Ish. If you automatically do an emergency braking / avoidance manoeuvre every time a LIDAR-opaque object is in front of your vehicle, then you'll end up causing

Ish. If you automatically do an emergency braking / avoidance manoeuvre every time a LIDAR-opaque object is in front of your vehicle, then you'll end up causing a lot of whiplash for the sake of sparing some paper bags. LIDAR gives you data points which may be more useful than optical data, but in order for it to be safely incorporated into a guidance system, there need to be times when it is out-voted by optical sensors. Back when the company I worked for was building the Heathrow Pod, they had the option of putting LIDAR on the vehicles for collision-detection. They eventually decided against it, determining that the probability of injuries due to false-positive e-braking manoeuvres was higher than the probability of injuries if LIDAR was omitted altogether. This was more than 10 years ago, and the state of the art has advanced considerably. I'm sure the balance of this calculus has changed. But figured it was worth pointing out that LIDAR is by no means a trivial thing to incorporate into a guidance system.