It has? This again gets to "are they safer than human drivers?", because the competition hits stationary objects all the time. If you have data let's discuss data, but "proven false" is, again, just spin.

> Pedestrian motion is not strictly a vision challenge but a general category of environment understanding

Semantic evasion. You agree that it's "not a problem solved by LIDAR", right? It needs a camera. You can use a LIDAR output as a (somewhat inferior) camera, but it's not providing any advantages.

The LIDAR addresses the part where all current cameras are unsuited to the purpose. It's not one or the other, but you appear to be assuming an imaginary not-the-one-we-live-in reality where only one is needed because you assume that all available cameras aren't actually very bad. But they are all actually very bad. So we continue to need both for the indeterminate future until someone invents mechanically robust extreme fidelity stereoptic cameras with motion freedom independent from the vehicle body, which is what humans have.

> "But depth info is...one of the easiest [problems]" ... "are they safer than human drivers?" ... Semantic evasion.

It looks like you're jumping from "depth is easy with cameras" (demonstrated false) to "safer than humans anyway without it" (speculative and not demonstrated by anyone), so which of us is evading?

Humans are unsafe predominantly because of inattention, not ability. Camera-only vehicles are unsafe because of camera ability before you even get to the attention part.

Tesla's repeated failures over the years demonstrate a dangerously erroneous belief that object identification is the first step for path planning. But that's not how humans drive, and it's not how to drive safely. The vehicle should avoid driving into any space that isn't going to be open smooth road, period. You don't need to recognize what's there. You do need to map whether it's open smooth road.