- 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

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.

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

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...