Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure about newer models without radar, but the older ones explicitly discard stationary returns on their radar. As I understand it, without elevation data it can’t know if it’s a bridge you’ll pass under, a soda can in the road, or a stopped car - so just ignore it all. Of course the vision system is supposed to compensate for this, and it performs poorly on objects it doesn’t see often, like emergency vehicl…
why should it matter how often it sees something? Or even if it's something the car has never seen before? All it should care about is whether there is an obstacle, not what the obstacle is. Whether it's an emergency vehicle, a sofa, a boulder, a canoe, a table saw, or a dolphin, you don't want to hit it!
It’s simply not possible to do depth estimation like this without priors. That’s one of the serious limitations of such systems - you have to train on every class of object you don’t want to hit.