8 ms·

"Lot of snow and can't see the lane markers? Millions of people adapt every day to this during winter." Having driven a corridor with a ton of snow quite a lot

"Lot of snow and can't see the lane markers? Millions of people adapt every day to this during winter." Having driven a corridor with a ton of snow quite a lot (western PA to washington DC), i'm going to strongly disagree with this. People don't "adapt". They just do it anyway because they have to. The rate of minor and major fender benders in this kind of situation is really high, it's just "acceptable". In truth, computers that understand the physics of what is happening to the car at a given point in time based on tons of sensor data are going to be much more effective drivers in snow and ice than people (because of even simple data it can use like "this wheel has this much traction currently, so i need to correct this much"). People are really bad at figuring this out in their head and use horrible heuristics, often hitting other cars, guard rails, you name it. You could also can get data about surrounding conditions (IE the ice the wheel will hit next or whatever) that people can't because they are not close enough/can't process fast enough (IE not just what is going on with the car, but what is the state of the ice on the road 2 inches to the right or left of the car and would it be better for the car to steer in that direction to get more traction, etc)

zanny 11y ago
This is it. There is nothing inherent to CV that makes self driving cars unable to operate in snow. Humans already suck massively at it (and in the rain). I remember driving home in a massive rainstorm at night about two years ago with around 2 meter visibility and was going like 20mph because I could not see shit. I had less sensory data than a computer with extra vectors of vision beyond sight would have had, and my reaction time is a ton slower. Then a year later I'm driving in icy conditions and count five cars that either off roaded or rear ended each other in the span of 15 minutes because of the slick surfaces. I imagine self driving cars would do a much better job slowing down and budgeting for potential slippage than impatient humans. There is nothing really magical about our eyes that give us better clarity in awful driving conditions, and we don't have radar and GPS fed into our brains to give us a clue where the roads are supposed to be - we just rely on historical context and past driving experience on the same roads. How many hours would it take a networked fleet of self driving vehicles to outdo my historical context for driving on any of the roads I've driven on for a decade? Two? Maybe three? You just need to get the tunable parameters right though some good old genetic algorithm work like what Google is doing now with its test fleet and while it would be impossible to guarantee perfect performance in every scenario (because inevitably an earthquake is going to make a self driving car crash where nobody could have prevented it) it just has to be better than us, and that has almost certainly already happened.
- oqnet 11y ago
  The biggest thing is that people drive when they shouldn't. Sometimes your car just isn't going to do it. All season tires, 2WD, ice storm. Yeah that's when you see people sliding down hills. There's no traction and no automation is going to fix that. The best thing it will do, no joke, is just not start the car in those conditions. You do see a spike of people who don't do well to adjust to winter driving. They don't give longer gaps, make sure they have more time before crossing intersections than they do. Computers will do that much better, eventually. I can't wait to go to work or drive around the city and not have to worry about someone texting, doing makeup or making poor driving decisions. Have a nap on long trips, watch a movie, finish up some work. I can see computers having an amazing reaction time to some kid running into the street to catch a ball. An animal running in front of you at night. It's going to take awhile though. I wouldn't trust it right now to safely take me anywhere. There are just so many variables that the engineers have to account for. Weather conditions, people conditions, car conditions and on and on. It's nuts.
  - ProblemFactory 11y ago
    > The biggest thing is that people drive when they shouldn't. It is extremely common to drive beyond your actual "in complete control" speed. You are supposed to drive slowly enough in snow so that you can correct for unexpected patches of black ice or rocks in the snow slush. You are supposed to leave a long enough gap to be able to react and stop if the car in front of you unexpectedly fully slams on their brakes. You are supposed to drive slowly enough to stop if a kid runs out between parked cars. Humans almost never do, because unexpected things almost never happen. Traffic flows faster and perhaps smoother, because we willingly accept driving at speeds where we can avoid most, but not all hazards. But if we expect self-driving cars to always put safety first, then we will find them to be "tediously" slow, even if they have better sensors and faster reaction speed than us.
    - msellout 11y ago
      I drive at a "correct" following distance. Way back when I took my driving test I was told to allow 1 car length for every 10 MPH speed. So on the highway I leave at least 6 car lengths. I constantly need to tap the brake and back away as a car cuts into the lane. Almost no one on the highway leaves adequate space for human reaction times.
dorfsmay 11y ago
True, the number of fender benders on the first snow of the season is very high because people haven't adopted the winter braking distance model in their head yet.
ninjakeyboard 11y ago
In Toronto I've seen many drivers on the highway splitting lanes because they have no idea where the lanes actually are.
JaRail 11y ago
To be fair, a lot of those concerns are handled pretty well by traction control systems, etc. I drive in the snow a lot and really appreciate the things my car does to micro-manage traction. The main rule for driving in snow is to assume everyone else is actively trying to kill you. :)
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  The main rule for all driving is to assume everyone else is actively trying to kill you. It's something I was told when getting a motorcycle at 17, and it's served me pretty well. Specifically on snow I think we subcontract too much from brain to ABS, traction control, lovely powerful heater and what not. We don't get Scandinavian amounts of snow in the UK, so whenever we do have snow you'll see dozens of ridiculous accidents because people don't take account of stopping distances or speed, or ABS being a hinderance in snow etc.
  - michaelt 11y ago
    The main rule for all driving is to assume everyone else is actively trying to kill you. If you were really doing that you'd never drive down an undivided road when a car was coming in the opposite direction, in case they swerved across the divider at the last second :)
    - anexprogrammer 11y ago
      Many years ago I was almost taken out when a driver did a very unexpected U turn into the gap he thought was there. Trouble is, the gap in traffic was actually me on large motorbike. So it can happen :p
    - xanderstrike 11y ago
      Or you'd do it cautiously. As a motorcyclist/bicyclist, I have to watch for this because drivers literally do it all the time, they call it "turning left."
  - fineline 11y ago
rayiner 11y ago
Some of this stuff about self driving cars sounds to me like the "sufficiently smart compiler" that can can optimize away the overhead of certain features of Lisp. Meanwhile, Uber thinks my house is in the middle of I-83.
smoyer 11y ago
I know that corridor - and I agree with you. Unfortunately, there's also a huge number of people that don't treat snow with the respect it deserves. If you live in WV or OH (or in PA near enough to the border to fake it) you still don't need to have your car inspected. In PA, you can probably still find a mechanic that will slap a sticker on anything, but it's getting harder. In any case, you need good tires and working brakes to navigate snow effectively. Anti-lock brakes (in my opinion) are no better than a person that can properly pulse their brakes but ... if you've got even a slight warp in your rotor, you won't brake evenly enough to stop in the snow. The other problem in PA is PennDOT's "new regime". There's been far more ice packed onto the roads when it snows lately - because melting snow that's packed under tires turns to ice. I'd far rather drive on dry, crunchy snow (for traction) /rant
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  Driving in Latvia, -25 celcius, 1.5 meters snowfall, main road (closest they have to freeway/motorway not cleared ... it's 2 narrowish lanes each way with no center divider).... visibility extremely poor due to continuing snow fall.... Everyone continues driving like it's +25 celcius and sunny. This means 110km/h (90km/h speed limit in the dry 70km/h in the snow) bumper to bumper (or is that fender to fender?). Never been so petrified driving in my life. Somehow it all worked out but I can imagine one false move and we would have been looking at a 100 car plus pile up.
  - ptaipale 11y ago
    That can be scary but there are scarier places in traffic. Latvia does have a traffic-related death rate (per number of motor vehicles) that is twice as big (24.8) as neighbouring Estonia (11.8), or the United States (12.9), which are about on the same level, or over five times as high as Finland (4.4) somewhat further to the north. On the other hand it's less than half of that in Russia (53.4), and one-fifth of that in India (130.1). In Ethiopia, the death rate is 200 times as big (4984). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
bisby 11y ago
We can also make digital lane markers, doing whatever the case may be. If we have future infrastructure built with autonomous cars in mind, they can easily be better in those situations too. The hard part of this we're trying to force self driving into our current infrastructure and traffic. If the bus was self driving, they would have communicated properly and merged perfectly.
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  And if the Moon was made of cheese, why are we not harvesting it already? Even if all new vehicles starting now were autonomous and perfect, it would take decades to get all-autonomous traffic.

zanny 11y ago

This is it. There is nothing inherent to CV that makes self driving cars unable to operate in snow. Humans already suck massively at it (and in the rain). I remember driving home in a massive rainstorm at night about two years ago with around 2 meter visibility and was going like 20mph because I could not see shit. I had less sensory data than a computer with extra vectors of vision beyond sight would have had, and my reaction time is a ton slower. Then a year later I'm driving in icy conditions and count five cars that either off roaded or rear ended each other in the span of 15 minutes because of the slick surfaces. I imagine self driving cars would do a much better job slowing down and budgeting for potential slippage than impatient humans. There is nothing really magical about our eyes that give us better clarity in awful driving conditions, and we don't have radar and GPS fed into our brains to give us a clue where the roads are supposed to be - we just rely on historical context and past driving experience on the same roads. How many hours would it take a networked fleet of self driving vehicles to outdo my historical context for driving on any of the roads I've driven on for a decade? Two? Maybe three? You just need to get the tunable parameters right though some good old genetic algorithm work like what Google is doing now with its test fleet and while it would be impossible to guarantee perfect performance in every scenario (because inevitably an earthquake is going to make a self driving car crash where nobody could have prevented it) it just has to be better than us, and that has almost certainly already happened.

oqnet 11y ago
The biggest thing is that people drive when they shouldn't. Sometimes your car just isn't going to do it. All season tires, 2WD, ice storm. Yeah that's when you see people sliding down hills. There's no traction and no automation is going to fix that. The best thing it will do, no joke, is just not start the car in those conditions. You do see a spike of people who don't do well to adjust to winter driving. They don't give longer gaps, make sure they have more time before crossing intersections than they do. Computers will do that much better, eventually. I can't wait to go to work or drive around the city and not have to worry about someone texting, doing makeup or making poor driving decisions. Have a nap on long trips, watch a movie, finish up some work. I can see computers having an amazing reaction time to some kid running into the street to catch a ball. An animal running in front of you at night. It's going to take awhile though. I wouldn't trust it right now to safely take me anywhere. There are just so many variables that the engineers have to account for. Weather conditions, people conditions, car conditions and on and on. It's nuts.
- ProblemFactory 11y ago
  > The biggest thing is that people drive when they shouldn't. It is extremely common to drive beyond your actual "in complete control" speed. You are supposed to drive slowly enough in snow so that you can correct for unexpected patches of black ice or rocks in the snow slush. You are supposed to leave a long enough gap to be able to react and stop if the car in front of you unexpectedly fully slams on their brakes. You are supposed to drive slowly enough to stop if a kid runs out between parked cars. Humans almost never do, because unexpected things almost never happen. Traffic flows faster and perhaps smoother, because we willingly accept driving at speeds where we can avoid most, but not all hazards. But if we expect self-driving cars to always put safety first, then we will find them to be "tediously" slow, even if they have better sensors and faster reaction speed than us.
  - msellout 11y ago
    I drive at a "correct" following distance. Way back when I took my driving test I was told to allow 1 car length for every 10 MPH speed. So on the highway I leave at least 6 car lengths. I constantly need to tap the brake and back away as a car cuts into the lane. Almost no one on the highway leaves adequate space for human reaction times.

dorfsmay 11y ago

True, the number of fender benders on the first snow of the season is very high because people haven't adopted the winter braking distance model in their head yet.

ninjakeyboard 11y ago

In Toronto I've seen many drivers on the highway splitting lanes because they have no idea where the lanes actually are.

JaRail 11y ago

To be fair, a lot of those concerns are handled pretty well by traction control systems, etc. I drive in the snow a lot and really appreciate the things my car does to micro-manage traction. The main rule for driving in snow is to assume everyone else is actively trying to kill you. :)

anexprogrammer 11y ago
The main rule for all driving is to assume everyone else is actively trying to kill you. It's something I was told when getting a motorcycle at 17, and it's served me pretty well. Specifically on snow I think we subcontract too much from brain to ABS, traction control, lovely powerful heater and what not. We don't get Scandinavian amounts of snow in the UK, so whenever we do have snow you'll see dozens of ridiculous accidents because people don't take account of stopping distances or speed, or ABS being a hinderance in snow etc.
- michaelt 11y ago
  The main rule for all driving is to assume everyone else is actively trying to kill you. If you were really doing that you'd never drive down an undivided road when a car was coming in the opposite direction, in case they swerved across the divider at the last second :)
  - anexprogrammer 11y ago
    Many years ago I was almost taken out when a driver did a very unexpected U turn into the gap he thought was there. Trouble is, the gap in traffic was actually me on large motorbike. So it can happen :p
  - xanderstrike 11y ago
    Or you'd do it cautiously. As a motorcyclist/bicyclist, I have to watch for this because drivers literally do it all the time, they call it "turning left."
- fineline 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago

Some of this stuff about self driving cars sounds to me like the "sufficiently smart compiler" that can can optimize away the overhead of certain features of Lisp. Meanwhile, Uber thinks my house is in the middle of I-83.

smoyer 11y ago

I know that corridor - and I agree with you. Unfortunately, there's also a huge number of people that don't treat snow with the respect it deserves. If you live in WV or OH (or in PA near enough to the border to fake it) you still don't need to have your car inspected. In PA, you can probably still find a mechanic that will slap a sticker on anything, but it's getting harder. In any case, you need good tires and working brakes to navigate snow effectively. Anti-lock brakes (in my opinion) are no better than a person that can properly pulse their brakes but ... if you've got even a slight warp in your rotor, you won't brake evenly enough to stop in the snow. The other problem in PA is PennDOT's "new regime". There's been far more ice packed onto the roads when it snows lately - because melting snow that's packed under tires turns to ice. I'd far rather drive on dry, crunchy snow (for traction) /rant

rorykoehler 11y ago
Driving in Latvia, -25 celcius, 1.5 meters snowfall, main road (closest they have to freeway/motorway not cleared ... it's 2 narrowish lanes each way with no center divider).... visibility extremely poor due to continuing snow fall.... Everyone continues driving like it's +25 celcius and sunny. This means 110km/h (90km/h speed limit in the dry 70km/h in the snow) bumper to bumper (or is that fender to fender?). Never been so petrified driving in my life. Somehow it all worked out but I can imagine one false move and we would have been looking at a 100 car plus pile up.
- ptaipale 11y ago
  That can be scary but there are scarier places in traffic. Latvia does have a traffic-related death rate (per number of motor vehicles) that is twice as big (24.8) as neighbouring Estonia (11.8), or the United States (12.9), which are about on the same level, or over five times as high as Finland (4.4) somewhat further to the north. On the other hand it's less than half of that in Russia (53.4), and one-fifth of that in India (130.1). In Ethiopia, the death rate is 200 times as big (4984). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

bisby 11y ago

We can also make digital lane markers, doing whatever the case may be. If we have future infrastructure built with autonomous cars in mind, they can easily be better in those situations too. The hard part of this we're trying to force self driving into our current infrastructure and traffic. If the bus was self driving, they would have communicated properly and merged perfectly.

Piskvorrr 11y ago
And if the Moon was made of cheese, why are we not harvesting it already? Even if all new vehicles starting now were autonomous and perfect, it would take decades to get all-autonomous traffic.