Thats one of the reasons why Uber chose Pittsburgh for development. We might not get the same amount of snow as those cities but we get enough and have a variety of terrain for them to use as test cases.

Chicago and Detroit don't get all that much snow.

(Southern Michigan gets quite a lot of snow. Prevailing winds are westerly so lots of lake effect. Grand Rapids gets almost 2x the snow that Detroit gets. Cleveland also gets more snow than Detroit, lake effect from Erie)

Detroit may have a lot more complex situations than Grand Rapids, and even thought it gets much less snow it does get storms with several inches which is enough to cover all the lane marking and making things very messy with traction control coming on a lot. I would say they need to deploy to as many cities in as diverse conditions as possible, but that's after they master stuff like in this article.

Once they can traverse Chicago or Detroit in the winter safely then they can try Grand Rapids or Buffalo.

For the record in East Lansing we get a lot more snow than Detroit but we're pikers compared to say Holland or Grand Haven.

I drove in Grand Rapids and Chicago today. I'd take bad weather in GR than here at home any time. More snow more often doesn't mean more difficult to drive, more population and smaller streets here make it way riskier. Ice and sliding are easy problems to account for in code, bad manners are not.

CMU being there doesn't hurt, either

Yup. Plus the mayor was trying to remove as much red tape for them as he could to bring the notoriety to the city.