I'm a big proponent of autonomous cars (did a lot of work on it in college, follow it closely now). I don't think all cars need to be autonomous, but I think ov

I'm a big proponent of autonomous cars (did a lot of work on it in college, follow it closely now). I don't think all cars need to be autonomous, but I think overall it will make the roads a lot safer once the thing is worked out. The car will never get sleepy. It will never get drunk. It will never be talking on a cell phone. It will never be road raging. The road block I see the most is the weather. In my experience designing cars, the cameras are falliable but the lasers are not. We trusted the lasers absolutely but the cameras were a lot less certain. That's fine for object avoidance on dry roads (or even wet roads with consistent slip), but on snow you really want to be driving based on the road surface itself. Is it loose snow? Ice? Packed snow? Slush? Is there a hump of slush between lanes? Is that a pothole or a bit of black ice? Can I get some pavement under me or not? I find it hard to believe that a camera will be able to distinguish all that perfectly (texture, snow depth, snow type, etc). I think they will punt and make the car just drive 15mph, but that is unacceptable for me. I have AWD & snow tires and routinely do 45-50 mph in snow. But there are other times in the exact same car that anything over 20 is unsafe. It is entirely dependent on the judgement of the snow surface that I don't think a computer will be able to do for a long time. That's just my nit pick, but it is part of the larger problem. It is going to be super difficult to convince people to actually allow it. Most people are afraid of computers and don't trust them.