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by frik 3455 days ago
Beside LIDAR, A/Google adds a radar now too.

I wonder if more and more vehicles have now a radar, isn't it unhealthy to be exposed to so many radar on the road? I mean it's well known that military grade radar can be very unhealthy. I would have assumed that LIDAR plus cameras plus ultrasonic would be enough.

1 comments

Military grade radars can run at peak power output of over 1MW; airport ATC radars at around 100kW. Given the power limitation of cars, car radars will be under a kW for sure, probably more in the single-watt range.

And health effects start happening if you absorb more than 1kW on a small area of your skin (burns, eye damage etc) - unlikely to happen if the total emission is sub-kilowatt.

(I presume there are regulatory limits for this sort of emission anyway, by FCC or otherwise, but I don't know for sure...)