[mkaufmann]

Driving on a german highway with autonomous cars has already been done as already as 1996 by Mercedes[1]. But same as with the google cars they used very special hardware which would be too expensive for production use. The current challenges are to make autonomous driving happening with fewer and cheaper sensors.

Also having a real highway allows testing scenarios like partially blocked street due to construction, testing at night, with rain, with snow, etc. Google's cars are currently not working under such conditions so there are still many problems to solve.

[1] http://wwwlehre.dhbw-stuttgart.de/~reichard/content/person/d... (Sorry no english news)