Atwood's bet is extremely pessimistic, and I don't blame him. I don't even think that weather is the biggest issue to self-driving cars: dealing with roads full of human-driven cars will be harder to handle. It's not that AIs can't learn to aggressively accelerate onto a crowded highway or aggressively turn out of a busy stop sign, it's that the companies running the AIs will be unwilling to accept the legal liability that comes with being responsible for a fleet of aggressive AI drivers.
If you don't want to accept that risk, don't operate a self driving car.
People are required to buy insurance to operate a vehicle. I don't see how why this needs to be any different.
Companies go out of business. How can a defunct company be held legally liable? Companies and employees can easily die over the 20 year lifetime of a car. Liability can only be placed on the operator.
Companies release new models every year. They get safer every year. Older cars will be more expensive to insure. Will a company want pay the ongoing insurance cost of your 20-30 year old self driving vehicle? What if they can't afford to? Will you still be able to use the car you bought despite the company not being able to insure it? or refusing to insure it (and wanting to force you into a new vehicle purchase)?
All these problems magically go away when you make the operator responsible. They are able to make the choice every month whether they want to continue to pay to insure it, and are legally required to have insurance even if they die in the accident.
Some brands will have better safety, and buying insurance for them will be cheaper. Everyone with the same car model will have pretty much the same insurance rate, unless you are negligent when it comes to maintenance.
Insurance companies are more than capable of calculating these costs. Especially over 10-20 year time frames.
If this sounds crazy to you, it's not that much different than buying liability insurance for pets. Owners are legally responsible.
If you don't want to be legally responsible, don't buy a self driving car. Or a dog for that matter.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNIDcT0Zdj4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x3SqeSdrAE
- everything is some shade of white/grey/brown
- snow is incredibly reflective
- winter is cold; sensors are almost certainly affected, dirty, or covered
- pedestrians are bundled up, looking less like people
- road markings are obscured or buried
- signs are dirty
- stopping distances are increased
- speeds must be slower to compensate for lack of traction
- "traction control" only helps when accelerating; stability control and ABS only help so much in snow/ice
And that actually looks very interesting to me for long drives. I actually care less about handling local driving including urban driving near me. I want the long highway drives to be handled.
Yes, 100% autonomous is another kind of interesting and opens up use cases like dropping me off at the airport. But that seems really hard.
That is to say, you could have L5 in Miami without handling snow, but rain...
Don't forget, for L5 it also needs:
- Do the right thing in construction zones where signs and/or barriers may indicate that following the lines is wrong (including flag-men)
- Detect when an out-of-site emergency vehicle with sirens running may be approaching the next intersection and slow down
- Go 25 "when children are present" and 55 when children are not present (though TBH, humans are mediocre at this, and L5 only requires human-level ability)[1]
To my knowledge, there's nothing in the prototype stage that can handle the above in sunny weather. Going from "No protytpe can do this in sunny weather" to "Commercially available in 8 years" seems unlikely even if we restricted it to "only in areas with no snow"
1: For the non-Californians, I drive by 3 of these on my way to work: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/what-does-when-ch...
By NY, do they mean manhattan, new york city or the actual state? Because much of manhattan is gridlike and almost made for self-driving cars. Though the sheer amount of pedestrians, cars and road work could make it especially challenging.
"By "major cities" we mean any of the top 10 most populous cities in the United States of America."
Phoenix is in that list.