This one of the many reasons why self-driving cars are such a hard problem though. They don't just have to drive better than humans based on knowing the road an

This one of the many reasons why self-driving cars are such a hard problem though. They don't just have to drive better than humans based on knowing the road and the conditions, they also have to deal with other drivers (who are perhaps also automated) behaving in unexpected ways. Self-driving cars have to be robust even when (especially when) normal assumptions about the road or other drivers aren't valid. This isn't tangential to the engineering problems surrounding self-driving cars, rather it's at the heart of those problems and why it's an order of magnitude (or more) harder than what so many people assume. It's not insurmountable, but whenever I hear people making comments like "self-driving cars are a solved problem, and are an inevitability in the near future", I cringe so hard. With a lot of care and skepticism, we can all make self-driving cars a thing in our lifetimes. Or, with a lot of overenthusiastic credulousness, we can make self-driving cars briefly a thing in the very near future, which get regulated out of existence for the remainder of our lives by a relatively small number of high-profile accidents like this.