Will the car be able to measure the depth of snow on the road? And find the most driveable part of the road? The high reflectivity of snow probably isn't a good ally for this use case.
Use a thermal camera to find the road? Or perhaps contrast, as the parts of the road with less slow should have roadway peek through. To determine how much snow you're dealing with, you detect wheel slip, which can assist in determining depth.
The more interesting question about the automated car is "can it do a Scandinavian flick"? They should come with a dedicated button for that.
The linked article, AFAICT, doesn't implicate driver aids in the accident, at all. (It's a rather short article, and the video doesn't mention anything about driver aids either.) Am I missing something?
I'm not saying ESP is a bad thing, mind you. The technical system works well and has reduced accidents overall, this is proven in several studies. There's been a few faulty ESP systems causing accidents, e.g. the Audi A3 and the Alfa Romeo Spider around '05 (fixed in recalls), but overall it's a success. But the more abstractions you put between the car and the driver, the more your run the risk of drivers ignoring, or not being aware of, bad conditions. Educating users about proper operation of any system is notoriously difficult.
The biggest issue would be that this is still a rapidly developing field, and the one thing government is not good at is rapidly evolving technology.
But fundamentally, we will need something controlled by an agency or government, or at least a nonprofit organization of some sort. A single corporation can't control our nation's transportation infrastructure.
Snow and ice are by far the hardest conditions for anyone driving. I have no doubt a computer can figure it out and be better eventually, until then it will be interesting.
ESP just modulates brakes to keep you from going sideways. It's basically automated cutting brakes paired with traction control and ABS.
All ESP does is utilize the car's existing technology to better do what the driver wants. It pretty much only comes into affect when the driver cranks the wheel hard enough to use up all available traction. It keeps the vehicle in an understeer condition and uses all available traction to try and steer in the desired direction (by acting like cutting brakes).
The point of this is so that the "AWD means I don't actually need to know what I'm doing people" are prevented from sideways (oversteer) because understeer is a lot easier for a novice to recover from and if he/she hits a pole he/she hits it head on utilizing the part of the car that's good at crashing "softly"
The traction control part of ESP is somewhat irrelevant. If the used is trying to give it throttle while the ESP code is doing it's thing and the ESP code is telling the traction control code to override the user then the user should just pull the fuse because you do better doughnuts that way...
I don't feel like this is particularly harder than any of the other problems self-driving cars face. To achieve performance on par with human drivers simple need to do a couple of things (which are what I do when driving in snowy/icey conditions):
1) Categorize current/recent road appearance into groups.
2) Do tiny periodic break checks on each relevant group to determine the traction available in that group.
3) Trigger a new set break checks when conditions change (e.g. exterior temp changes, precipitation changes, traffic density changes or road-type changes such as exit ramp or bridge)
This road surface analysis combined with a bit of traffic analysis should also allow you to determine 'emergent lanes' in snowy conditions.