> very least it'd be handy to have self-driving at least on, say, highways
Me too, like driving home after a long day on the highway, being sleepy, in the night, while raining. Good luck with that: [1]
Me too, like driving home after a long day on the highway, being sleepy, in the night, while raining. Good luck with that: [1]
The same also applies to many types of foliage and grasses.
The metal content of the line paint and the material of the roadway surface and guard rails are pretty easy to differentiate with other sensors.
This hints at an interesting issue.
The difficult problems with self driving are not going to be the technical ones (driving in X environmental conditions) but the social ones.
Self driving cars are going to need a theory of mind (be able to make good guesses about what mistakes other road users could make), and also behave in ways that don't make human road users uncomfortable. The latter is relatively easy, but the former is hard - never mind Theory of Mind, some self driving software doesn't even seem to have object permanence.