The entire drive must be done autonomously, under its own propulsion, with no human input. Humans can help with any parts other than driving and navigation, such as fueling/charging the car and performing repairs. The original route can be chosen by a human, but after that, any updates to the route due to road closures, heavy traffic, running out of gas and needing to go to a gas station, etc. must be decided on by the car.
The car must not break any traffic laws that could reasonably get a human driver in trouble. (e.g. if it sees an object in the road and chooses to swerve into an empty opposite-direction lane in order to avoid the object, that's fine.) Other road-related laws that don't have to do with driving capablity, such as an expired registration, won't disqualify the car. It also must not engage in any behavior that is legal but still highly unsafe, such as running into a pedestrian who's in the road illegally without a crosswalk.
If's fine if there's a human physically inside the car, they just can't provide any control inputs. If a human driver has to take over even once, such as to avoid an unexpected dangerous situation or help the car navigate through a complicated construction area, that disqualifies the trip.
Remote human driving, such as a human in an office looking at sensor feeds and driving the car from there, does not count as "self-driving".
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@EvanDaniel Not in particular. The cannonball run is similar (though it goes to Los Angeles rather than San Francisco). Maybe this could become a standard challenge in self-driving cars.
@IsaacKing The Cannonball route does seem like a more likely target; there's a lot of history there and it seems like it might make a good PR stunt.
@EvanDaniel Some have used slightly different routes:
In April 2015, the first coast-to-coast autonomous record was set by employees of Delphi. Delphi engineers covered 3,400 miles, San Francisco to New York City, over a span of nine days.
@hekatonsure It needs to do the driving portion of pulling into the gas station and parking itself at an appropriate distance from the pump/charger. Any non-driving tasks, such as inserting the nozzle/charger into the port on the car, can be performed by a human.