Wow, I never knew you had to have a 3D map of the road you wanted to use and it was so much a hassle, first time I read it after so many articles on the subject, I feel a little cheated.
A friend of mine working for Delphi Automotive (electronics supplier for car makers) recently told me that the google's autonomous vehicle needs exact 3D maps, and at that time I found it hard to believe. Watching Eric Schmidt's youtubes you get the impression like the technology is already there for the car to drive everywhere in the US. Coast to coast distance is 3000 miles as oppossed to 700.000 the car has already driven.
Same as I do. So 700.000 miles is 700x1.000, which is like saying that Usain Bolt has run a marathon in less than 4000seconds (a bit more than an hour)... As long as he has run 400 times the 100 meters in about 10 secs, that would be "true."
Well its not that weird actually. When i drive the first time over an unknown route i make quite some mistakes. Because i just dont know the route. I miss signs etc.
If you drive a route very often, you learn about the route, and you learn the appropiate speed etc.
The advantage of a robot car, is that it knows ALL the streets in advance.
It's almost of no consequence. Assuming the regular cars can do the data collection necessary, the first 10 times a road is driven on might need to be manual but from there, enough data about that road has probably been collected to make it autonomous from that point on. It's still an amazing technology.