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Comment by increment_i | Hacker News Reader

As a commuting Canadian I'm interested in this being addressed as well, as I'm sure millions of others are. All the self driving lab work seems to be taking place in California. If I value my life, shouldn't I want to buy a self driving car that was designed in Michigan or Wisconsin? Who can even answer that question right now? Perhaps its a matter for self driving car v2.0 to address?

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Researchers are working on this in Michigan. The University of Michigan has a new MCity test facility[0], and I know one of the projects they are working on is how the cars handle snow. They basically still do LIDAR and match the z-plane (height of objects nearby) to localize the car when road markings are hard to see.

Still lots of work to do though!

[0]: http://www.mtc.umich.edu/test-facility

Honestly, my prevailing theory is that this highlights how much further we really are from practical self-driving cars than Google's marketing department wants us to think. I think the self-driving car project needs to always sound 'a little over a year away' as good PR for Google, though they know it's much further from being truly serviceable.

A year away in California and other states with good weather.

I have a suspicion we will see some amazing demos of self driving cars in the snow and rain, once they are good at it. It's brought up every time we talk about being these cars to consumers, if Google or whoever have truly mastered these situations I think they would like people to know.

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