One big benefit of LIDAR is that it's an active ranging technique - that is, it illuminates its target. That means it works at night and whereas a human would

One big benefit of LIDAR is that it's an active ranging technique - that is, it illuminates its target. That means it works at night and whereas a human would need 360º headlights, a LIDAR doesn't. The second benefit is that LIDAR is robust and quite accurate. If you measure a distance, you know it's probably right and with what confidence. With vision based methods, you have trouble reconstructing featureless surfaces. Finally as others have pointed out, LIDAR gives you 3D information out of the box. You don't need to do a bunch of compute-intensive image matching to get range. It's much more likely that a stereo vision based system will give you false positives due to an incorrect feature match. The main downside compared to cameras is that LIDAR data is much sparser. You can get 1MPt/sec LIDAR, but that's over an entire hemisphere normally so in one camera's field of view you might only get 20k measurements compared to millions of pixels. In the end you need both (plus RADAR, ultrasound and everything else). Cameras will always be required for tasks like lane marking detection, reading road signs and visual identification of obstacles like pedestrians.