Car companies have (multiple) private tracks that they stress test their vehicles on. Car companies are extremely risk averse. Public road testing for something safety related is going to be very late stage in development/testing, if at all.
Some level of integration, testing always has to meet the real world. Maybe in IT we would call a "canary" instead of a test. I once had a colleague who had been a test driver for a major European car firm. His job was to drive cars around in real traffic.
Self-driving cars need this all the more, since most of the hard and scary stuff is the integration of many systems and how they deal with unexpected scenarios. And worse still -- in a traditional car, you had an expert test-driver like my friend who could, say, take evasive action if the brakes didn't work.
But in these cars, the driver is the system-under test.
> Car companies have (multiple) private tracks that they stress test their vehicles on. Car companies are extremely risk averse. Public road testing for something safety related is going to be very late stage in development/testing, if at all.
Yes, and so do these guys. They might be somewhat risk averse, but lets not pretend they have in the past made sacrifices that have cost lives (Pinto, etc...) and there are constant recalls going on.
