Comment by stevenhuang

People get into accidents not because they don't know with great accuracy how far away an object is.

They get into accidents because they make bad decisions and get distracted.

If AI makes better decisions and don't get distracted, the amount of accidents will already be greatly reduced compared to humans.

Having lidar in addition to cameras will be of marginal benefit (but a benefit to be sure) when you realize what is actually important: proper modeling of the environment. And for this, cameras are better at providing than lidar, so you still will want cameras anyways.

The focus on lidar is really a red herring. You merely push the computational budget you have to understanding a point cloud instead of vision. You're back to square 1 of "how can I properly model the environment given this sensory modality". This is the part that essentially needs human level understanding of the world that you're missing.

As the other commenter says, you deeply misunderstand the problem.