Yes, because somehow humans can't drive without LIDAR in the day or night or rain.
I'm not saying Tesla FSD is any good but the idea that a robot could never drive without just cameras seems to be false given 1.6 billion human drivers that drive with only eyes.
Your eyes and your visual system are much higher performance than any camera and computer currently available for the task of driving. Tesla also has far from the best available hardware, both in cameras and compute.
Still, even with this high performance human sensor suite, people commonly get into accidents in bad weather.
The Waymo approach of using other sensing modalities in order to compensate for the ways in which the cameras/processing aren't as good as a human makes a lot of sense, and in addition, it gives them the ability to exceed human performance using lidar and radar when cameras are having a hard time.
Once we have mass produced lidars and radars, the cost will come down, and not many people are going to care about an extra $1000-$2000 worth of sensors on a car if it significantly improves the safety.
There's no camera that can match the dynamic range of a decent pair of eyes. Some of this is due to active control of the iris at fairly high speed, so you can argue about whether it's the eye or the brain, but the overall result is higher dynamic range than you can get even with normal HDR techniques.
And there's a huge increase (apparently around 36%) in road fatalities during bad weather.
People have much higher safety standards for self-driving cars than they do for human drivers. Just look at how one fatality led to the total abandonment of both the Cruise and the Uber self-driving program.
