The failure to brake in the Arizona accident highlights the immaturity of driverless technology and tradeoffs made by programmers that could end in tragedy. While the basics of various companies' driverless systems are the same, in detail they differ greatly, from how software is written to which sensor systems are used. Tesla, for instance, bucks the industry in general by dismissing the need for lidar, an expensive technology that uses laser pulses to draw images of physical objects.

Source: Los Angeles Times May 24, 2018 15:10 UTC