Actually in the dark you often drive as a leap of faith in the state of the road. I.e. with very little visibility on what can come from the side of the road (no light) or after a turn. We shouldn't. But we do.

Yes, but it will cause you to slow down. Or at least, it should. As soon as you have less than your stopping distance of space in front of the car you are going too fast.

Again we probably should but we don't always.

In fact even in daylight you drive a lot as a leap of faith. When the traffic light is green for you at a crossing and you see a car arriving on the side, you assume that you have the priority, that the car will stop and you go ahead without adjusting your speed to the coming car. This is a leap of faith in the fact that all other cars will follow the rules.

There's always the option to enable the headlights in such a case. LEDs switch on way faster than incandescent bulbs. And if they're needed at all - a camera has way more flexibility in brightness input range than a human eye.

A car like a Tesla has also highest-quality maps and GPS sensors - these alone are way better than what you get in your smartphone and are enough to keep the car from going over the cliff.

It's pretty obvious that a self-driving camera-based software would take advantage of headlights on a car, just like a human does? So it never has to drive in full darkness.

You missed the analogy:

Darkness is to eyesight as inclement weather/obstacles is to LIDAR

Our eyes also come with our brains packed full of fancy algorithms to extract value from minimal information.

I am not sure what software does with noise from a lidar sensor but I have seen data from other noisy sensors and they are often useless.

What's the point of that analogy? Darkness can be fixed with lights on the vehicle itself. Inclement weather is entirely outside the control of the vehicle.

LIDAR doesn't work in inclement weather, that's the point.

Actually you will need more than a camera input, may be even a sound input.

In darkness it helps if you can hear the vehicles coming close.

> may be even a sound input

Bingo. When we drive a vehicle, we use so much more than just our eyes to sense the environment, and hearing plays a very large part.

I believe that it is something that warrants research for self-driving vehicle usage; I don't know if anyone has done such research, but I haven't seen any papers on it yet. If not, it seems like an underappreciated sensor aspect that could potentially greatly augment self-driving vehicle capabilities, and would be a very simple and cheap sensor to add to a vehicle as well.

EDIT: Found this recent article...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604272/a-sense-of-hearing...

While it seems to be focused mainly on diagnosing issues with vehicles before they become larger problems, there are hints about it being used for self-driving tasks as well.

I think you're implying that deaf drivers are fundamentally less safe than hearing drivers.

Studies have been highly mixed: http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/deaf-drivers.htm

I would be comfortable saying that the advantages a deaf, many eyed, always alert self driving system would far outweigh the safety of a hearing, two eyed and sometimes alert human driver.