Using Pittsburgh as a proving ground is a smart move - not just because that happens to be where CMU is located but if you can train a self-driving car to navigate Pittsburgh, you've pretty much trained it to navigate anywhere.

In Pittsburgh you have a haphazard street grid with unconventional and often poorly maintained road conditions, hills with poor visibility, narrow streets, weird unpredictable driver behavior like making left turns in front of oncoming traffic as a light turns green (my friends call this the "pittsburgh left"), every sort of weather condition imaginable including heavy rain snow and ice, etc etc. A self driving car that can navigate Pittsburgh without ever needing driver input is truly autonomous