I was careful to challenge the usefulness of the exercise. Mostly because I took it as a personal challenge. However, you make an important point. This exercise

I was careful to challenge the usefulness of the exercise. Mostly because I took it as a personal challenge. However, you make an important point. This exercise assumes the problem set will be identical in the future. This sounds like a sensible approach that ends up undermining all of the technological improvements a self driving vehicle will posses. Things like redundant control systems, [V2V, V2I, V2C] networking, run flat tires, and others. The self driving car will be closer to an airplane with a robotic agent as the traffic controller than anything else.