I've seen quite a few Google self driving cars on Castro in Mountain View. http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4082/4939372588_47979bceec_z....
That picture doesn't do it justice during the most busy hours of the evening, where there's tons of people crossing and bicycles flying about in every direction.
Given that, I've never seen a crowded street in Napoli or a crossroad in Ho-Chi Minh, but I can imagine they are a completely different level of complex all together.
As noted elsewhere, the announcement was that the necessary hardware will now ship standard. Musk has said elsewhere that the software is many times harder than the hardware.
I'm in Rome, which isn't quite as bad, but yes compared to driving in the US it's completely different. Every day I have to deal with someone cutting me up, or doing something otherwise stupid. You need to drive quite aggressively here, and in a self-driving car I'd imagine the journey would take twice as long, as it would keep stopping to give way to avoid an accident - and drivers would definitely try to take advantage of that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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?
Any folks who grew up on a farm who can confirm?
I wasn't allowed to fell the trees but I had to use a chainsaw and cut the branches off the felled trees and then section the denuded trees into small enough rounds they were suitable for busting into firewood with an axe. I was given the option to learn to drive my grandfather's stick shift Toyota pickup truck in order to move all the wood with that, or move it by hand. It was an easy decision.
But, yes, until you're talking about more serious off-road/bad road (which is challenging in a completely different way), there's nothing especially hard about driving on a private dirt road.
Also driving the shitty back roads in Finland was a lot of fun in my old Honda Civic which didn't have power steering or ABS (let alone any kind of traction control and stabilization you have in newer cars). Driving a modern car with all the modern aids is very easy on dirt. On snow some of them can hinder you though (some automatic gearboxes just don't know what to do when none of the wheels have any traction) but for the most part it is very easy too if you have winter tires.
Driving is very easy. Too easy I think which causes people to drive way too fast for the situation quite often.
Main issue for driving on dirt roads/snow for automated cars I see is just seeing the road itself correctly not with controlling the car.
Urban really means not clearly rural. But there are a lot of "urban areas" 10s of miles outside metropolitan areas that people would consider exurban with forests and homes on significant acreage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrEQaG5jPM
Edit:
This video from a motorcyle gives a nice first-person perspective:
Humans have been known to "follow" the car in front of them when its not appropriate. Being parked on the side of the freeway (especially on a curve) is one of the worst places to be. I recall hearing that people hit those parked cars quite often.
Fun issues to think about.
At the same time, it would beam this data back to HQ and to other cars, telling them to avoid the area of uncertainty.