It occurs to me there is an opportunity here. Passive lidar detectors sampling fleets of vehicles in the real world, measuring compliance and detecting outliers, would be interesting. A well placed, stationary device could sample thousands of vehicles every day. Patterns will emerge among manufacturers. Failure modes will be seen.

Cursory queries on this reveal nothing. Apparently, no one is doing this. We're all relying on front end certification and compliance. No thought given to the real world of design flaws, damage, faulty repairs, unanticipated failure modes, etc.

Apparently there are lidar jammers. I bet those are rigorously compliant with Class 1 safety regs... No one manufacturing those is ever going to think; "hey, why not a 50W pulse train?"

But is it going to raise to a level of concern? I don't think we're going to see a ton of cars with blinding lasers installed, unless they are installed to intentionally blind people.

If you have used face I'd, or someone has used a face detection on modern smart phone on you, or if you've pulled up to a modern intersection, you've been blasted with lasers. It may come one day where that's the largest concern but today it's not my primary problem and investing in FUD isn't going to bring any benefits.

A good safety system requires multiple of these failures to occur together to become unacceptable in risk.

This is why we create regulations and inspectors.