When I first visited autonomous car company AImotive in May 2017, I thought Google Maps had led me astray. Instead of an office building or warehouse, I faced a suburban home in a cul-de-sac near Highway 101 in Mountain View, California. I’ve visited startups in houses or apartments before, but they were developing software. This was a self-driving car company taking on behemoths like Google, Intel, Baidu, and plenty of others. The unusual setting was my introduction to AImotive ‘s offbeat take on autonomous driving.

Inside I met 44-year-old László Kishonti, CEO of the Hungarian upstart, whose main office is in Budapest. I came to investigate AImotive’s claim that it could navigate primarily using the input from webcams positioned around the car (including a front pair to provide stereo vision). Inexpensive radar sensors would be onboard for backup. But AImotive wouldn’t need the gold-plated standard of most self-driving cars–lidar laser scanners that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Eyeballing traffic

“If you think about how humans drive, you don’t have radar in your mind,” Kishonti says. “The traffic is mostly visual–so lane markings, traffic signs, traffic lights, all the surrounding objects.” Lidar navigation–accurate to within millimeters–also requires digital maps accurate within centimeters, and made by companies such as Google, TomTom, and Here Technologies. AImotive doesn’t need these maps, says Kishonti. The company will add lidar as a backup, he says, if the sensors ever get down to the commodity prices that self-driving car companies hope for.

Related: With its tiny chip, this lidar startup is challenging Velodyne for the autonomous car business

Kishonti’s claims were all talk in 2017, as AImotive didn’t have a license to test in California. But on my recent return visit, it did, and so we hit the road.

What AImotive showed is that a car navigating by standard cameras on a sunny day can stay in its lane when it needs to and change lanes when an engineer tells it to. (The company thinks that the same cameras can handle night driving, but may add infrared cameras if needed.)

Those lane changes were rather abrupt, admits Kishonti. “It’s more aggressive than I would like,” he says as we ride along Highway 101, which is itself a bit rocky. “The environment [in the U.S.] is much worse than in Europe, where you have smooth roads [and] very nice lane markings,” he says. “So we spent a few months first just to be able to simulate the U.S. road traffic quality.” Kishonti pronounces “quality” with ironic intonation, and chuckles.