[chrisseaton]

> Lidar is unable to see through the snow. Road surfaces are sometimes wet, sometimes snow covered, sometimes ice. Visibility can drop to zero.

All these problems apply equally to people drivers and their eyes. Why can't automated systems at least match us?

[rm_-rf_slash]

Because people can learn on the fly, and these systems can’t.

Sure, you can aggregate the data from a fleet of cars and use that to train a better model (or set of models for vision, driving, etc.) that updates the old one, but that process takes time and isn’t as immediate as a human reaction. Not saying it can’t ever happen, but rather that it’ll take a lot of time and effort before a self driving car can handle extreme weather, rather than the calm conditions of California (which, to be fair, took an awful lot of work to get functional there, too).

[icebraining]

Waymo has been testing outside of California: they're in Washington since 2016 and in Michigan since 2017 (for Winter testing): https://twitter.com/waymo/status/846438598421336064?lang=en

[throwawayhhakdl]

Humans are good at filtering out bad information because the whole system is understood. I can’t see some of the road, because it’s snowing, and I can quickly stop paying attention to the non useful parts of my vision.

It’s definitely a hard problem, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable