, filters out improbable hazards before they trigger braking, and keeps the system robust in edge cases.

And there’s another piece that rarely gets mentioned in these debates: connected infrastructure. If the vehicle can also receive data from roadside units, traffic signals, and other connected objects (V2X), it doesn’t have to rely solely on its onboard sensors. You’re effectively extending the vehicle’s situational awareness beyond its physical line of sight.

Vision-only autonomy is like trying to navigate with one sense while ignoring the others. LiDAR + fusion + connectivity is like having multiple senses and a heads-up from the world around you.

Honestly at that point of complexity I hope automakers just quit chasing FSD and go back to making actually good cars again.

Let the automated trucks figure it out if it’s an actual problem worth solving or we can just use trains or let truck driving be a decent middle class job.