I think that's a poor description of the LIDARless controversy. In the current state of the art there are many things that a self-driving car can do better tha

I think that's a poor description of the LIDARless controversy. In the current state of the art there are many things that a self-driving car can do better than any human (reaction speed, never gets distracted, etc) Then there are other driving tasks that humans are still far better at... I'm not a self-driving expert, but I suspect that they're still worse at picking up complicated environmental cues (say, a pedestrian acting unusual or trying to alert you to something) The safety premise of self-driving is that the former can outweigh the latter. The idea is that there will be some accidents that might have been avoidable by a proficient human driver, but many more that will be prevented by a machine's super-human capabilities in other areas. To make a self-driving car as safe as possible, you'd want to give it every super-human capability that's practical. LIDAR provides one such capability -- a super-human understanding of where objects are even when the visual environment is challenging. The question isn't whether it's possible for a LIDARless system to operate safely. Obviously humans don't have LIDAR and they're considered "safe enough" to put on the roads. The concern is whether it would be as safe as possible... and whether it would be so safe that people would feel comfortable sharing the highway with such a car.