> Do you think the robot will adapt to driving in e.g. snowy roads unless the algorithms have been programmed to deal with it?
Yes.
Google's self driving cars are programmed with a mix of clever algorithms, classical AI algorithms and new machine learning techniques. All put together leads to some surprising results on the tests.
I had the opportunity to take Thrun and Norvig's course on AI (www.ai-class.com), and I can say that the field has advanced more in the latest 5 years alone than in the previous 30. It's well worth the effort: