How does a human identify obstacles, VRUs [0], and other cars?

0: vulnerable road users, eg pedestrians and bicyclists

> How does a human identify

With the most complex, context-aware, intuitive computer in existence. In addition to eyeballs that are dramatically more capable than any camera Tesla is using.

Not going to comment on the overall lidar vs. pure camera approaches, but I don't think human eyeballs are more capable than a full 360-view array of cameras looking at everything (including blindspots) at once. For once, human eyeballs cannot see in full 360 or view the environment from outside of the car cabin (aka unrestricted by pillars and other things that obstruct the field of view from inside the cabin).

Have you ever used night mode on your phone? It looks nothing like what you are taking in terms of colours, but it shows a lot more detail than the human eye can pick up. Same thing with zoom cameras. Also there are more cameras than eyes, and in better spots.

Have you ever used night mode on your phone while driving on 60mph at night? It's basically sophisticated long exposure that won't work for driving.

How does a bird fly?

For human flight, we borrowed the wings, but made them fixed and added propellers, to cheat the mechanical incompetence.

I wouldn't be shocked that radar/lidar/sonar/whatever sensors are what it takes to cover the incompetence in matching human brain+vision.

Heck, use multiple "brains" and give each veto power on moving the vehicle. Supposing that stopping doesn't kill you, that would at most frequently annoy the driver, and sometimes save his life or someone else's.

Well also the largest animal to ever fly only weighed a few hundred lbs so we’re also just limited by the kind of flight we’re trying to do.

At least today we probably could build a craft that flies by flapping its wings but what would be the point?

Forget birds, insects do it, with vision and puny brains.

The human visual system works more like a high resolution event camera than a frame-based camera. Event cameras can deal well with glare and other problems that would otherwise require high dynamic range per frame.

Humans would drive better if they could shoot fricken laser beams out of their eyes.

Why would Elon want to model humans when humans are mostly responsible for the problems we want to replace humans for.