Hm, good point. Well, I hope someone looks into this deeper and does some real-world applicable tests…
Hmmm … like dig out one’s expensive Hasselblad and whack it with an industrial distance-measuring laser, sort of like an “etch-a-sketch” … 
I wonder what that does to roadside speed cameras.
When looking at the viral video, I note that the sensor damage generates bright colored spots in the field of view which then persist. The most probable explanation for this result is that the Bayer filter layer gets damaged at the pixels getting too much IR radiation. When the filter dye gets bleached or the layer punctured at a pixel site, more light will reach the sensor at that site creating a bright spot. If someone has a camera sensor damaged by a LIDAR, he could actually check this, because in this case the bright pixels should only show up when light reaches the sensor, but not when the lens is covered and no light reaches the sensor.
The risk of your camera being damaged by pointing it onto an operating LIDAR will mainly depend on two factors.
The first factor is how much of the LIDAR IR light entering your lens will actually reach your sensor.
All cameras for color photography contain a hot mirror, a dielectric reflective filter which lets pass visual light but reflects near IR. These hot filters are designed to reflect IR radiation up to a wavelength of about 1100 nm, the sensitivity limit of a silicon photosensor, to prevent invisible IR to be recorded as red.
Older LIDARs, such as the one use on the Waymo, use a 905 nm laser. The hot filter will reflect almost all light at this wavelength, so only a small amount of laser light will reach the sensor and damage to the sensor is unlikely.
The wavelength of the 1550 nm LIDAR used by Volvo is higher than the design limit of the camera’s hot filter and the filter may have much higher transmission at this wavelength than at 905 nm. I haven’t found data for transmission at 1550 nm, but the absorption spectra in the following two links show that hot filters can be almost transparent to IR at some wavelenghts higher than 1100 nm, depending on the make.
https://www.thorlabs.com/NewGroupPage9.cfm?ObjectGroup_ID=897
https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=6108
There is little you can do to reduce this risk factor as long as no dedicated IR filters for a wavelength of 1550 nm are available. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way for assessing how large this risk factor is for a particular camera.
The second factor is how much IR radiation from the LIDAR will enter your lens.
LIDAR scanners use pulsed lasers with very short pulse lengths of some tens of a nanosecond and a fast puls repeat rate in the range from 100 kHz to 1 MHz. The LIDAR scanners used in cars typically have a fixed laser and a horizontally rotating mirror for a horizontal scan with laser pulses sent out at small angle differences.
https://www.edn.com/autonomous-automotive-sensors-how-processor-algorithms-get-their-inputs/
If the laser is reflected at a point on the rotation axis of the mirror, all laser pulses of a LIDAR scan will come from the same point in space, which seems to be the case for the LIDAR used by Volvo.
If you point your camera onto the Volvo LIDAR from a point far away, only a single pulse from a scan will hit your lense and reach the sensor and the energy provided by absorbing this pulse in the Bayer filter layer of a pixel will cause no harm. However, if you get really close to the LIDAR, a large number of pulses of a scan, maybe in excess of 1000, will reach your lens on a line across the lens within a millisecond. All these pulses will be focused on the same spot on the sensor and the heat supplied by the IR radiation of so many pulses may be enough to literally vaporize the Bayer filter layer for the pixels at this spot, if it is not blocked by the camera’s hot filter. Note that the number of pulses getting to the sensor depends on the lens diameter and the aperture, but not on the focal length.
This second risk factor can easily be reduced by keeping your camera away from an automotive LIDAR and not pointing the lens at the LIDAR at close distance. Be careful partucularly at bright daylight, because the LIDAR system of Volvo seems to increase laser power at these conditions to maintain S/N ratio for the remitted laser light.
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Thank you for such a detailed comment. I guess standing let’s say 10 or more meters away pointing not directly at the LiDAR should be pretty safe then.