Well, don’t take my word for it, ask the experts.
I’m sure Waymo also evaluated camera-only and then chose multi-sensor.
Because, you know, “disciplined, careful, incremental approach.”
At Nuro, we have built and tested both vision-only systems and multi-sensor systems, and we compare them directly. Qualitatively, the perception outputs can look similarly high-quality, so much so that when watching video clips, it is not always obvious which system is which. Quantitatively, however, differences do emerge. When we look at object recall, especially at night and especially for pedestrians, systems that combine cameras with LiDAR and radar consistently perform better. These are precisely the scenarios that matter most for safety.
A common counterargument is that adding sensors increases system complexity. That is true to some extent. But complexity, in this case, is an engineering problem rather than a fundamental barrier. Sensor fusion, calibration, and redundancy are hard problems, but they are solvable ones. When solved well, they yield systems that are more robust across lighting conditions and environmental variability, with multiple sensing modalities providing complementary and redundant information.
There is also a broader principle at play. A common argument, often framed as a first-principles view, is that because humans drive using only their eyes, machines should do the same. While that observation is factually true, it does not follow that it is the most principled design constraint for machines. Autonomous systems are not bound by human biology. In many domains, machines achieve superior performance precisely because they use sensing and capabilities that humans do not have. Mimicking human limitations is not a requirement for building the safest or most capable system.
Over time, the cost of additional sensors like LiDAR and radar will continue to fall, as it already has. When viewed against the safety and performance gains they enable, their incremental cost becomes negligible. In that long-run equilibrium, particularly for true Level 4, fully driverless autonomy, I expect the best systems will include multiple sensing modalities.