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Comment by aquadrop | Hacker News Reader

I think viable L5 somewhere in Arizona is different from L5 in New York, so autonomous vehicles will start spreading from places with good weather. But I don't think L5 is required for successful start of autonomous fleets. Advanced L4 with an option of remote 'driver' connecting for special cases driving (like car stuck or something), should be enough.

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L5 is L5 - if the system can't tell, then it ain't L5 - and the driver 'connecting' won't work - it's basically 'please doze for three hours and then deal with a crisis within the blink of an eye' Pilots have enough trouble with this and they have 6DOF in a mostly isolated space - I do believe, but all my fun comes from learning about the spectacular levels of failure and hubris in much smaller systems :-) Think of it this way - if it's AZ, OK, I pick Flagstaff when the snows have just started to come and grease the road

Having been caught out in Tucson hailstorms with a 0% precipitation forecast, I'm not much impressed by "L5 for some regions, sometimes" myself.

L4, sure, map easy suburban spaces carefully and wake up your driver if things get weird. But L5 is intended to be human-parity, or at least have well-defined boundaries. It can give up and park until the snow stops, but if you're taking out the steering wheel it had better not stop more than humans do - and offer a "chance it anyway" button for if the snow isn't stopping.

Arizona is big, yes :) But on average it has better weather conditions, let's take smaller Phoenix area, L5 there won't have to deal with snow (I know it can get small amounts of snow, but don't think it's a problem). Driving in Alaska or Tibet mountains is different feat than driving on good roads of Arizona or south of Spain. So I think L5 can start developing in those favorable areas first. But if it works in 99.99% of times, it's ok to have remote drivers for 0.01%, of course it's not for situations when "it started to rain, get in control while car is doing 100 km/h", but for situations when car is stationary and can't understand what to do and need human brain to help it for a short time. If this will let me to use autonomous taxi 10 years earlier, I'm ok with it.

When the weather goes to shit, all L5-but-not-really cars on the road are now in a situation where they need a 'remote' driver.

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