Even worse: I've been on several mountain roads with stretches of one-way traffic, where either an officer has to signal a switch in lane direction every few minutes (which might not be clear otherwise, especially around a bend), or cars have to occasionally reverse to let opposing traffic through. Don't think I'll ever be letting an AI do that!
I was in a small bus on a switchback mountain road in Peru. The bus stopped at a low lying turn, and we could see that a muddy stream was racing across the road at its low point, pouring away into the valley off the the downhill edge it was eroding. The pavement under the stream was gone. The driver got out and found a couple of what looked like 2-by-8 pieces of lumber, and placed them across the stream, adding some rocks and rubble underneath like track ballast. He then slowly tiptoed the bus across these creaking muddy boards, leaning out the window to stay on track. We were not swept over the edge, as far as I recall.
Needless to say, not a situation for "auto-steer".
I'm sure this has been thought through, and I imagine the solution involves zones requiring different levels of autonomy and capability, some means of zone discovery or classification for unmarked areas, and self-driving cars refusing to continue automatically when overmatched.
I think you can argue that at least those are outlier very rural sorts of places. It's harder to write off major US cities. (To be clear, interstates are still compelling uses but they're not universal self-driving.)
That kind of thing happens occasionally around Boston when snow piles turn two lane streets into one lane, and it's common anywhere where construction or an accident partly blocks a road.
