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Comment by cafebeen | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for self-driving cars, but what I want to hear about is how on earth they'll overcome things like inclement weather, pedestrians, poorly maintained roads, and combinations thereof... but maybe that's just because I'm currently in New England in the winter.

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Bad weather and unexpected obstacles like pedestrians are actually trivial to handle. Remember that an autopilot's "visual" perception isn't limited to the visible-light range like ours is.

Poorly-maintained roads are the problem that would give me nightmares if I worked on these. Lane markers that might have been perfectly usable when the database was compiled may be too worn out or obscured by snow, leaves, or who-knows-what else to be usable later. How can you design a system to fail safely when every input source is independently fallible? And how can we redesign the auto insurance industry to make it possible to try?

>Bad weather and unexpected obstacles like pedestrians are actually trivial to handle.

Google's self-driving cars still have trouble with heavy rain and snow (or at least they did as of last year). http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles...

I'd probably lump "obscured by snow, leaves, or who-knows-what else" into the inclement weather category :)

I'd be curious to hear what the insurance industry makes of all of this too, they must be preparing for it in some way or another.

Detection of abnormal conditions might be tractable (though I wouldn't call online vision or recognition trivial problems). But taking action is harder. A piece of debris might manifest in a way that causes a self-driving car to skid to a halt or swerve - dealing with abnormal conditions in real time on crowded roads is certainly not a trivial problem, especially given the stakes.

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