Of these, only dark objects at night is related to lidar vs vision. What percent of accidents is attributable to not seeing dark objects at night?
Limited field of view is solved by having a bunch of cameras, that is what is orthogonal to LiDAR vs vision.
I’m open to an argument here, but you have not provided any compelling rebuttal. You apparently feel like you have, though.
You use some made-up idea like "superhuman vision" and then you're asserting that I haven't provided a "compelling rebuttal"?
You're not engaging in good-faith conversation here. If you want to understand the clear, obvious benefits of LIDAR over cameras, it's a Google search away. And it's not just about at night -- it's about weather, it's about greater accuracy, especially at greater distances, it's about more accurate velocity, and so forth. It's not rocket science to understand that earlier, more confident detection of a car or deer or child suddenly moving into the street is going to reduce collisions.
Obviously LiDAR improves the maximum achievable capabilities of a self driving system. I am not disputing that. I don’t think anyone would or could dispute that, it’s just trivially true.
The point I am trying to make is more nuanced than that.
Basically I’m thinking about whether this decision to ditch lidar is actually stupid, or if there could be a sensible explanation that is plausibly true. I am proposing what I believe is a plausibly true sensible explanation for the decision.
If you think about whether accidents would be reduced by having lidar, the answer is again obviously yes. But if you think about this as a business decision, it is not so simple. The question is not whether accidents would be reduced by having lidar. The question is whether accidents would be reduced enough to justify the added cost and complexity to the system.
So then, how do we figure that out? Well, we think about the causes of human car accidents ranked by percent of car accidents caused. What would be the items in the top 95% let’s say? Then, which of those items can be addressed exclusively by a lidar enabled system.
To isolate can-only-be-fixed-by-lidar problems, I imagine a thought experiment where we have a human with lidar for eyeballs. Which of the top k causes of accidents would be fixed by giving humans lidar eyeballs. Well, maybe not that many, actually. That is my point.
This could be argued to be immoral due to I guess making decisions about death based on business considerations. But it’s probably fairly easy to convince oneself as a Tesla executive that the car (M3 anyway) being affordable is critical to getting the safer-than-human driving tech adopted, so making the car more expensive actually fails to save more people than the lidar would save, etc.
You're using existing human vision as your baseline, which is not the right comparison here. The question is a baseline of superhuman abilities. So there's a ton of accidents we wouldn't get into if we had those superhuman abilities.
Basically everything involving a collision with an object we weren't aware of in time because it wasn't in our limited field of view and wasn't well-lit, that could have been avoided if we had been. Which is a decent proportion of accidents.
But the bigger, original point is that LIDAR is better than cameras, and better for avoiding accidents.