6 scenarios self-driving cars still can't handle

When a Tesla Model S was involved in the first fatal crash while Autopilot was activated, Tesla wrote in a blog post that the Autopilot system did not notice "the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied."

The fatal accident is still under investigation by government regulators, but that one sentence doesn't bode too well for Tesla. It shows that despite how far autonomous technology has come, there are still some situations that are better handled by human drivers.

That's not to say human drivers are perfect - more than 37,000 people die in the US each year from car crashes, according to the Association for Safe International Road Travel. As many companies working on driverless cars have noted, having autonomous vehicles on the road could drastically reduce that number. 

But for that to happen, driverless cars still need to improve in some key areas.