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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to me how these conversations tend to center around failure modes that would be apparent to

a) anyone who has driven in that situation since it's not even remotely an outlier of an event

b) anyone who took their self driving car out into that situation more than a handful of times

we've already seen self driving cars leave their lanes in response to pedestrians or road hazards or just temporary detours around construction. Why would a snow bank not be avoidable as well?

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As someone that grew up driving in the midwest I get a little nervous about autonomous driving being developed in California. It's a bit of a cliche, but CA drivers are notoriously bad drivers in winter conditions.

Of course the rational side of my brain knows there are brilliant people from all over the country (world?) working on autonomous driving for these companies, and they will have to do testing in all weather conditions across the whole country.

Perhaps it would help relax fears if companies like Google or Tesla opened (and publicised) an all-weather driving lab in someplace like northern Michigan.

Not northern Michigan, but there is the University of Michigan's "Mcity" near Detroit: http://ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/23020-u-m-opens-mc...

Uber's Advanced Technology Center [] is in Pittsburgh. Having grew up about 1.5 hours north of there, that is a good area to test snowy conditions.

[] - http://www.uberatc.com/ (which seems like a unofficial site but I can't find anything else)

Having spent multiple winters in Pittsburgh, it's not like a winter in the Rockies or the Tetons where as the GGGP describes, there are only single plowed lanes in multilane highways because it's snowing every day for two weeks straight. In Pittsburgh, the lanes get plowed fairly quickly and salted to death.

I suppose I was thinking more about the snow storms up near Lake Erie, which is only about 2 hours from Pittsburgh. Living in Erie, there was a few storms that led to I-90 having whiteout conditions and single lane traffic. Winters in Pittsburgh are fairly mild in comparison.

Having never lived near the Rockies, I don't know how it compares. They probably are worse though.

Tahoe is only a few hours away from Bay Area and virtually everyone* in bay area goes there at least a few times a year to ski. This year Tahoe got a lot of snow.

*everyone = Google/Apple/FB employees

Yeah I mean Tahoe gets crazy snow, but there are some things that happen to the road at super cold temperatures mixed with varying levels of rain or snow.

I think these mixtures are more prevalent east snd north of CA.

It's not that usual for large projects to proceed a fair distance before seemingly obvious problems become apparent. Bridges that fail to meet in the center come to mind.

I remember being at a meeting talking about the implementation of a chipset where each of the three chips required another chip to be running first. Global conditions can be more obvious to an outsider than those involved in many details of creating X big plan.

Why would a snow bank not be avoidable as well?

The Google car in particular is intended to follow a pre-defined path derived from more-detailed-version of Google Maps with obstacle avoidance being just deviations from that pre-defined plan. It seems like the situation described by the op, the road-structure itself changing, would present significant obstacles to that strategy. Essentially, rather than solving the problem of guiding a vehicle down the road using visible spectrum image-processing, Google avoided the problem by various stands-in; lidar for obstacles and satellite maps for positioning. Clever but that sort of thing will have failures that might be surprising - and surprisingly obvious.

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