If I trained a child to drive, I'd be comfortable letting them drive at 6. I believe I was around that age the first time I drove (handling steering, with assistance on gas / brake). My memory is that the only difficult part was a lack of power steering on hilly terrain.
Same age for walking around town unsupervised: the Japanese do and don't seem to lose many.
My original point was focused on the technical feasibility of driving with limited sensor input, which is physically possible.
Whether or not it takes a week, a month, or a million experience-years is a computational and algorithm problem.
All of which (based on previous technological progression) appear to be tractable.
And my point is that it's not just about experience-years, it's also about the breadth of knowledge. When driving, humans do not use just the experience acquired from looking at things from behind the wheel. They also use their general understanding of physics, of materials, of concepts related to visibility, traction, not to mention expected behaviour of other people and how to read face expressions.
For an average driver, I'd call BS on that. Humans are terrible at learning complicated things they rarely have to recall.
E.g. the disaster that is the first major snowfall, every year, or automatic transmissions, antilock brakes, and traction control systems becoming standard
The human can only reliably be trusted to keep the car between the lines, stop appropriately, and occasionally make turns. Which is something much simpler to compete with!
