I agree, and LIDAR would be the obvious best choice here. For whatever reasons the Autopilot team is choosing to go down the route of mimicking human driving, w

I agree, and LIDAR would be the obvious best choice here. For whatever reasons the Autopilot team is choosing to go down the route of mimicking human driving, which means trying to replicate the pipeline of human eye to brain-object recognition. To that end, it's not unlikely that a human eye could mis-classify something on the road and ram a car into it at full speed. In fact, it probably happens every day.