However, it didn’t really prove anything other than that the basic technology for self-driving cars is now fairly well understood.  That doesn’t bring the full-function self-driving car any closer to regular use on open roads. That probably won’t happen until the end of the 2020s.

This demonstration was done on a closed course that is well mapped with no other vehicles around. The real issue that Audi and every other manufacturer has to deal with is working out all the kinks of dealing with weather, less than ideal road conditions, system robustness and of course programming ethics into the system.

That’s not something this particular group of engineers had to deal with. Not to take anything away from their achievement, but there is still a huge amount of work to do before we let self-driving cars loose.