I'm looking for repeatability and reliably
There is the venerable ultrasonic which can be fooled.
LidAR seems to come a long way, but I've yet had a chance to test one out.
Does anyone have experience with a similar goal.
what does the "target" look like ? a large reflective wall orthogonal to the sensor's signal is easier to detect than a small shiny ball somewhere ahead of you...
have a look at Pololu proximity-sensors-and-range-finders
It depends on the target, I`m using HC-SR04 for the lake water level and it works great up to max 4m, with 1cm resolution.
Target is the 1st 4 feet of a small SUV.
I'm planning of making an "off center" for our garage.
So it’s wall mounted an detects the SUV?
Hopefully 
I'm not sure I understand what an "off center" in a garage is (two car garage?), but just putting it out there, is it something that a tennis ball hung from the ceiling on a string can't handle?
You can use ultrasonic sensor for this without any problems. What is "off center" ?
A tennis ball did THAT?! 
So the mirror clipped the wall or another car? Maybe if you draw post a floor plan of your garage, size, one car or two? Wall mounted or ceiling? What is the alarming device?
Looking at that Garmin Lidar sensor on Sparkfun, it seems like it could work but I have no experience using them.
I do have experience using the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors and they're pretty good, although I can't say I have used one for any length of time in a fixed facility type installation where it's running 24/7. Could always have it only come on when the garage door is open I suppose, but that adds another layer of complexity and of course layer of potential device failure.
I'm wondering how you plan to use a system like this to notify you to stop. Any system will, at heart still rely on driver notification and response, after all. You certainly wouldn't use an Arduino based system to interact with vehicle control itself.
How will you know if the system is working correctly? If it does for say, a year, and the driver's parking habits have come to rely in it, the day it doesn't work, how will you know and avoid the very problem you solved in the first place?
I'm not saying all this to discourage or disparage your design goal, I'm just putting to the forum the things I think need to be considered in the goal of creating a system that's reliable, ie a system you can trust.
Going back to the tennis ball, unless I'm missing something, I just don't see how a system using any Arduino sensor offers any real advantage over what's tried and true.
It it was me, and I'm not being sarcastic of flippant, please understand, I think I would just add another tennis ball or even a bright, heavy cloth strip with a fishing weight sewn into a hem, if space is really tight
- Tennis ball: We have one and it did not work (in this instance).
- I have a HC-SR04 working in the other side of the garage to determine if there is a vehicle there or not (sensor in the ceiling, pointed at floor). However this application has a very wide difference in distance between vehicle and no vehicle. The reliability I'm talking about is sensing reliability not failure reliability.
As for someone relying on this sensor, That could be said for anything. However in this case, if the sensor shows "RED" the driver must backout and re enter the garage, not exactly something you rely on.
Is the sensor working? A simple RED / GREEN would solve that.
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Sorry I don't understand what is the problem...
So you want to detect if a small SUV is positioned in the center of one half of a two car garage? Are you sure that one sensor would do it? Maybe two to determine if it was at an angle.
Or can you draw a little sketch to demonstrate?
I'm sure one sensor will work, the vehicle is large enough and garage door opening small enough that the vehicle can't be on much of an angle (else we will have bigger problems).
My original question was simply wondering if anyone had some experience with some of the newer sensors. But is sounds like I'll have to test them myself.
I think the members do have experience with various distance sensors - it feels like some of us (well at least me) still have a hard time understanding exactly what is your end goal.
A drawing could be worth a thousand words
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