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.