&gt; <i>A Slate article from 2014 stated that Google&#x27;s cars wouldn&#x27;t know a stoplight existed, and would simply run it, if it wasn&#x27;t in Google Maps</i><p>That muse be old. In their TED talk from last year, they had it spotting and reacting to cyclist hand signals, school bus mechanical stop signs, and even a police officer directing traffic at an intersection.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tiwVMrTLUWg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tiwVMrTLUWg</a><p>edit: I see you mention this below.<p>Weird article, though. The author says:<p>&gt; <i>In fact, when I first wrote about the car for MIT Technology Review, Google admitted to me that the process it currently uses to make the maps are too inefficient to work in the country as a whole.</i><p>but his previous article he links to says<p>&gt; <i>Maps have so far been prepared for only a few thousand miles of roadway, but achieving Google’s vision will require maintaining a constantly updating map of the nation’s millions of miles of roads and driveways. Urmson says Google’s researchers “don’t see any particular roadblocks” to accomplishing that.</i><p>(and, incidentally, you quote the word &quot;impractical&quot;, which appears in neither quote :)