I'm working on autonomous off-road vehicles, and while this is (probably) true for autonomous cars, dynamics modeling for wheeled robots on rough terrain is another beast where these approaches could very much help.
People in space robotics have been working on that (moon and mars rovers need to deal with this). Perception is also a bottleneck; you have to see rocks, root, grass, mud and predict the effects on the dynamics.
Sure, but to be clear, I meant physical modeling which includes real-time modeling of all salient objects and surfaces in the immediate and foreseeable environment. I mean going as far as creating a physical model for deer, their range of behavior and speed, weight distribution, predictive modeling for subsequent behavior, etc...
But not outside those teams. If you want to put something together in a few weeks your options are relatively limited in that collecting accurate data is fairly hard. The actual dynamics of the car is fairly simple but the forces applied to it are quite hard to model (I don't know how much Michelin charge to use TameTire but I'm guessing not cheap)