[LeifCarrotson]

> Once the hood has occluded the view from the windshield cameras, these obstructions will cease to exist.

I have observed that this is how vision is currently implemented, but does it have to be this way? I can pull up to a concrete wheel stop in my Toyota without vision and without the sonar enabled even though my eyesight is occluded by the hood because I know where it was and how far I have moved. Concrete wheel stops do not flicker out of existence when you stop looking at them, they should be able to monitor the wheel speed sensors and shift the 3D map of the world into your camera blind spots, perhaps showing a "hidden" wireframe on the cameras.

It would be inconvenient if you were unable to pull forward because a tumbleweed or (more likely) plastic bag rolled through, but you could back up and try again or the human could decide to ignore the beeping.

Granted, I'm not a domain expert, but we do this in my field of industrial robotics when building models with 3D vision. The computer can composite multiple profiles into a single higher-resolution image, can return data about that model when the camera on the EOAT has moved such that the field of view is limited, and can provide faults when the model does not match a previous image because something has been added or removed while the camera wasn't watching.

[gizmo]

Possible, sure. But not trivial, and there is no pressing need to get rid of these sensors right now. Why the rush, if there is no supply chain issue?

[stetrain]

The inverse is an issue though.

The car parks and turns off, with no obstacles in front.

While parked a child/dog/bucket of concrete materializes directly in the front blindspot.

Next time the car drives, it has no knowledge of this obstruction.

This isn't a huge problem for a car driven by a human, since you can and should check around the car before driving, or will have other context clues that there is a child or dog or whatever running around your car, but this seems incompatible with the stated goal of making all current cars into Robotaxis.