[grmarcil]

"Our brains just possess superior perception."

This is the kicker. Lidar allows companies to make up for a lot of the current shortcomings of state-of-the-art computer vision.

As to how easily Uber could advance state-of-the-art computer vision, CV is an academic field with decades of research efforts built up already. To be fair, CNNs are still young-ish in terms of producing results, but Google, FB, etc all have better teams than Uber in this area. The fact that every major self-driving car project except Tesla is using lidar says a lot about how insiders see the first-to-market strategy playing out. Relying on pure CV at this point is kneecapping yourself.