A little bit of a meta-point: The article, like most articles uses an attention grabbing headline from the "$71,000 cheaper" point. The point of that is to giv

A little bit of a meta-point: The article, like most articles uses an attention grabbing headline from the "$71,000 cheaper" point. The point of that is to give your brain a low resolution picture of the story. Enough to interest you and get you to read. Regardless of how you feel about that, if it worked (you are reading the article) it's best to forget about the conclusions/objections you started developing from the headline after you read the article. They're just a distraction. Obviously, this isn't a drop in replacement for Google's system. Google probably haven't even been optimized their system for price anyway. The interesting points here IMO is that (a)Google system cost ~$75k (b) a student was able to cheaply play in this space and get somewhere and (c) he did it by replacing the expensive 3d radar with a cheap 3d radar + webcam.