How self-driving do we need our self-driving cars to be?

Photo: Vjeran Pavic Illustration: Alex Parkin

There’s a big debate happening in the self-driving car world: what’s the best way for these vehicles to see the world around them? Both Tesla and those autonomous taxi startups, like Waymo and Cruise, use powerful machine vision systems to help their cars navigate the world, but that’s where the similarities end. A Tesla’s view of the world is provided entirely by cameras, whereas Cruise and Waymo use an array of different kinds of sensors, most critically lidar. Short for “Light Detection and Ranging,” lidar systems use pulses of lasers to map the environment with impressive fidelity, though at a much higher cost.

Lidar has become a surprisingly bitter bone of contention for those competing for a self-driving future. Former Uber CEO…