Current lidar systems can’t see a black tire, or a person like me wearing black—Velodyne’s [Puck] wouldn’t see a 5- to 10-percent reflective object [30 meters away]. It’s the dark car problem—no one else talks about it!”
The safe solution to this is not to look for "obstacles", but to profile the road ahead with a high-mounted laser. If you're not getting a return, either it's not very reflective, or there's a cliff ahead. In either case, you don't want to go there at speed.
As you get closer to the trouble spot, you're more likely to get a bounce from even a low-reflectivity material, because the returned light increases. So you can deal with this by slowing down until the data improves. Off-road vehicles must do this. On-road vehicles can use other data sources for assurance there's a road there, and radars are capable of detecting anything as big and metallic as a car.
It's a similar thing to not being able to see men carrying a glass windowpane. It's a somewhat niche problem.
Parked cars, on the other hand, may be a tougher challenge. If I were building a self-driving car, my nightmare scenario would probably be a tire lying in the middle of the road, or a piece of matte-textured furniture.
I honked the horn at it.
Thankfully, it missed me despite that brilliant decision.
Matte black cars, not so much.
There is a major price difference right now, but the switch to electric and market forces will drive those costs down. Tack on insurance discounts and the price delta will be smaller than that of automatic vs manual.