[alsodumb]

Definitely agree with your second point! In theory, the reaction time and complete environment awareness should itself make an autonomous system way safer than human drivers.

In some way, I am against the philosophy of using HD maps + LIDAR data for highly accurate localization which most companies seem to be using these days. I believe that this approach is inherently brittle and is an 'easy way out' to the hard localization problem. I think more resources should be put into developing more natural, no HD map dependency techniques.

PS: It is my understanding that most of the major players were using HD maps, not sure if it is still true.