[marcosdumay]

When does one ever drive in a featureless place? Are you talking about an empty street covered in snow? Or do you have any other situation in mind?

If a car can self-drive anywhere, but will refuse to take control in an empty street covered in snow, I guess that's not a fatal flaw.

[joshvm]

Street surfaces are relatively featureless (uniform grey) at low resolution or quality and a lot of matching algorithms will fail on them. With modern high resolution cameras and algorithms like SGM (see Heiko Hirschmuller's work) you can do pretty well nowadays, but it's not a panacea.

It doesn't necessarily need to be absolutely featureless: more specifically stereo matching suffers when there is local texture that is not sufficiently unique along an epipolar line (normally we use rectified images so epipolar = along the image rows). For a concrete example, if I showed you (or a computer) a small patch of road (< 15x15 px square) and told you to find its location in another image, you would struggle because of the ambiguity. This happens all the time 'in the wild'. Cars are shiny, which means specular reflections everywhere; global illumination differences are fine, but local differences cause problems. Matching surfaces like glass is also hard. Someone else mentioned the sides of artic lorries.

LIDAR avoids a lot of potential confusion, but I'm not suggesting that it's a catch-all. It's time consuming to scan and the data are sparse. The best systems (should) fuse data from all the different sources to maximise confidence.

[raisedbyninjas]

A light colored semi trailer against a light colored sky has already been a fatal flaw.