I agree. To elaborate, I think that "Looks" is the problem. Relying on appearance is a fundamental mistake. A road is a predictable flat surface that is safe for wheels at speed. If the map matches your ranging probes, and no geometry that is non-trivial sized impedes or will impeded your progress, you can drive.

This should immediately preclude any approach to self driving cars that has pedestrians, bags of trash, debris, cross traffic, etc. Highway (and probably daytime) only. I don't understand the obsession with starting with corner cases and working back to the very real good that self-driving autonomy can do on highways at speed. Build back with lessons learned, rather than solving the whole problem in one shot. That seems like fundamental engineering, but the marketing team is in charge, not the engineers.