Much like how a pilot captain boards a ship to steer it into port, traffic systems will be able to be a bit more 'hands on' when it comes to getting traffic through junctions safely, regardless of the weather. Hence, on the final journey through a city, the city traffic systems will be directing your car.
For the journey on highways between built up areas, variants of today's self driving systems will suffice.
I wouldn't call things like radar and lidar unnecessary but in principle a good AI vision system should be able to operate at the same level as a human eventually. Of course if you don't have such an AI just yet, you need a stop gap solution. But I wouldn't bet against AI getting there eventually. Probably not on Mr. Musk's accelerated and optimistic schedule though. But give it another five to ten years and things might look a bit differently.
What Waymo is doing now with much less than perfect AI is of course completely pragmatic and very impressive. I'm kind of eager to see them start operating self driving outside a few restricted zones in the US and for example in European cities. I live in Berlin, so probably we'll have to wait quite a bit for people to finally let go of their fax machines though apparently there are some trials with self driving buses about to kick off here now.
No camera system comes close to the capabilities of human eyes, combined with general intelligence.
i grew up where bad weather was common enough that we cosidered it not worth shutting down for bad weather so we risked driving in it - but it was always a risk and many do die from taking that risk.
I have a model 3 with v3 FSD hardware. FSD is an objectively terrible driver compared to the average human.
He's wrong. Cameras are not enough... but they're certainly cheap enough.
When I was getting my driver license I had to perform a series of tasks as part of the process. On of first was driving a 50m narrow curve forth and back. I had my exam in the middle of winter. The training yard was fully covered in snow. I was young and didn't knew better, so I got in the car and begin my test to quickly realize I couldn't see shit. I tried my best, but next moment I was told I got off the curve - the examiner knew it by heart - and I failed the test. Back to school and see you next semester.
A learning experience on so many levels.
Anyway, since then I always come back to that single experience when I read about self driving vehicles.
You have to pass theory exam - when I was doing it it was 30 questions with four possible answers out of ~500 pool [1] now the pool is 3700. If I'm not mistaken you could make two mistakes and still pass the test. The questions are either road diagrams, ie. intersection with three cars, road signs and/or lights and you have to tell in which order cars will go or a picture from drivers POV and a question what you should do in such situation - like three lanes, car on the middle, the right is a bus lane and the question is if the driver is allowed to take the left lane.
Once you get that done you can take practical driving test.
It starts on a training yard where you have a series of tasks, like said driving forth and back on a curve in one sweep motion, starting a car on a incline without going back or losing your engine - mind you we're driving manual - parallel parking between cones [2], etc.
If you ace them instructor will take you for a 30-45 minutes ride around town. Apart from normal driving he will ask you to few random tasks like parking in normal conditions.
Any mistake will end the trial with a fail and you have to start all over again. Three failures and you need to redo your theory exam.
[1] I have really good memory and when I taking my exam I went through all questions few times - they are publicly available - and when I had my exam I only looked at the picture and double checked if the question ended up with question mark or period as some images were reused and I knew my answer. I don't think I would be able to do that again with that 3700 question database lol.
[2] before taking exams you go to a private driving school and my instructor gave me a cheat code for parallel parking - which is extremely tight, but also, as pointed by my instructor, government regulated, so all the cones have to be in very precise spots. Not only that, but you take the exam in government selected car (whoever won current bids). So he told me to back up until I saw a cone lining with door post, then full stop, rotate the steering wheel by a exact amount of degrees, etc.
PS. gun permits are given on similar grounds, plus you are required to have a regulated gun safe at your premise and it has to be permanently attached, so given the fact that many of our apartments are smaller than your garages and most people are renting significantly reduces access to guns :)
How much more problematic is it with autonomous vehicles? I could see action here just because it is a threat to the property of large corporations, though.
I got stuck getting out of shoreline after a large concert with abnormal parking conditions, and when we didn't move for 30 minutes I got out of the car and directed traffic so both lots could empty equally. Took another 45 minutes for my family to catch up to me, which was good because that's when someone in a safety vest showed up and told me to stop.
CALTRANS uses trucks with big flashing arrows and portable collision barriers on the back to protect road workers ahead. They make no attempt to make ordinary drivers do anything more complex than stop or change lanes.
The people from Pepe's Towing in LA post videos of large vehicle accident recoveries, and they often talk about road worker coordination problems. They have to coordinate with CALTRANS, the California Highway Patrol, local cops, fire departments, HAZMAT services, railroads, terminal and port operators, and the drivers involved. The pros who clean up such messes seem to know each other, at least by reputation, but the drivers are often clueless. Pepe's has two questions for drivers - how heavy is your load, and what are you carrying? The answers they get run about 80% "duh". Those are the drivers who roll over semis on freeway ramps.
When autonomous trucking gets going, that kind of coordination will be necessary. But not for passenger cars.
Look at Scottie Scheffler's arrest for an extreme case of how very hard this is to get right.
I doubt the tech will be immune to that. So it's up to how they manage the fallout from the crashes they end up getting into.
Another personal favorite is driving on ice with a tiny layer of sun melted water so you can also hydroplane.
I've driven FWD cars in heavy snow and it isn't that bad. You just have to go half the speed you normally would.
Winter tires also go a long way.
even better if this is the only way to get around. no transport for whoever the Trump admin decides is insufficiently loyal!
y'all need to get more creative with your dystopias
Based on their current approach, it'll be much simpler than facial recognition.
Or you could get a pardon for drunk driving if you vote MAGA.
The only time people stopped was when it was hailing.. and then they would hide under bridges if they could.
Did you ever hydroplane in a car, even ever so slightly? That experience teaches you to slow down or stop and wait for the rain to be over pretty quickly.
(I’d love to see a serious winter vehicle that can deploy traction devices by itself, perhaps while rolling at very low speed. Off the top of my head, it seems like it might be easier to put them on then to take them off.)
No idea if they're compatible with Jaguars or whatever Waymo is rolling these days, but my guess is that Waymo could make the economics work.
But chains aren't enough in some common situations around here that locals, including school bus drivers, know well. When we get a good size snow storm (multiple feet) and the sun comes out a day or two later, thick ice forms on the sections of road that the sun hits - snow melt runs across the road during the day and freezes at night, getting thicker and smoother each day. When that happens on our steeper inclines, chains on AWD/4WD vehicles are not enough to get up those inclines or to stop on the way down them. Locals know where those spots are and take other routes in those situations. It's hard for me to imagine autonomous vehicles having such local information in remote areas like this anytime soon.
I actually had chains when I lived in the Los Angeles area, which is probably the last place most people would expect someone to have chains or snow tires.
I occasionally had to take I-5 to Central California or the Bay Area in winter, and in a typical winter there are maybe 1-5 days where you aren't allowed through Tejon Pass on just ordinary tires.
There are three cases, depending on the severity of the weather. From least to most severe the requirements are:
• If you have snow tires on at least two drive wheels you don't need chains. Otherwise you need chains.
• If you have a 4WD/AWD vehicle with snow tires on all wheels you don't need chains. Otherwise you need chains.
• You need chains.
I'm guessing they meant _Upstate AND Western New York_.
Glad someone in Waymo saw the potential for testing for extreme snowy conditions there.
When I lived in NYC I used "upstate" to mean anything not in the five boroughs, Long Island or Westchester, and I don't think this usage is uncommon.
I hope Waymo shares more solutions for winter driving to debunk a lot of the marketing for winter activity driving in the USA
The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires. Most high performance cars come with summer tires. I live in a wealthy area where I often see new cars in parking lots wearing summer tires in winter, probably relying on electronic nannies to mask the lack of grip in normal driving.
A full set of tires can easily cost $1k, and we're in a country where most people barely have $500 saved at any moment.
If the benefits were truly as categorical as the internet makes it out to be then normal people would know about it.
Normal people don't care, because the difference is incremental, not categorical. An AWD SUV on all-seasons gets you 95% of the way there with a fraction of the effort, and that's the sweet spot for normal people.
Won't happen. Tires affect fuel economy in EPA testing. Your commuter car will always come equipped with the hardest all-season or summer tires the manufacturer can source.
And instead of taking a step back and realizing that there are competing tradeoffs here and that a compromise needs to be made people will just screech harder about "the side of the tradeoff I care about is not being pushed hard enough by the .gov".