" 

 ::Well, even if we accept the (in my opinion questionable) premise that Stanley should be in the top 10 list, shouldn't the vehicles of, say, CMU appear there, too? One of them led the race and apparently just lost due to a technical glitch, finishing just a few minutes after Stanley. I guess WIRED would have included them if CMU was a local Californian university...   

 How much of a challenge was it anyway? The course was precisely layed out by numerous waypoints. No sophisticated planning procedure was necessary. Four separate teams managed to finish the course in time. This seems to suggest that the task was not that hard.  

 In fact, several days before the race the Stanley team leader announced that this time with very high probability there would be a winner, thus reflecting the general feelings of the experts. Afterwards, however, he fueled the hype by claiming, rather inconsistently: ""the impossible has been achieved!"" Then he compared himself to Charles Lindbergh (no joke!), according to the WIRED article (which suggests that the ""Wright Brothers / Kitty Hawk spot"" had already been taken by Ernst Dickmanns in 1986). Lindbergh! One of the most ridiculous comparisons I've seen lately. Now I'm waiting for the confetti parade -)  
  "