Laser attack blinds autonomous vehicles, deleting pedestrians and confusing cars

Not only would they be fooled, their eyes might suffer permanent damage from exposure to lasers.

But consider this. Thermal Cameras are the best way to detect pedestrians, and can't be blinded by Lidar(They operate in Near infrared and Short wave infrared, so MWIR or more commonly, LWIR sensors are flat out immune to being blinded at all) - SEEK and FLIR ,went and recreated the Tempe Arizona accident and discovered Thermals would have easily avoided the accident there due to a high amount of early warning.

Ultrasonic sensors and Sonar are invulnerable to Lidar(though a longer ranging sonar is something to work towards, but they can act as short range radar)

There's good old radar itself- with various frequencies for resolution, rain penetration, snow penetration, ground mapping(so your car can then build recognition points and recognize where you are in total whiteout conditions because the ground and 'underground' doesn't change) -There's Lidar- and it can be made to be resistant to this, we would indeed be using techniques that modern military radars use to avoid getting jammed. This would also help the edge cases of not getting blinded by potentially- police LIDAR guns, which use variable pulse rates for their latest models(which are difficult for the majority, though not all - aftermarket laser jammers using LEDs to keep up with)

There's also potential Microwave and terahertz sensors- but these can be passive , or Active- or both. And the further you go in the spectrum, the more you penetrate bad weather.

Sensor Fusion is the trickiness- But having multiple is a solution to this issue. This is why there is research into air-to-air missiles to fit onto them more than just one type of sensor.