In reality, what Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is trying to do is considered impossible. Any automotive safety feature needs to have redundancy -- there can be no single point of failure. Two cameras aren't considered redundant to each other -- they both suffer from the same limitations. So, Tesla’s technology has a glass ceiling. The safety level from a camera plus lidar is much higher than just a camera. That’s because a camera by itself suffers from vision and AI limitations.
For an autonomous car that mostly relies on cameras, like Tesla, low light conditions are a safety issue. A camera needs to detect that there’s an object in front of it, but it also needs context -- it has to be able to classify that object to understand what it’s actually looking at. As a result, the AI required for a camera is very complex. It needs a lot more processing power. In contrast, it’s much easier for a lidar to give you a good understanding of the scene. The lidar is already collecting a lot of information, including the physical measurements of the object in front of it. The latency, or time to reaction, is faster and the processing power is more lean. It’s strange that someone with such vision would handicap a machine this way: Tesla is using a camera with a 2D sensor and trying to translate it into 3D.