In recent years, electric vehicles have achieved rapid development. Intelligence is one of the important trends to promote the development of electric vehicles. As a result, autonomous driving system is becoming one of the core systems of electric vehicles. Considering that environmental perception is the basis of intelligent planning and safe decision-making for intelligent vehicles, this paper presents a survey of the existing perceptual methods in vehicles, especially 3D object detection, which guarantees the reliability and safety of vehicles. In this review, we first introduce the role of perceptual module in autonomous driving system and a relationship with other modules. Then, we classify and analyze the corresponding perception methods based on the different sensors. Finally, we compare the performance of the surveyed works on public datasets and discuss the possible future research interests.