Safety is not a boolean value, you have to look at this from a risk perspective. If you have a self-driving car that's pretty safe, but you can make it even sa

Safety is not a boolean value, you have to look at this from a risk perspective. If you have a self-driving car that's pretty safe, but you can make it even safer with maps, and those maps are going to be accurate 99.9% of the time, the 0.1% of the time will be less safe, but overall you've significantly reduced your risk of an accident, and maybe you can even mitigate the risk by doing things like slowing down when your maps aren't accurate, the same way human drivers slow down when there are cones on the street. The issue isn't so much that they "couldn't handle" some debris, but that "handling" something is not a yes/no proposition. Having said that, I haven't worked for these groups, so I don't really know what these maps are used for, maybe these maps are just used for localization because GPS isn't accurate enough.