Lidar worked well (and continues to do so) because it’s the most accurate proximity sensor today for cars. If you don’t want your car to hit anything, you need

Lidar worked well (and continues to do so) because it’s the most accurate proximity sensor today for cars. If you don’t want your car to hit anything, you need Lidar. Radar and vision-based stereo are useful too, but 10%+ distance error and overall false negatives make that combo pretty unsafe (especially off the freeway). Computational cost is a far smaller factor than safety in the value of a demo. Cheap lidar (and probably radar) will earn a permanent place on ADAS of the future if only because it works much better than vision at night. You’ll see them together because they have complimentary failure modes and the denser lidar point cloud is worth a $100 add-on. While many of the autonomy efforts are still struggling with basic detection, the major challenge facing the leaders is in forecasting future motion, especially complex motion. The new cheap sensors are a boon but not a game changer.