To me, more sensors means faster implementation. Quicker to get on roads. Less total deaths. At least in theory, and in what successes i'm seeing.
If it get's cheap enough it will be.
But the AI isn't human and things a human would recognize, like a a large grey truck up ahead doing a turn on an overcast day an AI can just miss.
> if you say we can't have automation until its 100% perfect,
That's why we need the lidar.
99.99% of daytime highway dashcam frames don't include a firetruck stopped in the lane, dealing with an accident.
But let's say, hypothetically, that a self-driving car accelerated into a clearly visible, stationary firetruck in clear daylight. Despite being 99.99% perfect.
Legislators might feel in order to be an above-average driver the vehicle shouldn't hit any clearly visible stationary objects in clear daylight, because the median human driver doesn't do that.
I'm worried about a time when the _statistical_ safety of AI driving is better than humans across the board, but there are horrifying correlations between AI induced accidents, like "Children on tricycles are not well recognized" or "slight fog in Seattle induces 150 car pileup". Or, AI causes worse accidents less frequently than humans. Whereas humans have lots more fender benders and minor injuries to older adults.
Not saying this is true, but it's a scenario I think about a lot.
Continuing your example just for exposition / hypothetical, if those are 100 individual deaths with varying causes, vs 99 children run over by AI b/c they were walking in a line holding hands and were interpreted as road markers, well that's not _better_ is it?
This is purely hypothetical, but statistics gloss over those human details.