The best cameras are surely better than most peoples' eyes these days.

Sensory processing is not matched, sure, but IMO how a human drives is more involved than it needs to be. We only have two eyes and they both look in the same direction. We need to continuously look around to track what's around us. It demands a lot of attention from us that we may not always have to spare, especially if we're distracted.

>The best cameras are surely better than most peoples' eyes these days.

Not on all metrics, especially not simultaneously. The dynamic range of human eyes, for example, is extremely high.

The front camera Tesla is using is very good with this. You can drive with the sun shining directly into it and it will still detect everything 99% of the time, at least with my older model 3. Way better than me stuck looking at the pavement directly in front the car.

AFAIK there is also more than one front camera. Why would anyone try to do it all with one or two camera sensors like humans do it?

It's important to remember that the cameras Tesla are using are optimized for everything but picture quality. They are not just taking flagship phone camera sensors and sticking them into cars. That's why their dashcam recordings look so bad (to us) if you've ever seen them.

Well, Teslas use low cost consumer cameras. Not DSLRs. Bad framerate, bad resolution and bad dynamic range. Very far from human vision and easily blinded and completely washed out by sudden shifts in light.

I’m consistently surprised by how my Tesla can see a traffic light with the sun directly behind it. They seem to have solved the washout problem in practice.

You can compare the size of the cameras used in Tesla with the size (of the lenses at least) on the Waymo rig, and they do not look like they’re in the same league, optically.

Cameras are better than human eyes. Much better. There are areas in which they are worse, but that's completely outweighed by the fact that you are not limited to two of them and they can have a 360 degree field of vision.

What garbage. The human eye has about 20 stops of dynamic range. Cameras of the size that are in a Tesla are at about 12 stops. That's a lot of data they don't get. For just one thing. Human eyes can also adjust focal distance multiple times a second, which camera (lenses) have a harder time doing.

For one tiny portion of the 360 field of vision of cameras, yes. For the rest they have 0 stops.