Although inclement weather is certainly a challenge, comparing the sensors in your car to the sensors on a commercial self-driving taxi is of limited use. The

Although inclement weather is certainly a challenge, comparing the sensors in your car to the sensors on a commercial self-driving taxi is of limited use. The sensors on your car are designed to be affordable first and foremost, and likely cost hundreds (or maybe in the low thousands on very high end systems) of dollars each so they can sell the vehicle. The self-driving taxis are designed to work no matter what, cost be damned, so they can build out the technology and let the cost come down later with scale. There are single sensors that cost tens of thousands of dollars on some of the A-list players in this space, and sometimes several of them. The sensors cost more than the car, not to mention the cost of the computers themselves potentially costing more than the car (this varies by company). As a rough rule of thumb, the companies testing level 4 autonomous vehicles on the road today are paying around $100k-200k per vehicle in hardware costs alone.