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Comment by igetspam | Hacker News Reader

As a human driver who has navigated both Boston and SF, they're both equally terrible. Once you're in the middle of downtown for either city, you should abandon your car, your plans and hope. Just walk.

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The weather in Boston is considerably more challenging than SF though.

For all its reputation, I'm not sure Boston is clearly a lot harder to drive in generally than a lot of San Francisco is--given Boston weather for maybe 8 months out of the year. However, after a big snowstorm (admittedly not much this year) it's a whole other game. And while it's easy to say just don't use self-driving if there's a snowstorm or if lanes are partially blocked by snow, that's not ultimately a driving system that can be depended on. And I guarantee people who maybe only drive a few dozen times a year in the worst conditions will be an absolute menace on the roads.

(And "just don't drive then" isn't an option for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances.)

Well, as an example, last year the lights at the intersection outside my apartment went out during a heavy rain storm. I also tend to have a lot of driverless cars in my neighborhood. I watched how cars were dealing with the blacked out intersection. I saw two different Waymo cars stop at the intersection as CA law requires. Then I saw a Cruise car approach the intersection. As it did it slowed a little but then seemed to speed up as it blew through the intersection. I could only imagine the nightmare during a bad nor'easter!

I don’t think any self driving cars have been trained for snow yet, but it does rain (sometimes pretty hard) in SF, and because we have wet/dry seasons rains are more hazardous in some cases due to months of oils all being disrupted at once. It can also be quite windy in SF, it’s common for gusts to reach >20mph on random sunny days, especially this time of year. So aside from snow and ice( big exceptions, for sure) I think they can handle Boston weather.

Though to be fair that San Francisco fog is famous for a reason too. I'm sure that doesn't help.

That's basically what these cars do in SF, apparently. They get themselves into a situation with no way to figure out a way forward and they shut down.

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