I don't disagree, both humans and ML are bad at classifying things they haven't seen before[1]. However that reasoning doesn't disqualify either vision only auto driving systems or machine learning.

Both statements are true:

"Computer driven cars may crash, even fatally, when they encounter a situation that they do not recognize." and

"People driving cars may crash, even fatally, when they encounter a situation that they do not recognize."

The success criteria for self driving cars is that they can drive at least as well, in the common case, as the set of human drivers who are defined to be "good" drivers. And self driving is not invalidated by a computer's mishandling of an event that a good driver would also mishandle.

I expect that self driving systems will be differentiated by how well they handle the unusual cases so a Mercedes system might do better in an unusual situation than a Chevy system. And all of this discussion is orthogonal to LIDAR :-).

[1] http://puzzlephotos.blogspot.com/