[bsaul]

i don't know why you got downvoted. The engineer in charge at the latest autopilot meeting explicitely mentionned snow as not beeing specifically adressed yet. He did also mentioned that the autopilot performed quite well under snow right now, but that was indeed very surprising to hear that snow condition wasn't been specifically addressed yet, and yet they talk about robotaxi for next year.

[natch]

They probably got downvoted for wrongly assuming the technology doesn't deal with rain or snow, and then presenting that assumption as fact. It works great in rain. Snow, I have less experience with, but it seemed OK during a winter vacation with snow.

With neural nets, a lot of things just get learned. You don't have to specifically address them to get great progress. I'm not saying snow is 100% solved, and yes specifically addressing aspects like snow in the future will help make it even better, but autopilot has worked pretty great so far.

[mft_]

was indeed very surprising to hear that snow condition wasn't been specifically addressed yet, and yet they talk about robotaxi for next year.

I've never yet seen a city with a taxi service which is reliable in heavy snow - things usually fall completely apart. (Not to mention buses, trains, planes, etc...)

Even if the robotaxis are shown to not be able to operate in snow, it's not necessarily an indictment of the whole robotaxi concept. If they can work in snow-free conditions, it's still covering the majority of time, in the majority of potential markets.

[soperj]

There's literally snow on the ground for the majority of the year in Edmonton. There's snow on the ground right now.

[mft_]

Hah, as I wrote my previous comment, inserting a caveat about Canada ran through my mind :)

My point still stands for most of the rest of the world, though.

[mrep]

Not on the roads though and that is where it matters. Most snowfall gets plowed up within a day of the snowfall ending.

[na85]

Not in places like Winnipeg. Streets stay snowy for months.