[munk-a]

So build a covered test road for your initial trials - then unleash them on real road situations. I'd be much more ready to trust a self-driving car that was born and raised on Boston streets than one in the wide, luxurious and pristine SoCal streets.

I'm not saying you need to teach your kid to swim by throwing them into the sea with weights tied around their ankles - you can ramp up to that... but you need to start exposing things to real world conditions pretty early on in development lest something, like a LIDAR censor close to the road surface in the front of the car, force you into a huge redesign when you discover that sheets of slush and road salt will liberally coat every front-facing surface of your vehicle driving in Boston in the winter.