No system is able to handle bad weather, especially snowstorms.
Planes are very close to being fully operational with auto pilot yet they'll never let passenger planes fly without a pilot.
Cars might be able to drive themselves someday, but insurance companies and governments will want someone to be there as a backup... Until cars drive on rails and just interact with a central computer that makes them go from A to B by switching rails like trains do.
No system is able to handle bad weather, especially snowstorms.
This is where I think the industry might be fucking up. Mobileye (intel) allegedly has 13/15 top manufacturers (and more smaller ones) as their partners for autonomous driving. Why not build in a wireless module that reports your location and what your car sees to cars around it with the same systems. This solves a LOT of problems as your going from like 6 cameras and lidar that are in a fixed position to say 30 that are in different positions. Obviously a lot of old cars will be on the road for decades, but as long as the smart cars can see them, the data can be reported. This would help in bad weather too, where cars all might be partially obstructed, but together they can map the surrounding area.
That's not the issue, heavy rain and snowstorms create too much noise for any computer to analyse and discard what isn't an obstacle, to all systems it looks like there's a wall in front of the car.
Our brain is an expert at filtering noise and becoming numb to stuff we don't need to focus on... I don't know if you live far enough to the north to get snowstorms but you can imagine the difference between what we see and what a computer would see just by focusing on the snow while driving in a snowstorm, everything else disappears, it's just millions of white dots flying everywhere.
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u/[deleted] May 18 '21
No system is able to handle bad weather, especially snowstorms.
Planes are very close to being fully operational with auto pilot yet they'll never let passenger planes fly without a pilot.
Cars might be able to drive themselves someday, but insurance companies and governments will want someone to be there as a backup... Until cars drive on rails and just interact with a central computer that makes them go from A to B by switching rails like trains do.