I'll reiterate:
2019 - Tesla didn’t fix an Autopilot problem for three years, and now another person is dead
> And if it was truly unsafe or compromised we'd have seen a good deal of evidence
We see that evidence all the time. Teslas veering into oncoming traffic, hitting parked vehicles, driving through loony tunes walls where other cars stop, being fooled by smokescreens where other cars are not, and decapitating multiple people in a similar way that would have been mitigated by LiDAR. And now apparently real-ending motorcyclists.
This whole self driving scam is an exercise in the 80/20 rule. They spent 20% of the time to get 80% of the results, and that's why you claim "I see teslas self driving just fine"
But Tesla has been promising the other 20% will be here in 5 years for 10 years. That last 20% is the difference between the system being "Full" self driving and a fraud. Right now what we see is a vaporware fraud, and they're not going to be able to deliver.
You are the one who raised the 1940s optical rangefinder question, and now talking about autofocus, which is a totally different problem than dense ranging from optical stereo disparity.
If you don't want to argue hypotheticals, don't do it.
If you choose to argue technical details in the absence of expertise, expect pushback from people with domain knowledge.
I spent 5 years working on long-distance optical stereo as part of a DARPA program, with a team that was very committed to stereo vision. Our limited success left me with an appreciation of the challenges versus lidar.
Besides, rangefinding optics weren't exactly amazing in the 1940s either. It's why the introduction of radar made such a massive difference in naval warfare.