They found and shot down Spongebobs Thanksgiving missing parade balloons, and all it took was a multimillion dollar military operation. Success.

Quite amazing indeed. Quite amazing that we were not designed for the speeds cars currently make, but still we can "manage". What is not amazing is the yearly death toll from traffic accidents. 1,350,000 global... That's more than 1,3 million that die on the road every year, a full small country. Think about it. We can surely improve on this.

The problem is we are not there yet. There's no algorithm or computing power that can match humans at processing the data required to drive "safely". Solution for this? Redundancy, more sensors. We also aim to surpass the human abilities, avoid accidents altogether. We need all the help we can get to achieve this, and the solution again is more data sources, more sensors. No way around it, the more sensors the better. Airbus has learned this recently at the cost of many lives. Let's learn with mistakes not repeat them indefinitely.

Absolutely. The future of driving will have to deal with these situations. Accidents will happen due to technology surpassing human abilities. We will have to find solution for this. I'm thinking automatic driving only in some areas, no manual mode allowed. Or a combination of manual with automatic, when danger is imminent autopilot will automatically takeover the driving. LEO / drones in the mix? A big Hive of cars? No limits when it comes to saving lives on the road. The future is right at our door and it's quite amazing what it will hold for us, feeling confident.

If it requires a button do enable/disable a sensor feed, you're doing it wrong. Good Programming should take care of that for you, analyzing current conditions and validating data. And no, not the 737 Max way...

Completely agreeable. The technology isn't up to human abilities (yet?), and it might not be for quite some time. Redundancy is key if you want a car that drives you around "safely". But the future we aim for is near 0% traffic accidents. If you look at the statistics, how many accidents are due to mechanical issues with the car? The road? How about The human behind the steering wheel making all the decisions? You see the factor surely.

"goes into disabled state until the car is restarted." Bad programming. Yes, it should not be considered in adverse conditions; No, it should not continue disabled until the car is restarted.

What I'm saying is that when it comes to sensors there needs to be Redundancy. mmwave radar, lidar, and imaging sensors all have their own advantages, and drawbacks. The technology for validating data to achieve full self-driving isn't quite there yet. The right way to approach this is Redundancy of sensors, until we get an amazing algorithm that can surpass humans based on imaging (and sound?) processing only, but that will take time... And still, we will need other sensors, other than imaging. Humans aren't quite that good at the driving task...

There's just one little thing missing there to put the autopilot on par with other systems of the kind, and no matter what some say, you just can't build a fully autonomous system without it, LIDAR. Semi-truck accidents when the sun shines on them? LIDAR avoidable.

It's obviously Apple doing aerial photography for its new upcoming Apple Maps. They do it at night because... "think different". You will not find anything on it...