  With recent advances in learning algorithms and hardware development,
autonomous cars have shown promise when operating in structured environments
under good driving conditions. However, for complex, cluttered and unseen
environments with high uncertainty, autonomous driving systems still frequently
demonstrate erroneous or unexpected behaviors, that could lead to catastrophic
outcomes. Autonomous vehicles should ideally adapt to driving conditions; while
this can be achieved through multiple routes, it would be beneficial as a first
step to be able to characterize Driveability in some quantified form. To this
end, this paper aims to create a framework for investigating different factors
that can impact driveability. Also, one of the main mechanisms to adapt
autonomous driving systems to any driving condition is to be able to learn and
generalize from representative scenarios. The machine learning algorithms that
currently do so learn predominantly in a supervised manner and consequently
need sufficient data for robust and efficient learning. Therefore, we also
perform a comparative overview of 45 public driving datasets that enable
learning and publish this dataset index at
https://sites.google.com/view/driveability-survey-datasets. Specifically, we
categorize the datasets according to use cases, and highlight the datasets that
capture complicated and hazardous driving conditions which can be better used
for training robust driving models. Furthermore, by discussions of what driving
scenarios are not covered by existing public datasets and what driveability
factors need more investigation and data acquisition, this paper aims to
encourage both targeted dataset collection and the proposal of novel
driveability metrics that enhance the robustness of autonomous cars in adverse
environments.
