[temp667]

Agreed. There are options for low res / narrower FOV lider as well with fewer moving parts / lower cost. At some point for safety you end up with a question - is it worth a few hundred $ to have definitive depth data in some directions.

For tesla's, they have in the past struggled with stopped objects - so you have a tesla going straight into something at 70 mph on autopilot (highway dividers, stopped trucks, crossing trucks). They also suffer from phantom braking which is very disruptive, and the fix may have been to basically to disable emergency breaking in these areas which increases risks if something is stopped there. Lider, even lower rest, would really help in all of this plus pedestrian detection for emergency breaking there (see China videos of teslas crushing mocked-up walkers in videos there).

Google also is building absolutely nuts training data for wide stereo vision recognition if they wanted. They are driving these vehicles generating very hi def point clouds with synchronized video. In terms of a training data set for a vision based system, this is basically a dream situation. Ie, if google wanted to reduce lidar reliance, they may be well positioned for that as well.

Finally, what people want is level 5 autonomous driving. What trucking companies want is level 5. So they are skipping some of the earlier levels but getting to where I think people want this to go. Could a trucking company put a lot right near freeway and waymo get's the truck from lot to lot (1000's of miles) with then last mile hand driven? The savings would be huge there.

[reitzensteinm]

Tesla has lidar equipped vehicles that presumably provide training data for depth perception as you're describing. Although given the rarity of the sightings probably just one or two.

[temp667]

And google runs street view cameras everywhere with lidar now I believe, so their HD maps are getting pretty darn HD.

They are going to be in a great position when this all shakes out.