According to Sawyer Merritt, citing Waymo’s AI and foundation model lead Vincent Vanhoucke on Google’s DeepMind podcast, Waymo’s approach to autonomous vehicle safety relies on advanced sensor fusion rather than prioritizing LiDAR, radar, or camera data individually. Vanhoucke explains that when sensors disagree, their AI system merges all available data to form a comprehensive scene understanding, similar to how the human brain combines input from both eyes. This fusion process increases redundancy and reliability, enabling safer perception stacks. This approach represents a significant trend in autonomous vehicle AI, where multi-modal data fusion enhances safety and operational efficiency, offering substantial business opportunities for companies developing sensor integration technologies and robust AI-driven perception systems (source: Sawyer Merritt on X, Dec 20, 2025).