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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

At this point, I'm not really going to be impressed until just ONE self-driving car company even talks about being able to handle snow and fog, preferably their cars knowing when they can't drive safely in the conditions.

(It's not just about seeing through moisture: it's also about traction, something you can't really use sensors to enhance.)

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Computers are so much better at detecting traction problems that electronic stability control is mandatory in most new vehicles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#R...

Cool. But sometimes the road is just plain impassable. And having grown up in many Iowa winter blizzards, I still don't trust even electronic systems. They help, but sometimes there's nothing you can do when there's basically no friction.

The safest thing might be for the car to pull over, put on hazard lights, and tell you to wait or call for assistance.

Humans deciding to go continue driving in such conditions is a mistake, leading to more collisions. Perhaps there will be a manual override, like "Unsafe conditions, voice password and waiver required to continue in manual mode; you might die or kill someone else."

Once you get into bad snow conditions pulling over is a really bad option. That said, this is a corner case I care less about than crossing Manhattan in rain at rush hour. Or really lots of tricky busy off-highway situations.

Self-driving car can go slower in those cases. It depends entirely on how beefy its CPU/GPU is to process a lot of sensor data realtime. The more messy situation is, the more time it needs, the slower it needs to drive.

Well, after a few cars get stuck (or crash) it will show up on the mapping system as blocked and the remaining cars will find another route. I'm semi-joking, but human drivers do that more than we would like to admit. Just needs a cheerful "please get out and push" message.

Or take a page from the internet playbook: Destroy the car and re-send from the origin.

Right? There is no better teacher than driving through a few brutal upstate New York winters to teach one how to drive in the elements. No WAY am I trusting a car more than my own abilities to do so.

I'm going to be really impressed even when there's one geo-fenced and weather-restricted self-driving car available for purchase.

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