"Brad Templeton, who provided consulting for autonomous driving competitor Waymo, noted the car was equipped with advanced sensors, including radar and LiDAR, which would not have been affected by the darkness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

The car had LIDAR.

Yep, and it detected Herzberg in the roadway with plenty of time to spare.

"the car detected the pedestrian as early as 6 seconds before the crash" [...] "Uber told the NTSB that “emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior,” in other words, to ensure a smooth ride. “The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.”" [1]

'Oh well it was very dark' is not a factor in the crash that killed Herzberg

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/uber-in-fatal-crash-detect...

It had lidar and ignored an unknown object it was tracking. If that's not damning for the whole field, I don't know what is.

The car had LIDAR. It wasn't an equipment failure, it was a failure on the part of the programmers. They had programmed in a hard delay to prevent erratic breaking and the system was programmed to dump data whenever an object was re-categorized. The system detected the person in the road as an unknown obstruction and properly detected that it was moving into the road but it re-categorized that obstruction 4 times before correctly identifying it as a person. By that point, the velocity and LIDAR data had been dumped because of the re-classifications and the car only had <2 seconds to stop.

Seriously, that is hopeless. It is worse than I'd expect from a university project.

It’s $75,000 USD for the LIDAR sensor, a far cry from $2,000.

I think that was the price for Velodyne's 64 laser LIDAR. They've discontinued it and now the top of the line is the Alpha Prime VLS-128 which has 128 lasers and is ~$100K.

There are many other cheaper LIDARs, even in the Velodyne lineup, but they are less capable.