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by ams6110 3479 days ago
I don't disagree. But without exception every winter slide-off I've witnessed first hand has been caused by excessive speed. You're driving along on a snow-covered interstate highway, someone in a BMW or 4x4 flies past you because "I have all wheel drive" starts to fishtail, overcorrects, spins out, and ends up backwards and stuck on the median.
1 comments

Respectfully, I think this amounts to bias more than anything. It's a lot easier to believe that the slide-offs are caused by bad driving - and most probably are. But some are unavoidable.
I have to agree as well. I've only had two winter driving accidents, both of them just me and one of them was unavoidable: I was travelling at very low speed down a plowed street and found a long streak of ice. I've been in plenty of winter skids and am decent and correcting them but I had 0 traction and essentially skated at 5mph into a telephone pole (which seemed safer than the cross street I was drifting toward).

I'm not sure how a self-driving car would have fixed that. I certainly believe one could but it would require a ton of learning beforehand and conditions vary widely in storms. I suppose with all-wheel drive and some selective application of the wheels in reverse it might have stopped the car before any damage was done, but how to handle situations where the AI can't stop the car before an incident and has to minimize the damage? That feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen in the US.