In the mean time, on a completely non-commercial separate track, AI researchers should try to do more with less. Driving using only visible-light sensors is a challenge. AI is pushed forward by taking on challenges exactly like this, let's see the push continue.
These two tracks may in fact intersect. When your LIDAR and radar are caked with ice and mud, you'll want the car to be able to drive visually at least to a safe stopping point.
Cars are far-and-away the biggest killer of people in my age group. I sincerely hope that we are not going for true parity, and they will not end up driving like we do.
Using a couple stereoscopic pictures to get the lay of the land is a very, very error-prone process. Humans have to make do with it because we have very limited sensory equipment available to us. Computers can and should make use of the vastly superior technologies that they have at their disposal. One of the main points to this whole enterprise is to make better, safer cars by replacing the primary point of failure behind most collisions. Deliberately crippling the system in an effort to slavishly imitate the thing it's supposed to replace would be completely missing the point.
Commercial driverless cars will blow humans out of the water in safety and reliability. That is the goal and should be goal. To achieve the goal multiple sensors can and should be used.
But separately AI researchers will continue to improve and evolve their algorithms. One avenue for improvement is to operate with fewer sensors. A human driver can drive passably well on any road without LIDAR or radar or GPS. In time computers can and should be able to do the same. We will benefit from that capability, even if in general driverless cars make use of other sensors.
It uses all-electric vehicles and they even have a convoy mode where each car follows the lead vehicle closely to maximize the number of passengers and minimize wind resistance.
The guidance system is pretty primitive - it's all done in hardware with steel wheels on steel rails - but it makes it relatively difficult for it to go off-the-rails.
But a self-driving car that uses only visual sensors is clearly possible in the long run. And having that technology would only benefit multi-sensor cars. What if one or more sensors breaks when you are doing 85 mph with the whole family asleep? I'd certainly welcome the resiliency to operate on less input.
There are too many situations where one type of sensing isn't good enough (e.g. lasers scatter off snow and can't penetrate fog/dust, radar can get saturated by multiple corner reflectors, visual sucks at night, IR sucks in bright sun, etc). To reduce cost visual-only might be a good way to go, but it won't be versatile enough to cover all the necessary scenarios.
I'm just advocating we do the research, create some visual-only cars as proof of concept, solve those thorny AI problems. It's an artificial constraint, one which will produce engineering innovations which can then be applied back to real world products.
Sure our eyes have great resolution and batteries-included depth perception, but they can't see around 360 degrees around the car at 15 fps. Pros & cons
Policy search is AI. =)
Eyes not only have great resolution and depth perception, but are attached to an amazing pattern processing machine that looks forward in time to estimate the next set of perceptions. They're also very environment-invariant - sun, snow, heavy rain, fog, etc would screw a camera, but human eyes can handle it relatively gracefully.
Seriously?
My point was just to defend humans from the hyperbole that we drive all horribly today. We have cumulatively driven trillions of kilometers. Our cities and entire economies function because for the most part when you get into a car, you can expect to arrive at your destination. This is no small feat. But yes I look forward to self-driving cars vastly improving on "okay".