In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
IIRC robot vacuums usually use a single Time of Flight (ToF) sensor that rotates, giving the robot a 2d scan of it’s surroundings. This is sufficient for a vacuum which only needs to operate on a flat surface, but self driving vehicles need a better understanding of their surroundings than just a thin slice.
That’s why cars might use over 30 distinct ToF sensors, each at a different vertical angle, that are then all placed in the rotating module, giving the system a full 3d scan of it’s surroundings. I would assume those modules are much more expensive, though still insignificant compared to the cost of a car sold on the idea of self driving.