Considering that the gen 1 ryzen 3 1200 (the lowest end model) is more than double the performance of the automotive processor in my car from 2023 (3.1ghz quad core vs 2.4ghz dual core)...

what architecture is the CPU in the car? my smartphone is no 3 GHz, and it too can handle image recognition.

But, the car does do some onboard image recognition to support Hands-free driving, so there is enough compute onboard to manage that.

possibly hardware accelerated with some specialized hardware. there's this thing called google coral, it can be connected through PCIe or USB, and can do the heavy lifting for multiple cameras.