Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chrisseaton 2257 days ago
> I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me.

Perhaps you should have pulled over at this point? Maybe that's what an autonomous car would do.

1 comments

Pulling over in a snowstorm to the side of the highway can be pretty dangerous too. Once you're in that situation there aren't necessarily great alternatives.
Yeah, I think people who believe that pulling over is an easy solution may not have been in one of these situations. It can come up quickly and there may be no exit for miles. Pull over into what? The snow bank on the side of the road? Now you are a hazard for everyone else coming along behind you. Sometimes you just have to make it work as best you can until the circumstances change.
Why is any traffic moving in conditions this bad? Just stop.
Again, I assume you've never experienced this. Storms can come up fast in the mountains and be very localized. As I, and the previous poster mentioned, it can be more dangerous to stop sometimes.
If you can't see, then it's always safest to just stop rather than driving on, potentially off the edge of a cliff.
How about "Dont use the self driving mode during a snowstorm. Make the human drive".

That sounds like it solves the situation nicely.

That definitely works. It just means that if there is a possibility of a snowstorm or other circumstance that self-driving doesn't work, you now require a driver who can take over control. Which is fine. It just eliminates the robo-taxi use case of self-driving which is what a lot of people seem to care about.