Comment by Joel_Mckay

Imagine a tramway train car that branched its rail-line at every intersection, person, animal, lane, or obstacle it detected.

1. What would that rail system look like?

2. How reliable would that service become after (6^(4+p+a+l)) per km branches?

3. Given #2, how much computing power is needed to evaluate that state always-mutating SLAM environment?

4. Ok... now throw out GPS (don't work in cities), Lidar (don't work in direct sunlight), and Machine vision cameras (fooled by weather and environment surfaces)...

5. Peoples wishful thinking tends to hijack common sense when someone else pays the price.

Easier to redefine what "autonomous vehicle" means with "levels", rather than to recognize how difficult the problem actually is inside an unconstrained system.

I would never claim to know anything about the subject, but I did help build working platforms when I was more interested in robotics for a time.

Making them "safe" is a whole different problem domain, =3