>If you’re driving on a new road that hasn’t been mapped with the super high res Lidar, it presents a problem. Not even remotely true. LIDAR is used to SLAM in

>If you’re driving on a new road that hasn’t been mapped with the super high res Lidar, it presents a problem. Not even remotely true. LIDAR is used to SLAM in real-time. Think of it as a radar on steroid. For successful reliable autonomous driving you need both machine vision and lidar. If you only use machine vision, you end up like Teslas and slam into stationary fire trucks. So you use machine vision for reading signs, lane localization, etc and lidar to prevent accidents. > a cross country road trip on any highways. That's not the agreed upon definition of self driving. Also, you should probably take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Testing Waymo on average travels for 5,127.9 miles before a human disengagement is necessary measured over 635,868 miles. Cruise, 5,224 miles. Tesla, 2.9 miles. > Not you or anyone else can say either machine vision OR lidar are necessary Well since pretty much every single company that exists right now in the autonomous car space with the exception of Tesla uses LIDAR, I am inclined to think that's the way to do it. All in all, machine vision is way too unreliable for anything above SAE level 2. Due to the nature of machine learning algorithms used (CNN) you can't be sure that a firetruck will always be recognized as a firetruck. The only way to reliably "see" a firetruck is via lidar/radar.