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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

Also, driving in the snow and ice safety is about 3 orders of magnitude more difficult to do than driving on dry pavement.

There also needs to be an indicator: "It's snowing, please wait until the road is warm and dry, or have the carbon unit take over".

But that's no good, we have to get to where we are going, so tens of thousands of people, who havn't been practicing driving AT ALL for about 8 months now dust off their glasses and try to remember what these symbols on the dashboard mean and which petal is the "make go faster" one.

Either humans must be required to drive 20% of the time, or else the humans will be stranded when ice is encountered.

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The robot will be far, far better than humans at driving in such conditions. Modern cars already help out as best they can with monitoring slippage, temperature sensing, running in higher gears, monitoring road gradient and rate of change thereof, running wheels at different settings, and all the rest of it; if the meatbag would just sit in the back and let the robot drive everything would be much safer.

The indicator will say :"It's snowing meatbag, please wait until the road is warm and dry, or give me the wheel".

Then you'll need the override when the passenger (or driver) is dying and needs to get to the hospital. I guess you would have to read and sign the 85 page EULA and sign: "I understand that if I crash here there will be hell to pay".

Why would there be such an override system? That's crazy. If there is a need to drive less safely for such a purpose, again, the robot will do better. You push the button marked "Emergency - get me to a hospital" and the robot works out the closest hospital and negotiates with other robots on the road to allow it through at greater speed. The last thing I want in such a situation is a panicky human losing blood and going into shock trying to drive a car as fast as they can.

What makes you think computers will be worse than human drivers at driving in poor conditions? I'd think it'd be the other way around.

Exactly: I have some experience driving in snow and I've certainly made a few big mistakes that I'm pretty sure a computer (that would have a much better sense of available traction) could have avoided. I can also easily imagine sensors that can see through headlight-lit falling snow better than a human.

"Will be"? Probably. Right now? Probably not.

Ice and snow are real issues for, say, the Google car. Driving at night is pretty good because its sensors can still see things better than the human eye.

I think some of that difficulty is because we mostly build up driving intuition on clear roads. An auto-driver will have relatively objective heuristics to evaluate road conditions, which is where humans make a lot of their mistakes (that is, humans frequently just fail to realize that the road is slippery).

Now that I think about it, the auto-driver would decide it is slippery and go excruciatingly slow. And the next problem is that you can't get up a hill because it doesn't know how to gather up excessive momentum to make it over the hill. The human would say: "I can do it", but the auto driver says: "it's too risky".

So the human wants to run deliberately fast so they can effectively slide up a hill with massively reduced control, and the robot kiboshes it on the grounds it's dangerous? Sounds pretty good to me.

This is my biggest fear with automated cars. Snow, ice, and animals are problematic and having the car drive all summer means poor winter driving[1]. I still worry about how it figures what is safe to push through versus what will cause an accident. The constant flurries / drifting is also going to be a huge sensor problem.

Car companies are pretty bad about winter driving as is[2][3], so I expect we will have a lot of problems.

1) it is bad enough on the first snow day in Minneapolis even though everyone was driving the day before

2) if the traction light actually informs you of a loss of traction, you shouldn't be driving anyway

3) heated seats, but a total lack of work on defrosting in all these years

Animals: Google driverless car has already been shown to avoid collisions with unexpected animals (like, say, a deer).

Snow and Ice: the sensors about wheel rotation and speed used in fancy automatic suspensions are more than able to control for slippage. I'm willing to bet that once prepared, a driverless car could deal with these hazards with much more finesse than a human pushing a pedal with no idea what kind of friction coefficient their vehicle's tire is getting.

The problem with snow and ice isn't what your already driving on, it is dealing with what is coming. I would really like to see how it deals with the lower visibility and constant motion around it. How does it deal with the ice coming up (and black ice).

If Google (or anyone else) starts testing in the northland, I will be convinced, but I don't think it is a very easy problem to solve.

"How does it deal with the ice coming up (and black ice)."

It's been told about it by other robots who have already encountered it, which already gives it a massive head start over the meatbag.

Snow and ice have different reflective properties than regular old asphalt.

The car uses LADAR.

Pretty sure it'll be able to tell the difference.

Automated vehicles also potentially means automated plowing/sanding vehicles. Roombas for the roads basically.

I'm not sure if that means more plow trucks taking out my mailbox or fewer...

Not unless sensors get a lot better, as starring into white and finding the road is a rather large problem[1]. Nevermind the actual skill of those drivers, it is not an easy job.

1) GPS + Maps is not the answer as it wrong sometimes.

[1] will surely improve greatly with a fleet of millions of data gathering machines. No, it still won't be absolutely 100%, but that's what Kalman filters are for.

Since roads where it snows are always getting torn up and repaved, if automated cars do become widespread, it seems entirely feasible and realistic to line major roads on each side with radio reflectors or some other cheap system that can keep automated plows from driving off the road.

The real problem is the cost of the automated plow itself. A 10-wheel plow with salt feeder isn't exactly cheap to run with or without a driver.

Since they haven't been real successful at automating a combine (a bit of a simpler problem), I figure the plow and the expertise needed to drive one is a ways off.

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