Carnegie Mellon professor Raj Rajkumar, one of the world’s leading experts on self-driving cars, says that traffic patterns like in Vietnam, as well as China and his native India, pose a big challenge for autonomous vehicles.  Eventually, he believes technology will be able to handle it. But it’s going to take a long time to get there. More than a decade, reckons Rajkumar. “Sensors on self-driving cars will have some inaccuracies to deal with, and also will require a good amount of computing power. Designing, implementing and testing these will take time,” he says.
Perhaps more importantly, Rajkumar explains, the industry will need to “decipher” the way traffic works in places like Vietnam. Unlike in the US where drivers obey clearly established rules of the road, drivers in Vietnam use implicit rules.