Humans are not capable of safely operating motor vehicles. For a combination of practical and psychological reasons, we accept them as safe enough, stuffing the tens of thousands of Americans who get mowed down each year into the backs of our heads. But we know what the genuinely safe version of human-operated vehicles looks like, because we do it for planes, and it involves quite a lot of complex instruments other than the human eyeball.
It would be an absolute catastrophe for the developers of autonomous vehicles to decide there's no need to do better than human drivers.
Human eyes and vision system are so much better than current cameras and GPUs they aren't really comparable.
Also we should be aiming at creating autonomous driving systems that are SAFER than humans and this requires as many sensor modalities as possible. Vision + LIDAR + Radar + Sonar + terahertz Radar.
Are there any successful autonomous driving systems that don't use lidar?
Sure, Wayve did some experiments with just radar + vision, but now incorporate lidar across their fleet. Waymo, Pony.ai, and WeRide have always used it.
You can shout "you don't need it!" as loud as you like, but the people who are actually building and running these systems seem to disagree.
Tesla don't belong in a list of companies with working autonomous driving systems.
They might get there one day but, since they've been breaking promises about it for longer than those other companies have been in existence, at this point it's reasonable to treat what they have to say with extreme scepticism.
Everyone at Tesla probably thinks they should use LiDAR but Musk doesn't want to so they don't. Just like so many people must have told Musk using stainless steel for the body of the cybertruck was a terrible idea and he did it anyway. Musk is deep in the "only talks with yes men" phase of being a billionaire.
