SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.
The real challenges when navigating city streets are the human ones – delivery vehicles blocking lanes, municipal worker fixing a manhole with a single cone to redirect traffic, pedestrians/bicyclists appearing out of nowhere, no one following traffic signs. This is the kind of stuff that tests "intelligence".
It's not a matter of "finding" lane markers. There are no lane markers visible after it snows.
We ourselves identify and confirm other urban waymarks via captcha which feeds the nav data -- bridges, signs, hills, hydrants, chimneys, lights. There is mass live verification from android auto in vehicles. There are many yearly layers of street view images and scans.
I don't think we'll see a system that can handle that in my lifetime.
The harder part is driving like a human and detecting that a path has been made in the middle of two lanes in heavy snow and not obeying the lines at all.
The human driver detects the pedestrian, laughs at the fall, then get worried and wait for them to get up, because a human knows someone fell and didn’t magically disappear.
This remark makes me wonder if you've ever lived in an area that actually experiences winter.
Around here, dead of winter, there are no lines visible on the streets. Heck, after a good snow storm the lanes are basically a function of group consensus.
(noting that Waymo requires full detail maps to be able to drive an area, including all signage).
First, it's optimistic to assume that data is accurate and up-to-date.
Second, I can't emphasize my "group consensus" point enough.
Anyone who's driven in real world winter conditions has seen a day where three lane roads turn into two. Or lanes form in the shoulder. It'd be actively dangerous to insist on driving according to the underlying lane markings during those types of road conditions.
Maybe in a world where all cars are autonomous and using map data that could work. In reality it really doesn't.
Huh, what? Human drivers can already take advantage of all of those, and they still find snowstorms and torrential rain challenging.
The challenge is understanding what you see (and hear), and dealing with very noisy and limited--sometimes actively misleading--inputs.
Source: grew up watching subarus do 360s on the freeway.
I find SF much more challenging to drive in, at least wrt the other drivers. In Boston, drivers are aggressive and take calculated, dangerous risks to meet their goal.
In SF, a lot of people on the road act like it's their first time driving in like 5 years and they're still figuring it out. There's no rational risk-taking towards a goal, but more people bumbling around unpredictably while unsure of what their goal even is.