[ACCount36]

No amount of LIDAR wankery can solve self-driving.

Take any self-driving car crash where the self-driving car was found at fault. Dump the blackbox, extract the raw sensor data. What will you see?

You'll see that the car had all the sensory data it needed to make the right call, many times over. And it didn't make the right call. That's not a "sensors" problem. The sensors are good enough. The main bottleneck for self-driving is, and always was, in AI.

Which is why you get things like that Cruise car dragging a pedestrian despite being equipped with 360 cameras and a total of 5 overlapping LIDARs. It had the sensors. What it didn't have was object permanence.

[danny_codes]

Well an under-carriage camera would have obviated this failure mode.

So you could define it as a sensor issue

[VirusNewbie]

How many car crashes does waymo have per mile compared to average drivers?

[ACCount36]

Statistically, SOTA self-driving cars are already superhuman. That holds for Waymo and Tesla both. They crash less, like for like, and the incidents they get into are less severe. But that's not because self-driving cars outperform a "top of the line" human driver. It's because they outperform the absolute worst bottom of the barrel human driver.

A big part of a self-driving car's "safety edge" is that it isn't going to go 80 in a 40, doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, and isn't capable of DUI.

Self-driving cars still struggle in some situations most human drivers wouldn't find challenging - AI issues - but they don't make the worst, the most unforced and avoidable "human factor" mistakes.