In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
There’s a reason they do that, he actually covers that in the video. Lidar spins a single line many, many many times a second. Processing the differences in that line scan to scene makes the point cloud generation many times easier allowing the scan to be exponentially more dense.
The iPhone uses a diffraction grating to shoot static dots at your face and looks for the subtle movements of your face and phone to generate a 3D scan.
The diffraction method is tiny and good for static identification but bad for high-speed outdoors.
The spinny towers give it a better field of view. you could probably put shorter towers on each corner, or even build them into the body panels, but it’s a delicate, expensive instrument and it’s not what’s currently holding back self driving anyway :)