The article briefly mentions (but does not do justice) to the fact that identifying small objects at extreme range is something that LIDAR is _also_ really bad

The article briefly mentions (but does not do justice) to the fact that identifying small objects at extreme range is something that LIDAR is _also_ really bad at, due to extremely low effective resolutions by camera standards. High-end LIDAR units cap out at ~100 channels (roughly equivalent to vertical pixel size), usually over >100deg vertical field of view, for less than one "pixel" per degree. That's not nearly enough to detect a brick at 100m, and pales in comparison to the angular resultions an HD camera with a decent lens can achieve. In general, it's not yet clear to me whether LIDAR is all that useful for the hard parts of the self-driving car problem. We know it's extremely useful for the easy parts (not hitting curbs, other vehicles, or walls), but it's not clear whether LIDAR helps that much with small objects, vehicle behavior prediction, or object classification (paper bag vs. dog)