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Jonathan M. Gitlin-April 11, 2016 at 5:53 PM UTC

As we reported on Sunday, some automakers are dissatisfied with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's push to develop consistent autonomous vehicle regulations across the country. This is partly because optical sensors cannot always cope with bad weather. But don’t forget that the intention of the regulators and the original equipment manufacturers that promote this technology is to save many of the 33,000 people who lose their lives on American roads every year. One of the companies, Ford, has just released the results of its recent night test, which it said proves the effectiveness of the company's autonomous driving method.

The semi-autonomous vehicles that we recently drove from Audi, Tesla and Volvo rely mainly on optical sensors to detect the surrounding environment. The critics are correct-these sensors cannot always read the lines on the road and are susceptible to bad weather. Like Google, Ford uses lidar as the main sensor of the car. After testing in the desert at night, Ford said this technology far exceeds anything humans can do.

Wayne Williams — whom we talked to at CES in January — was one of Ford's researchers, and he rode the night in automatic Fusions. "In the car, I could feel it moving, but when I looked out the window, I only saw the darkness. When I was sitting in the back seat, I used a computer to monitor the progress of the car in real time. Sure enough, it Keep precisely on track along those winding roads," he said.

The reason why this technique is so effective is that lidar data is combined with extremely high-resolution maps. For now, this means that in the next few years, fully autonomous vehicles that support lidar may be restricted to well-mapped locations such as Silicon Valley, manufacturer proving grounds, and automotive research centers.

Map companies like HERE intend to use the same crowdsourcing methods as traffic data services such as Waze and INRIX to accelerate this process. Nonetheless, a fully self-driving car—a car that can go from A to B without any human intervention—may take at least 10 years.

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