Will the X initially ship with the hardware required for autonomous city driving? I'll watch the video later, but I would bet the hardest part is deciding whether a lidar is needed, or whether image processing from cameras is sufficient for the city. It could be that both may be needed, so more hardware.
Concerning shadowing, this comment makes sense. The current Google cars driving around record all sensor/camera input for future analysis. Any time something "unusual" is encountered it gets added to the database of scenarios the upgraded software needs to process correctly. Essentially, the cars being driven around provide an ever increasing number of off nominal cases that allow the software to get better and better over time. So if now say 99.999% of unusual conditions are properly processed, when they find 100 more that don't and then modify the code to handle those, you get to 99.9999%. Now it is simply about adding to the trailing number of 9's until you get the code to the level of being as good as the best human driver. And the code updating process is never "done". All accidents that end up happening that could have been prevented will be added to the baseline code after being reviewed. Some accidents are unavoidable.
RT
