Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.

Even if it didn't work in snow (and it's unlikely to do worse than humans), all the west coast, desert west, and south have basically zero snow all year long.

How else would you do it? First, get the technology to work at all before doing the harder things it can't handle yet. Crawl, walk, then run. Or in this case, drive in snow. Even if it never gets there in my lifetime (which I doubt), it's already working.

I don’t know where this idea that driving in SF is easy mode comes from. No one who has actually driven in SF would say that. Yes it doesn’t have snow, but it has rain, zero-visibility fog, lots of pedestrians and cyclists, heavy traffic, narrow roads, steep grades, bus-only lanes, lots of cars parked on the street and double parked. Self-driving companies don’t pick SF because it’s easy, they pick it because it’s the most challenging city that’s close to their engineers.

Most of the US population lives on the coast, which is quite temperate generally.

I suspect large portions of North America will be easily serviceable by robotaxi.

Waymo seems to work the same in pretty heavy rain as a clear day in SF. They're testing snow a lot more now, no idea how good it is yet.

SF doesn't seem like an ideal place, it rains and is foggy which both degrade lidar performance.

Yeah have fun when it's snowing so hard that all the sensors get covered if you stand still for too long at a light or something.

And I do wonder what hail would do to it. Could cause a lot of... interesting input data. And subsequently a lot of interesting driving.

San Francisco seems pretty tricky: narrow streets, heavy pedestrian traffic, fog, hills, street cars, etc