I agree with you that self-driving vehicles of all types will characterize our world by the mid century. But you know that we already are seeing limited use of AI-driven technology on closed circuits already and in Singapore, an entire city district has launched an autonomous car initiative.

You make an interesting observation. Human drivers are also bad in snow but for very different reasons. It’s not the vision issue. It’s the feel for the road surface. In that sense an AI-vehicle would be far better at negotiating deteriorating surface conditions based on the sensor-package on board. But computer vision needs to be further enhanced to see through snow and heavy rain. And the issue of up-to-date digital map requirements is not something that a human driver absolutely requires to effectively negotiate a drive. A new construction sign may be an irritant to a human behind the wheel, but for an AI-vehicle it is potentially an accident waiting to happen, or a reason for the vehicle to come to a dead stop.

at least with GPS, and dedicated software there is hope to improve it definitively.
for humans, except with hard training, there will always be the same problem…

I remind me the ponny express pretending to be faster than the train

Present Lithium Ion battery technology is far from ideal, but it’s good enough to power universal robots that can produce more robots and more batteries. That is to say robot generations can be self-replicating. Robot brain and sensory system development is the major present technical impediment. The significance of IBM’s recently announced neurosynaptic chip cannot be overstated. In 3-6 years the next generations of this microchip strategy will reach or exceed human brain capability. See: http://research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/neurosynaptic-chips.shtml#fbid=heTWdJm0uKy

So the timelines will likely develop much as Ray Kurzweil projects.