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Comment by grahamburger | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like exactly the kind of job for a computer.

I live in an area that gets a lot of snow. The only 'safe' things for a human to do in snowy, icy, wet conditions are: slow down (a lot), leave a lot more following distance, stay home. I talk to a lot of people who seem to think that they are able to drive at full speed in the snow and complain about all of the 'out of town' drivers who slow down the roads because they 'don't know how to drive in the snow.' It's the people who make those kinds of complaints that frighten me the most - they are deluding themselves. I'd rather share the road with a computer.

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"people who seem to think that they are able to drive at full speed in the snow and complain about all of the 'out of town' drivers who slow down the roads because they 'don't know how to drive in the snow.'"

The most raged filled responses I've even gotten to a comment on the Internet (20+ years) was when I called out aggressive snow drivers on Reddit. Despite being from, and living in the Northeast, the rage from fellow Northeasters whom I was accusing of driving like assholes was intense.

I recently drove several thousand miles this summer across many states (towing a trailer). It was only when I returned to the Northeast that I encountered aggressive, asshole drivers. It never occurred to me that maybe ... we're the baddies?

They're mad at you because it's indeed frustrating to get stuck behind someone who has no business trying to drive in the snow. If you get stuck because you're terrified at the thought of exceeding 10 MPH, they get stuck too.

Aaaaand there it is. ;-)

"Slow down" is not, contrary to popular belief, always the best advice. Slowing down too much in the snow is a good way to get stuck.

Yep the key to climbing a hill in snow is to keep your speed up so momentum carries you over slick spots. I've seen a slick hill look like a Tetris game with stuck cars in many different orientations.

It's the same with a muddy and wet 4WD road.

> I'd rather share the road with a computer.

Not version 1.

Factoring in all these variables is going to be a lot of work for a non-universal feature. I have no doubt they'll be included some day, but I doubt it'll be day 1.

EDIT: To be clear, I believe that dealing with ice and snow is an order of magnitude more difficult than driving under normal conditions. This is an 80-20 feature that many people won't need. I can't imagine holding the product back for additional development when just locking the feature based on a thermometer would suffice.

I'm worried about the south europeans jumping into their self-driving car thinking they can come visit us in northern Sweden early spring (their season, still full winter here).

How do you meassure how slippery the road is? How much wind from the side? Will the wind blow me off the road because it has been polished by the wind just after those trees end, next to the lake? Will the car know to stop before even going because the car doesn't have winter tyres with good enough tracktion left?

A self-driving truck, does it know enough not to slow down in the uphill because it will start to glide sideways or backwards where the road leans too much to the side?

I get gray hair when I start thinking of all the problems that needs to be solved before we have self-driving cars.

One of the developer voes, am I wise enough to be humble about my limits of knowledge or do I know enough to be dangerous?

Modern cars can drive at their traction limit already, it's a solved problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_control_system

It's been a safety boon to have a computer limiting power to the wheels when they slip, humans are really bad at estimating how slippery the road is.

Estimating for the road ahead is a different problem, but there is data to feed into that estimate.

If you read the manual for the traction control it is full of big warnings on every page,'Does not cancel out physical laws'. It is not a solved problem, it can only do as best it can uphill until car does not have enough traction to continue upwards. At which point the car will slowly glide down or into the ditch.

So what's your point? Are you saying human drivers can safely navigate those same hills or something?

What he's saying is that a human will, in those conditions, build up a speed in advance that is exactly enough to get up there before the speed has dropped too much (due to having to back off on the speed to keep traction. The computer can do the latter, but can it do the former? Probably when we get AI. But we don't have AI. Just machine learning.)

You're presuppose individual ownership of self driving cars. Ride hailing replacing those seems like a very likely outcome of self driving tech and won't have your issue thanks to "destination outside service area".

Actually, even with private ownership i'd not be surprised we'd end with region locked software, even if just for business reasons.

How well do the south Europeans jumping into their rental cars and coming up north to tool around on your weird roads fare now?

Well, eventually, when that computer has sophisticated software and all the appropriate sensors. An array of optical sensors that you ignore anyway won't really cut it.

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