The terms appear to actually suggest any of the top ten most populous cities in the US, plenty of which are in places where it doesn't snow.

Atwood's bet is extremely pessimistic, and I don't blame him. I don't even think that weather is the biggest issue to self-driving cars: dealing with roads full of human-driven cars will be harder to handle. It's not that AIs can't learn to aggressively accelerate onto a crowded highway or aggressively turn out of a busy stop sign, it's that the companies running the AIs will be unwilling to accept the legal liability that comes with being responsible for a fleet of aggressive AI drivers.

Interesting. I interpreted "work in any of the top ten cities" as meaning I could pick any city and it would work. I can see the other interpretation. Hopefully they agree on the parsing!

Liability is easy to solve. Just make the owner of the car responsible. Solved.

If you don't want to accept that risk, don't operate a self driving car.

What do you mean by "operate a self driving car"? That's the point of SAE5: You can't really operate a SAE5 vehicle other than telling it where to go. No steering wheel, no gas pedal, no brake pedal, no nothing. There is no way you could argue that the owner of a SAE5 car is responsible for it. You might as well be legally responsible for the bus, train, airplane you ride in.

Operate as in, put fuel in it, turn it on, tell it where to go. You can operate a dishwasher without washing the dishes yourself.

People are required to buy insurance to operate a vehicle. I don't see how why this needs to be any different.

Companies go out of business. How can a defunct company be held legally liable? Companies and employees can easily die over the 20 year lifetime of a car. Liability can only be placed on the operator.

Companies release new models every year. They get safer every year. Older cars will be more expensive to insure. Will a company want pay the ongoing insurance cost of your 20-30 year old self driving vehicle? What if they can't afford to? Will you still be able to use the car you bought despite the company not being able to insure it? or refusing to insure it (and wanting to force you into a new vehicle purchase)?

All these problems magically go away when you make the operator responsible. They are able to make the choice every month whether they want to continue to pay to insure it, and are legally required to have insurance even if they die in the accident.

Some brands will have better safety, and buying insurance for them will be cheaper. Everyone with the same car model will have pretty much the same insurance rate, unless you are negligent when it comes to maintenance.

Insurance companies are more than capable of calculating these costs. Especially over 10-20 year time frames.

If this sounds crazy to you, it's not that much different than buying liability insurance for pets. Owners are legally responsible.

If you don't want to be legally responsible, don't buy a self driving car. Or a dog for that matter.

No sane person would take that risk. And even if regulations made it a purely civil covered by regulation thing even if the car runs over some kid, I'd fully expect the insurance company to go after the manufacturer.

Drivers are not qualified to assess the safety of a self-driving system. These cars should simply not be allowed on the road unless manufacturers take liability.

Well, Waymo is already working in San Francisco. Winter in New York adds traction control and additional obstacles. Traction control is already mostly the vehicle's job anyway, what with anti-skid systems. It can go way beyond that. Stanford has an autonomous, electric, drifting, deLorean.[1][2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNIDcT0Zdj4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x3SqeSdrAE

- limited visibility due to haze or precipitation

- everything is some shade of white/grey/brown

- snow is incredibly reflective

- winter is cold; sensors are almost certainly affected, dirty, or covered

- pedestrians are bundled up, looking less like people

- road markings are obscured or buried

- signs are dirty

- stopping distances are increased

- speeds must be slower to compensate for lack of traction

- "traction control" only helps when accelerating; stability control and ABS only help so much in snow/ice

2030 seems impossible to me. In NY, you might not be able to see the road surface at all due to snow. Curbs and other landmarks that are necessary for Waymo to work (they map _everything_) will be covered. Seems unlikely to account for all conditions necessary for level 5 in 7 years.

Yeah. The against side of this bet seems like a no brainer. Is it possible (maybe even more likely than not) that there will be a fully autonomous system that will be available in that timeframe that can navigate many limited access highways in certain weather conditions by then? Absolutely.

And that actually looks very interesting to me for long drives. I actually care less about handling local driving including urban driving near me. I want the long highway drives to be handled.

Yes, 100% autonomous is another kind of interesting and opens up use cases like dropping me off at the airport. But that seems really hard.

The problem is not traction, it’s the visibility impact of snow drifts, etc.

Exactly. Not being able to see where the lanes are because the paint is covered by snow brings about a whole new level of challenge.

Forget snow; that problem exists for wet roads at night with oncoming traffic!

It's worse with snow. I'm in Minnesota, I speak from experience.

It's definitely worse with snow, but the areas where "roads are sometimes wet" are a superset of "roads are sometimes covered with snow."

That is to say, you could have L5 in Miami without handling snow, but rain...

OK, I see your point. But try to see mine - rain may make it hard to see the lines, but snow may make it impossible.

Yes, snow is worse in every possible way than rain (unless the rain then freezes to the road). We are so far away from that though.

Don't forget, for L5 it also needs:

- Do the right thing in construction zones where signs and/or barriers may indicate that following the lines is wrong (including flag-men)

- Detect when an out-of-site emergency vehicle with sirens running may be approaching the next intersection and slow down

- Go 25 "when children are present" and 55 when children are not present (though TBH, humans are mediocre at this, and L5 only requires human-level ability)[1]

To my knowledge, there's nothing in the prototype stage that can handle the above in sunny weather. Going from "No protytpe can do this in sunny weather" to "Commercially available in 8 years" seems unlikely even if we restricted it to "only in areas with no snow"

1: For the non-Californians, I drive by 3 of these on my way to work: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/what-does-when-ch...

And this is exactly why I think Jeff has the winning bet.

And there are basically non-existent lines on tons of roads.

polarizers reduce this problem.

Polarizers also reduce the amount of light, increasing the required camera sensitivity and noise.

> The terms of the bet require the car to navigate through New York in the winter.

By NY, do they mean manhattan, new york city or the actual state? Because much of manhattan is gridlike and almost made for self-driving cars. Though the sheer amount of pedestrians, cars and road work could make it especially challenging.

Navigation in much of Manhattan is straightforward. Driving at high traffic hours is certainly not in large areas of the city. I hate driving in Manhattan and will do just about anything to avoid it.

My reading of the terms of the bet is major cities, which means more than one city with a population in excess of 250K. In my reading just Phoenix and Tucson would be sufficient.

He said top 10 most populous.

Looks like we both misread it.

"By "major cities" we mean any of the top 10 most populous cities in the United States of America."

Phoenix is in that list.

Tucson is not. If he only means 2 of them though there's definitely another car driven sunbelt city on that list though.