Let's put things in perspective first. An aircraft with an autopilot is capable of flying to destination and landing the aircraft and coming to a complete stop ...on the runway, not at the arrival's gate! The pilot still needs to disconnect the autopilot to even turn off the runway, otherwise the airplane will refuse to exit the runway because it's landing system is trying to keep it aligned with the centerline of the runway! Once the system is turned off, the pilot then has to manually taxi to the terminal building himself.
But keep in mind one thing... the aircraft as described, cannot do an automatic landing at an airport which DOES NOT have an instrument landing system installed at the runway of intended landing!
In other words, for any of this to happen, there must be an auto landing system installed on the aircraft AND there has to be an instrument landing system installed at each runway of intended use. One system is wholly dependent on the other.
When it comes to autonomous driving of cars, there is NO ground-based system for the car's computer system to lock onto which would otherwise tell the car's computer where the centerline of the road is.
In this situation, it is like the airplane trying to do an automatic landing onto a runway that has NO instrument landing system installed, which ain't gonna work!
What autonomous driving cars use now are cameras and a pre-programmed computer logic that tells the car where the edge of the road is, where the centerline is and where the exits are, simply because the cameras can see them!
But if you cover up those camera lenses with snow, heavy rain or dirt, your autonomous driving car will simply go straight ahead until it crashes into something if you don't turn off the system when it tells you that it can't see anything!
If there was a ground-based electronic system that could couple itself to the car's computer logic for autonomous driving mode, I would be all in 100%.
But as it stands right now, if there is no centerline painted on the road or there are no edge markings on country roads, your autonomous driving car will not function on those roads without pavement markings! It says so right in the car's owner's manual!
