Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two fundamental reasons, in principle, vision alone can do it: 1) Humans do it with vision alone 2) You can actually predict lidar’s output with vision alone. So many systems out there actually use lidar to generate more labeled data to make lidar unnecessary
besides vision, humans also have this thing called brain, and reasoning, and instincts, and being able to tell if the object in front of them is e.g. a roof of an overturned truck vs. empty space, etc, etc. the key word is "etc" which expands into infinite tail, which no big data training on farms of GPUs would ever help with. Humans and other animals have an ability to understand the scene and generalize from prior…
Assuming the car is reasonably good at this, it has the advantage that it can see in every direction at once.
I don't think self-driving cars will ever be perfect, but I think they will quickly become less-lethal than the average human.