Automobiles are some of the most constrained consumer problems in my opinion. There's strong laws on how cars can operate and the environments they operate in. Cars operate in constrained and relatively simple ways. Most other consumer problems are optimized around a human body's abilities which are very complex.
It's still incredibly complex. Reliably handling an area like downtown SF requires a robot to detect, understand and predict a lot of diverse human behavior. All the edge cases lead me to think there will be a supervisory driver in the car for a long time unless we constrain the environment further.
