Machines are displaying a trend of increasing autonomy. This has a far reaching impact on the architectures of the embedded systems within the machine. The impact needs to be clearly understood and the main obstacles to autonomy need to be identified. The obstacles, especially from an industrial perspective, are not just technological but also relate to system aspects like certification, development processes and product safety. In this paper, we identify and discuss some of the main obstacles to autonomy from the viewpoint of technical specialists working on advanced industrial product development. The identified obstacles cover topics like world modeling, user interaction, complexity and system safety.