The biggest problem human drivers have in winter weather is simply driving too fast. Self-driving cars won't get impatient and will presumably never exceed safe speeds for given conditions.
Even in highway driving you can lose traction in an instant if you hit a patch of black ice. Autonomous vehicles will need to be able to recover from a complete loss of traction safely. This isn't trivial - in fact it's probably the most complicated bit of driving I tend to do. Once you are sliding and your steering wheel becomes more of a suggestion than a command, the entire act of driving becomes a process of trying to coax the car off the road using a combination of steering, brakes, and even occasionally gas. I think it's possible for a computer to do this - but you can't avoid all slides just by driving slowly.
Then there's the plethora of other winter fun you run into with a vehicle: getting stuck (happens all the time on city streets) and all the techniques to get unstuck, going too slow and losing your momentum (and thus traction), having every indication you have traction and then discovering you actually don't (it's very easy to be driving at a "safe" speed and still slide through an intersection), white out conditions where you are guessing where the lane is... etc...
To be clear, I believe most of these conditions could eventually be handled by computers. I also believe a lot of people drive too fast in/on snow. However, winter driving is in no way simple. It's a problem domain unto itself, and one I've seen relatively little work being done on.
Winter driving is really no different from any other kind of driving in which the driver exceeds the limits of the vehicle's available traction. The methods of recovery are mostly well-known; the problem is more often the driver's inability to implement them in a timely manner.
Constant input from wheel speed and accelerometer sensor arrays, coupled with the vehicle's ability to individually brake/slow wheels (which also gives the vehicle the ability to accelerate individual wheels independently!) means that it could be a far easier 'problem' for self-driving cars to solve than it is for humans.
Again, if they're working on it :) But there's already been decades of work put into ABS, traction/stability control, etc.
I actually agree with this statement. The problem is that, in good conditions, low traction events are rare, and often caused by catastrophic conditions. In winter driving it's practically the norm, once you leave well traveled roadways.
I think AI could be trained to drive a car that only occasionally has full traction, and probably more effectively than a person given enough time. But again - it's like you said - someone needs to be addressing this case directly.
I'm not sure how a self-driving car would have fixed that. I certainly believe one could but it would require a ton of learning beforehand and conditions vary widely in storms. I suppose with all-wheel drive and some selective application of the wheels in reverse it might have stopped the car before any damage was done, but how to handle situations where the AI can't stop the car before an incident and has to minimize the damage? That feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen in the US.
It comes down to balancing, and we know we can build machines that can balance. Segways, bipedal robots, etc. So we have some of the tech and algorithms to do this in other applications, but applying it to autonomous vehicles will be its own beast.
The smart ones pull over and turn on the emergency flasher. Then they check to make sure they have lots of gas, blankets and water, just as they prepared.
The dumb ones slow down to 45 mph and stare into the white blankness looking for clues about curves.
I'd expect logic at that level might be more difficult to train for than the relatively low-level visual task of identifying and following tracks. But I guess existing self-driving systems already need to work at that level to predict the actions of other cars and pedestrians, so presumably the current data-driven training techniques would also handle it OK? (Assuming a lack of pranksters with shovels...)
This may seem like a straw-man argument, I don't intend it to be. I think self-driving cars will be on the whole better drivers, but these are also situations that I see as being extremely difficult for a computer to identify to the level a human driver is capable of.
You - and the other drivers on the road - have less control at all speeds and are always much closer to the limit of traction. Driving on winter roads is a lot like racing a car on a track with other drivers - everyone is near the limit of traction and a hazard can present itself very quickly. Having the right reaction at the right time helps, but planning ahead is more important. Daily driving in summer months is benign in comparison.
That is an excellent analogy.