Google Self-Driving Car on City Streets

"The autonomous Google car may never actually happen." Directly underneath that, an image captioned: "A Google self-driving car maneuvers through the streets of Washington in 2012." This article is rubbish. It makes lots of arguments that sound valid, but are actually nowhere near being insurmountable. Take the first one, for instance. Supposedly, the need to map the roads is a huge burden. Well, what if they just design the cars so that when a road is unmapped they need to be manually driven, but after that has been done a certain number of times, can be driven on that road autonomously? Only a tiny proportion of drivers would even encounter that situation, and even new roads would become autonomous-compatible from day one. (or thereabouts) Overall, the article acknowledges that varying degrees of autonomy are already being built into vehicles. To not come to the conclusion that these will be iterated on and become (more or less) full autonomy is short-sighted. ▶ this video

If you watch this video you can see that Google's cars doe exactly this. You even see the car pick up on hand signals. ▶ this video Realistically you would have to modify the software to pass the test for stupid reasons, for example the vehicle might refuse to function at all without it's LIDAR, insisting on slowing to stop and pulling over, where the video wants to continue driving.

This video shows how the Google self-driving cars react to cyclists, as well as obstacles on the road and such: ▶ this video No idea how Cruise deals with this, but it does appear to be possible anyway.