Why don't some of the teams impress me and try driving somewhere with black ice, strong crosswinds and blowing snow. If their systems can't drive in negative environmental conditions, they will be largely worthless in many locales.
In my opinion, the fully autonomous vehicles shouldn't need to handle those situations. Leave that up to the human to navigate.
Fully autonomous should be able to handle the NORMAL day-to-day driving responsibilities. If you're going to require those situations that you mentioned, we'll never have fully autonomous vehicles.
NOTE: when I say fully-autonomous, the car will still have a steering wheel and someone sitting in the driver seat. The google car that had no steering wheel would never happen in the "real-world" only tightly controlled environments.
If we never see a car that can actually drive itself without human intervention, I will be severely disappointed. All that work and hype just for some driving assistance systems?
They may be difficult conditions, but people drive in them all the time. Something like 30-40% of the US population drives in snow and wind for months at a time. They're not uncommon. What's the great utility of a car that can only perform its function in ideal circumstances, i.e. on a closed track.
I'd compare it to having a convertible car---it has one lovely feature, that only really proves it worth during elusive weather conditions.
This will make driving in those conditions even more dangerous. If people start relying on self driving cars, their driving skills will deteriorate. If computer can't drive the car safely, rusty driver won't do better job.
Say Dakar for example (2.5M people): no road signs, pedestrians on the highway, constant honking from every directions, more varied "vehicles" like horse carriage and "car rapides" (small buses).
Having recently returned from Paris, I was completely flabbergasted by the driving patterns. It was surreal. I am excited about Tesla and this self-driving car, I really am. If it can in fact navigate around the city of Paris on a Saturday I'm not sure how I would react. Probably wouldn't believe it.
It knows where it is, it knows where it needs to go and they already have an "aggression" where they'll pull out a bit to signal to other drivers they're going.
The really complex part for us is that we can't easily keep track of all the things around us and have very slow reactions. The computer knows the distance of all things around it accurately and can respond in milliseconds and doesn't get flustered or angry. Or am I missing something, is there a lot of complex reasoning?
I ranked them in order of crazy. Milan is the most crazy of crazy. As are the motorways around Milan. I am pretty sure that the shared philosophy to not use the brake is that if they just go faster they can be ahead of any trouble about to occur.
My three tests for self-driving cars would be:
1. Drive through Milan on a Saturday afternoon, from the outside of the city, and park on the opposite side of the centre of the city.
2. Drive through London during a weekday, similar thing... cross the centre and find a parking space and park.
3. Drive through Paris during a weekend, same deal.
Those three cities are the most stressful to drive through for various reasons.
With Milan it's speed and decisiveness, small spaces and tight navigation.
With London it's the mix of traffic with a high cycling % along with a good mix of motorbikes and heavy goods vehicles as well as a phenomenal number of pedestrians who will walk out at any moment.
With Paris it's the speed of the ring-road (and the challenge of handling variable speed traffic on and near it) as well as the tight spaces on the streets and the numbers of scooter riders.
I also like the diversity of traffic signals and signs across those cities.
When I see a self-driving car manage those cities I am going to be impressed. It will exercise so much of their systems to do any one of those.
PS: I like that they are all fashion capitals... it would be a good marketing campaign to throw in Tokyo and NYC and present an accessible and fashionable angle to a set of super complex technical achievements.