There’s a lot more to perception while driving than just stereoscopic vision.
First, your stereoscopic “cameras” (eyes) are mounted in free-rotating sockets, which are themselves mounted in a rotating and swiveling base (your head/neck). Your eyes can do rapid single-point autofocus better than any existing camera. They also have built in glare mitigations —- squinting, sunglasses, and sun visors. This system is way more advanced than fixed cameras. Yes, even an array of fixed cameras with a 360 degrees field of view.
Then you have your sense of touch, your hearing, and your equilibrio sense. You feel motion in the car. You feel vibrations in the pedals. You hear road noise, other cars, sirens, and the engine (not much in EVs). You smell weird smells and know when you’re driving with your e-brake on or when there’s a skunk nearby. There’s a lot getting fused with the vision to make it all happen, and I think you’d be surprised how “broken” your driving capabilities would be if you took one of these “background” senses out of the equation.
My anecdote: I drive a manual transmission car. A few months back, I woke up with no hearing in my right ear. Spooked, I drove to urgent care. I could not drive well at all —- I was holding low gears for way too long. I learned that I use hearing almost exclusively to know when to shift. If you had asked me beforehand, I probably would have said that I’m visually monitoring the tachometer to know when to shift. Not the case. Also, I had a TERRIBLE sense of my surroundings. As I drive, I’m definitely building a model of the environment around me based on road noise, sound from other cars, sirens, and the like. Without hearing in just one ear, I felt very disconnected and unsafe. Living in California where lanesplitting is legal, I had several motorcycles catch me completely off guard. I had my hearing restored at urgent care and everything went back to normal immediately on the drive home.
I think Andrej and Tesla massively overestimate vision’s sole ability to solve the problem. Humans are fusing lots of sensation to drive well.
