A new issue seems to have surfaced - one I had not thought of. Man says CES lidar’s laser was so powerful it wrecked his $1,998 camera | Ars Technica
To summarise the issue. All autonomous cars use lidar (radar using laser light, usually IR) to decipher their surroundings. The lasers in these are legally required to be low enough intensity not to damage human eyes. Almost all digital cameras are much more easily damaged by high intensity IR than are human eyes. Lidar uses digital cameras - which need to be very sensitive to the IR used.
Once there are a significant number of these in use on the roads, the Lidar receiver cameras will start to get direct hits from other car's transmitters, permanently damaging part of their image array.
The solution to this is not obvious, without legal restrictions on the type of Lidar used - for example, 'chirp' lidar does not need anywhere near as intense pulses, avoiding the issue.
I expect that more "gotchas" are likely to appear before autonomous vehicles make it into general use.
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