Uh oh.

The California DMV won't yet allow testing of autonomous vehicles heavier than 10,000 pounds on California public roads. Otto is thus testing in Arizona. Looks like that was a good decision by DMV.

I wrote this on HN yesterday:

An important question is whether their system is smart enough to take evasive action.

It's becoming clear that there are two ways to approach self-driving. The first stems from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was about off-road driving. For that, the vehicles had to profile the terrain, plotting a path around obstacles, potholes, and cliff edges. The GPS route was just general guidance on where to go. That's the approach Google took, as can be seen from their SXSW videos. Google also identifies moving objects and tries to classify them. With all that capability, it's possible to take evasive action if some other road user is a threat. The control system has situational awareness and knows where there's clear space for escape.

The other approach is to start with lane following and automatic cruise control, and try to build them up into self-driving. This can be done entirely with vision systems. That's the Cruise Automation and Tesla approach. This puts the car on a track defined by lines on the pavement, with lane changes and intersections handled as a special case. There usually isn't a full terrain profile; that requires LIDAR. So there isn't enough info to plan an emergency maneuver for collision avoidance.

This distinction is not well understood, and it should be.