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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

What does "everywhere in all conditions" mean for level 5? Across a flooded road? Through 8" of snow? Up "The Chute" in Sand Hollow?

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> except in the case of natural disasters or emergencies

Whatever a human driver with a non-commerical license does on a day to day basis is a good measuring stick.

This is an oddly imprecise position to me. It's unclear whether an 8" snowfall is a natural disaster. In places where this is a regular event, it is not treated as a natural disaster. Some human drivers drive in it just fine, though most prefer not to.

What about a 3" snowfall? That is a more common event, and a much larger number of human drivers stay on the roads despite the snow.

> oddly imprecise position to me

Yes. It is intended to be so. Because being pedantic is now how you define these levels.

The ultimate goal is to run a large fleet of robo taxies wherever possible and Level 5 tech can do that everywhere on globe. One can get pedantic and ask if this would work in Antartica or on Dead Horse Bay or whether driving in sand dunes of Saudi Arabia is possible. But the folks who are trying to pedantic wont be happy with any definition either here.

The ability to safely and successfully get where you want to go would not be diminished by the fact it was an autonomous vehicle. 8" of snow in LA would be a disaster because they don't have the road maintenance infrastructure to handle that. It's not that people in LA are dramatic compared to people in Michigan.

The text of the official standard explicitly mentions floods, defining Level 5 to be when the software "can operate the vehicle on-road anywhere within its region of the world and under all road conditions in which a conventional vehicle can be reasonably operated by a typically skilled human driver"

It adds: "However, there may be conditions not manageable by a driver in which the ADS would also be unable to complete a given trip (e.g., white-out snow storm, flooded roads, glare ice, etc.) until or unless the adverse conditions clear. At the onset of such unmanageable conditions the ADS would perform the DDT fallback to achieve a minimal risk condition (e.g., by pulling over to the side of the road and waiting for the conditions to change)."

It means that it needs to be able to get the vehicle into a safe situation regardless of conditions. That can mean needing human help once it is there in some cases.

This doesn't mean that it needs to magically cross destroyed bridges, as the popular culture definition often implies.

Standard roads are probably the intent. Being pedantic is just moving goalposts.

The problem is that freezing rain caused Portland to come to a standstill, but in Canada, that’s just an annoying day with elevated rates of accidents.

In Texas, a light breeze takes out the entire state, whereas in Canada, most of our workforce is expected to at try to continue working after a 20 inch snow dump the night before.

I hope you can see how there’s reason to being pedantic.

If level 5 is all conditions human drivers do regularly for day to day activities, 2030 is an idiotic bet and anyone not living in a bubble could see that.

Did you typo "light freeze?" Texas does terribly with ice but it is regularly windy as hell here, among the windiest of all US states. Even when a tornado tore up three miles of North Dallas a few years ago, it didn't take out even the local traffic, let alone the whole state.

There's an additional aspect however: on days with e.g. freezing rain, human drivers might risk it, but companies like Waymo will probably decide to play it safe and not let their taxis run, because they know how much bad publicity an accident would be...

A lot of that doesn't have anything to do with cars or drivers, but is rather about city infrastructure.

Does the city own a fleet of snowplows? Does it keep massive stores of road salt available? Do schools and offices even have heating systems at all?

On the other hand, driving carefully on snow and ice is a skill in itself that has to be learned. And in snowy places I do know people who simply don't drive in some conditions because they're well aware they don't have those skills, even growing up there -- while others enjoy the challenge. So that part is a fair question of which humans we're talking about when we talk about human-level driving skill.

Regardless of city infrastructure, I've seen schools in North Carolina close after a light snow (like a few millimiters). In Stockholm this winter I regularly feel my car drifting when entering roundabouts, and a lot of roads have transformed from 2-lane streets into 1.5-lane streets.

> So that part is a fair question of which humans we're talking about when we talk about human-level driving skill.

These California-based companies assume everywhere is California, and still want to release those cars internationally.

It doesn't even have to be snow. Heavy thunderstorms can close schools too.

In that case, SAE Level 5 driving may have a place for “sub-division” by weather, the same way that CAT-III ILS offers a range of operation options based on visibility.

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