Having read that article it looks like all pedestrians will need to be fitted with a radar transponder and a strobe light.
Possibly.
But the fact is that the current tech is massively overrated and often ascribed almost magical capabilities. I don't work in autonomous vehicles but I can certainly relate to what he is saying about the LIDAR data processing - e.g. that LIDAR scans 10x per second
doesn't automatically mean you have the data 10x per second!
I have been working on SLAM and point cloud fusion (mostly for 3D scanning and virtual reality navigation - the algorithms used are very much the same) and this stuff requires enormous computing power, especially when you want dense and accurate point clouds, otherwise you can literally hide an elephant (or a cyclist in this case!) in the holes in the data. E.g. merging a measurement campaign worth of high-res scans from a laser scanner (which is basically slower but much more accurate LIDAR) can take a few hours on a PC, even with a GPU acceleration.
Now in a car, even at 10Hz, that's 0.1s * 60km/h (16.7m/s) the car was doing = ~1.7m traveled between every scan where it needs to rely on other sensors only. If the car is fusing the data slower (which is likely due to the complexity of the process), you do the math. E.g. at 1s effective data rate you have almost 17m traveled between the map updates. Then you typically need two or more "frames" for the AI system to evaluate the new data as an obstacle (as opposed to e.g. spurious reflection or some transient noise - e.g. a car moving nearby). So, in the worst case, during those 2-3s the car is effectively driving "blind" (or rather - with outdated information) as far as LIDAR is concerned - that's some 50m traveled! You can literally have an elephant step in front of the car during that time and the LIDAR-based system wouldn't see it.
Of course, a real car would likely do this faster and also have other systems covering that "blind" time that could prevent the collision as well (and the author actually says that explicitly) but the point is that LIDAR is far from the miracle it is often "sold" as.