How's this a good argument? The entire point in favor of lidar is that the hardware gives more data to software which can in turn be used to make decisions. There is no hardware/software distinction here. Nobody claims that lidar isn't capable of detecting objects. (Note that this is not a comment against lidar, I agree with you but I don't think your argument is sufficient)
The parent comment was opining that Uber's LIDAR based system was systemically inferior to Tesla's non-LIDAR based system. As this is a comment thread about LIDAR systems, the clear implication was that the LIDAR aspect failed.
My point was that the software failed, not the hardware, and I am making a hardware/software distinction.
LIDAR > camera-only systems. LIDAR provides positional data for objects before objection recognition/detection. Camera-only systems need to process an image and do object-detection before they can even figure out where objects are, meaning that they will always be slower than LIDAR for at least the amount of time it takes for that particular system to do image processing and object detection.
My point is that you're missing the point. This debate isn't about whether lidar works or not. Whether lidars are capable of capturing images is not the question we're trying to answer. The question is whether applying lidar to self-driving technology is worth the tradeoffs. Your last paragraph is a point about software not hardware. You're suggesting by using lidar, you give software more information than just using camera, which causes software to be faster. This is a valid point. But you cannot say, using lidar in a self-driving car is a good idea because it successfully captured the image even though software failed to process that image to make the correct decision. Well, if lidar doesn't help software (and it does) it'd just be useless crap. If Uber engineers don't know how to process lidar data, they really shouldn't put lidar in their cars... It's not about hardware or software, it's about the system as a whole.
But what is the trade off by using lidar? Higher prices that will be absorbed by the fleet owners? For a significant amount of crash-avoidance data? Lidar have a wider range of operation (especially at night), and software will catch up to squeeze every single data it can from both cameras and lidar. I don't understand this obsession of limiting bleeding edge applications to use a select few of sensors (as been echoed in this thread a few times).
