Aren't you conflating two issues? Getting visual sensing to the same level as radar/lidar is a great aim. Having redundant multi-modal sensing is a great aim. S

Aren't you conflating two issues? Getting visual sensing to the same level as radar/lidar is a great aim. Having redundant multi-modal sensing is a great aim. Switching over to visual-only isn't. There are too many situations where one type of sensing isn't good enough (e.g. lasers scatter off snow and can't penetrate fog/dust, radar can get saturated by multiple corner reflectors, visual sucks at night, IR sucks in bright sun, etc). To reduce cost visual-only might be a good way to go, but it won't be versatile enough to cover all the necessary scenarios.