[superkuh]

Autonomous cars might be possible for climates without snow but they'll never be capable of driving with humans in winter till they start making the same intuitive mistakes as humans given sparse data (complete snow covering).

The problem with any non-vision based location system to compensate for covered roads is that it isn't what humans use. In winter in cold climates sometimes the roads are covered with snow for days to weeks and road margins drift for the entire season. Humans just form new emergent lanes. These lanes often aren't the "correct" lanes that non-vision based absolute position would find. And they're very difficult to detect with computer, or even human, vision.

Having one set of laws of autonomous cars in arizona and another for minnesota will lead to a lot of problems.

[kingsuper20]

My own guess is that the difficult-to-solve problems tend to be in surprising areas (as are the easy-to-solve).

People are so poor at driving on ice/snow that it seems like a much lower bar to clear.

[therouwboat]

I think people are pretty good at driving on snow, we have lots of snow every winter, but there is rarely any problems in traffic.

For self driving cars its very hard, roads might be a lot narrower and visibility is limited because of snow banks, also you need to know what part of the road you should drive, sometimes there can be deep grooves and you might get stuck. If you stop at traffic lights etc. it might be hard to get going and how does the computer know that this crossing is very slippery and it takes 3x more time to take off?

[wutbrodo]

There are already limitations by road condition. This level of control over the operating environment is part of why so many services are targeting robotaxis as their initial product.

[shagie]

Would a robotaxi in Detroit, Chicago, or Minneapolis in the winter be viable?

I'm thinking about those roads where it's nominally a two lane in each direction, but the snow banks make it a 1.5 lane in each direction (if that).

Where one doesn't start into the intersection when the light turns green - to give any cars that have the need to slide through. And likewise the ability for the robotaxi to realize "well, I've got no traction - guess I'm going to slide through this intersection and the left turn is impossible - I'm going straight through."

A robotaxi in LA, SF... ok. Pheonix - sure. But I've yet to see any examples of a self driving vehicle able to drive in winter condition roads in the midwest.

[wutbrodo]

That's my point. Presumably Detroit doesn't have winter driving conditions in the summer, in which case robotaxis are feasible seasonally, or when there hasn't been rain/freezing conditions for X # of days, etc. Determining a bound on operating conditions is a far easier problem than making a car that drives itself.

Before launching in any city, you have to validate that you can handle the idiosyncrasies of its driving environment. Perhaps the business side decides that Detroit isn't worth launching in, but <other snowy city> is drivable 200 days/yr and that's enough to warrant launching an intermittently-available service.

My ultimate point is that AVs can cover a lot of ground from a business perspective without getting to full universal-availability. This is helped along by a combination of validating each city independently[1], limiting operating conditions, and safe-fallback teleoperation for occasional use.

Validating a 2021 AV in a snowy environment isn't an inherently harder problem than validating a 2016 AV in a normal environment (with a safety driver), and a similar approach will be applicable.

[1] Presumably less and less narrowly each time

[bluGill]

I'm not sure a want a human driver who only drives in winter - they will be out of practice when we need them. The snow problems mentioned above are real - but it isn't all winter, it is a couple weeks scattered around the whole season. Then the plows get out (and things warm up enough for salt to work) and you can drive like summer for a few days.

[wutbrodo]

Right, and these companies are more than capable of running on a week to week or day to day basis (they already do this in the markets they test in).

> I'm not sure a want a human driver who only drives in winter - they will be out of practice when we need them

Do you feel similarly about making cities bike-friendly?

[toast0]

> Would a robotaxi in Detroit, Chicago, or Minneapolis in the winter be viable?

If not, the robotaxi could drive itself to Florida and leave any customers who relied on it up north in a lurch, and also mess up the traffic and transportation economy of Florida in the winter. Screwing two economies with one car = bonus.