If you look at how lidar's work this does indeed make no sense. Lidars will see vertical poles that stick up high, like pedestrians. That's exactly what they're

If you look at how lidar's work this does indeed make no sense. Lidars will see vertical poles that stick up high, like pedestrians. That's exactly what they're good at. For a lidar with even bad resolution to have missed this pedestrian ... it's technically not impossible, but it'd be one-in-a-trillion streak of extremely bad luck. It seems much, much more likely that the car was somehow ignoring the output of the lidar. Lidar's see everything in a specific plane that's originated at their sensor. This situation is exactly what lidars are made for ... Remember the Tesla accident ? A lidar was scanning planes in front of the Tesla and there was a large truck in front of it. A truck hangs low at the front and at the back, and the tesla autopilot saw both of them. Presumably because it was using lidar it decided that the front of the truck was a car, and that the rear of the truck was a car, and then when the truck changed direction it compensated by doing a high speed maneuver directing the car beteen the front and the read wheels of the truck. Needless to say, results were less than optimal (and then came the unforgivable: after the crash the autopilot was still in control, but it did NOT stop until it was mechanically blocked from going on). That's the sort of mistake you'd expect a lidar to make : it misses objects that are very close to the ground, or "far" off the ground. It sees things starting at 50cm high until 1m30 or so (also depends on the distance to the sensor. The closer the sensor, the narrower the range), no more. That's the weakness of lidars. That unfortunately means what they do miss is ... well, let's put it this way : you can't mount it low in the car, because at that height it'll think large pebbles are telephone poles (plus mud will splatter up and block the sensor). So you don't do that. You can also mount it high but that means those detection planes don't get very close to the ground. And that means, what it'll miss is anything that's close to the ground. Dogs. Children. Parking poles. Stairs (or any kind of abyss). That's where you'd expect mistakes. An adult crossing the street ... there's no way.