In March, Jensen Huang, chief executive of computer chip giant NVIDIA, declared the “ChatGPT moment” for self-driving cars had arrived. In Australia, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system is already available on public roads. Waymo is exploring robotaxi operations in Australia.

The question is no longer whether autonomous driving will arrive, but whether Australia is ready to operate it safely, efficiently and sustainably. This raises an infrastructure question: can roads, bridges and intersections designed for human drivers also be understood by machines?

Over the past 100-plus days, my colleagues and I have used a Tesla Model Y with FSD every day on Queensland roads. We recorded more than 500 safety-critical events where the system required driver intervention or revealed an important limitation in how it interpreted the road environment.

To make some of these observations useful beyond our own research, we initiated White Box Autonomy as a public archive of events where autonomous vehicles hit problems in real-world conditions.

Two things stood out. First, the technology is already far more capable than many people realise. In many cases the vehicle handled the driving task smoothly, with a precision that is hard for a human driver to match.

Second, it is also less capable than many people assume. It occasionally struggled with situations human drivers handle almost automatically, making mistakes that were surprising........

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