On 2022-11-03, we had a post here, “Andrej Karpathy on Artificial Intelligence, Tesla Self-Driving, Language Models, and Intelligence in the Universe”, a three and a half hour conversation between Lex Fridman and Andrej Karpathy, who ran the Autopilot Vision project at Tesla between 2015 and July, 2022.
Here is a seven minute clip on the rationale for removing radar and ultrasonic sensors as inputs for self-driving.
I found the most persuasive argument starting at 4:27 in the clip: that vision is necessary and sufficient for humans to drive, and adding other kinds of sensors (which humans do not have) is a distraction to solving the problem of driving as humans do it.
At the same time, I can certainly see the case for extending the visual range beyond that of humans: using sensors that can see into the near infrared would allow seeing through fog, and that might be an advantage (although possibly scary to passengers riding in a car that was confidently navigating through pea soup).