What version of Lidar does your head have?
- What living creature is using wheels to move around?
- What kind of birds come strapped with a jet engine?
Sometimes non-natural solutions are easier and often better than attempt to replicate nature for every cost. Imagine your logic applied on a plane - birds flap their wings, thus this 737 should spread it wings and flap away like a goose. Now take military goose and flap fast enough to get supersonic...
A human driving a car.
I agree with you that sometimes non-natural situations are easier and can absolutely be better, but the point of bringing up humans is generally to show that it demonstrably is possible to do at least as well as humans, with humans as an existence proof.
But that it might well take too long and cost too much to get there, and that it might well in the end be cheaper and better to use additional types of sensors is a good point.
But more specifically to this case, human eyes are attached to brains with (generally) vastly better image recognition and reasoning abilities than any camera based self-driving car. Because of this, humans are better able to recognize visual input even in degraded or unusual conditions compared with a computer.
(Also, I don't know what star-system you grew up on by my lidar sensors are next to the tubular sheaths on my cephalothorax, right where Xoc'tlz'ik (the Creator) intended them to go.)
Despite all this, a lot of modern cars are adding lidar to make things easier for me.
There's a small, sharp, high resolution color-enabled area in each eye - but the bulk of your vision field is monochrome, and mostly sensitive to motion.
You don't notice that, because your image data is stacked and post-processed to shit to make it presentable. Your brain has been doing computational photography before it was cool - 90% of what you see at any moment in time is effectively AI-generated.
We possess a spatial intelligence (e.g. how your brain has an approximation of: It feels like I walked three blocks) that will never exist in this "photons-in" "controls-out" fantasy.
And they may well end up with something "that works". But... many buts.
This "world model" is what you get to peek into through the car's screen. By now, it even has basic "object permanence". Nowhere near as good as a human yet. But AI is getting better, and an average driver isn't.