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You can buy many of these built in safety systems and bolt them on.

Lane departure
Back up cameras
Collision Avoidance

Sure...maybe suspect or poor quality at the moment, but it will only get better,

"Bad weather" as in rain is not a problem. The problem is snow and ice. Tesla's technology comes from Mobileye inc. http://www.mobileye.com/ Tesla's technology and Google's technology do not work in snow and ice. It will work at night and in many rainy conditions although glare can cause problems at night in the rain. The sensor's depend on seeing painted lane markers, which may be difficult when there is glare from light in the dark in the rain.

The pedestrian detection feature has nothing to do with the self parking feature. It is just another feature that you can buy, on a car that happens to have a self-parking feature. And the car in the video isn't in the process of self-parking, it is under the control of a human driving forward.

Car analogy: Back in the old days, you could get anti-lock brakes as an option, and/or airbags as an option. They are both safety features, but don't have anything to do with one another. This video is analogous to if somebody got the airbag option, but not the anti-lock brakes, then lost control in a skid and crashed. The headline would read "Car with airbags loses control because owner didn't pay extra for anti-lock braking system," to make us all afraid of air bags, and would be just as stupid.

Mobileye developed road sign recognition tech a while ago. I think BMW was integrating Mobileye software into their cars. Ford is listed as an OEM partner - I wonder if this is the same tech?

What's the current speed limit - it's easy to miss the speed signs, especially when you're turning onto a road from a sideroad where you might not see them! Can we have some sort of display that tells me I'm going too fast (too slow?) without me having to compare two numbers? A red warning symbol for going too fast?

Yup, it's possible. Basically two ways:
- GPS that have databse of speedlimits (also useful when the GPS computes the fastest route). That's both available at some car manufacturer (as a random example, Volvo's nav does it) and available at 3rd parties (As an exemple, the openstreetmaps database has speed limits, and the opensource navit application does display them, along with color-code (green/red) to tell you if your within/beyond the limits).
That would be rather easy to integrate into TFA's HUD. (as it has on-board and can also connect to smartphones over bluetooth. And maybe could also get the information from the infotainment over the ODB2? No idea about that).

- Optical recognition:
Latest generation camera and image recognition capabilities of crash avoidance systems (like mobilEYE which is one of the major manufacturer and 3rd-party solution provider) are able to detect and decode traffic sign like speed limits. This could also be fed into the HUD's onboard apps, or ask the smart-phone to display it to the hud instead of its own screen).

Thundercall alerts. If there's weather enroute that means I need to get off the road coming in the next few minutes, I'd like to be told that in a way that doesn't involve me looking at my phone, and BEFORE I get onto a highway

The radios have a capabilities called RDS on which are broadcast informations like TMC, and its common place nearly everywhere in europe. This information is used by the GPS (either the in-car, or a 3rd party with an integrated FM receiver). Whenever a problem happens, the TMC information about it is digitally broad cast over RDS and your GPS gives a small alert box, telling that you might need to adapt your route to the newest information and giving you the options to read the information (if you haven't heard them over TA/TP) and giving you the option to have the GPS calculate a safe alternate route around the problem.

Again something useful to have on the HUD, and not that complicated to integrate.

First of all this seems not very novel to me. They already aquired a patent for this technology int he U.K. in 2004. I am far more impressed by the abilities of the eyeQ system by Mobileye, a intergrated camera with processor being able to perform complex image processing. It would not surprise me, if the eyeQ could do this job as well. The image processor is RISC based, and although it only runs as 120 Mhrz its computing power is theoretical equivalent of an Intel Pentium IV processor, running at 4Ghz clock rate. Its architecture somehow resembles that of the Cell processor.

It looks like everything that is interesting today is about small Israelly companies. (story was rejected on submission.) I wonder why these guys did not participate in the DARPA Grand Challenge?

perhaps THIS would be interesting for you

A company named Mobileye seems to have a solution already. Well, a partial solution, perhaps. They have a car that nearly drives itself, and can recongnize obstacles, such as pedestrians, motorcycles, etc. As I understand, their car already has a mode where it will automatically follow the vehicle in front, without user intervention.

A company named Mobileye seems to have a solution already. Well, a partial solution, perhaps. They have a car that nearly drives itself, and can recongnize obstacles, such as pedestrians, motorcycles, etc. As I understand, their car already has a mode where it will automatically follow the vehicle in front, without user intervention.

A company named Mobileye seems to have a solution already. Well, a partial solution, perhaps. They have a car that nearly drives itself, and can recongnize obstacles, such as pedestrians, motorcycles, etc. As I understand, their car already has a mode where it will automatically follow the vehicle in front, without user intervention.