Yes and no. You are right, control is not the issue. Sensing is or isn't the issue depending on what you are talking about. On one hand, sensors are the best t

Yes and no. You are right, control is not the issue. Sensing is or isn't the issue depending on what you are talking about. On one hand, sensors are the best they've ever been and you could get a car to drive around a closed course in a robust enough manner. However, there's a lot going on in the world around a car in the wild. We can identify obstacles like other cars pretty robustly, but it is still a sticking point because small mistakes cost lives (see that early Tesla fatality that thought a truck was a billboard). I think an AI winter is pretty inevitable at this point because AI has become so overhyped. It won't be as bad as previous winters though, because modern AI techniques have had a pretty major impact on other fields. Computer vision, for example, will never really be the same again. Moreover, for something like a self-driving car, ML will certainly play a big roll. Even though getting the computer vision models to work is incredibly tricky, I can't fathom how you would go about doing it with "conventional" algorithms.