> Another option is that machine vision will improve to the point where Lidars are less of a necessity.
Highly doubt this will happen anytime soon. Machine vision has come a long way past decade but nonetheless it is far from being reliable for driving. I think lidar is pretty much a necessity for safety's sakes.
It is all relative (safety that is). If you’re driving on a new road that hasn’t been mapped with the super high res Lidar, it presents a problem. Machine vision absolutely is the holy grail here. Not you or anyone else can say either machine vision OR lidar are necessary as neither of them currently power a self driving car. There isn’t currently such a thing that can do say a cross country road trip on any highways. Not even Waymo.
>If you’re driving on a new road that hasn’t been mapped with the super high res Lidar, it presents a problem.
Not even remotely true. LIDAR is used to SLAM in real-time. Think of it as a radar on steroid. For successful reliable autonomous driving you need both machine vision and lidar. If you only use machine vision, you end up like Teslas and slam into stationary fire trucks. So you use machine vision for reading signs, lane localization, etc and lidar to prevent accidents.
Waymo on average travels for 5,127.9 miles before a human disengagement is necessary measured over 635,868 miles. Cruise, 5,224 miles. Tesla, 2.9 miles.
> Not you or anyone else can say either machine vision OR lidar are necessary
Well since pretty much every single company that exists right now in the autonomous car space with the exception of Tesla uses LIDAR, I am inclined to think that's the way to do it.
All in all, machine vision is way too unreliable for anything above SAE level 2. Due to the nature of machine learning algorithms used (CNN) you can't be sure that a firetruck will always be recognized as a firetruck. The only way to reliably "see" a firetruck is via lidar/radar.
Highly doubt this will happen anytime soon. Machine vision has come a long way past decade but nonetheless it is far from being reliable for driving. I think lidar is pretty much a necessity for safety's sakes.