I hear all this talk about better infrastructure, however what about the places in the middle of nowhere.
I see more of the Tesla, with self drive being in the future. Kind of like the movie demolition man.
We could do that in 1985. We used to test our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle (a Polaris Ranger ATV) at a horse ranch, and watched it climb dirt hills with ruts and avoid ditches. You profile the terrain ahead with a LIDAR and choose a driveable path. You can detect potholes, dropoffs, and ruts. You build a height field from the sensor data and run a planner.
The hard part is out-driving the LIDAR range and going faster. You can't profile terrain more than tens of meters away; you're looking at the ground at an oblique angle and can't see holes and drop-offs. We didn't have an answer for that. Stanford's team did; when the near part of the road profiled OK, and the far part of the road looked like the near part of the road, they'd assume the far road was drivable and speed up. We overdesigned the off-road capability and went too slow. But we didn't crash. The vehicle was eventually donated to UC Santa Cruz, where it was used for various projects for years.
The remaining hard problems all involve other road users.