Comment by SirMaster

Comment by SirMaster a day ago

>I'll throw this out there: your human-driven car already accounts for acceleration and braking on slippery roads, without the need for the human. Traction control systems and electronic stability control systems exist! They're in fact incredibly common on modern cars.

These systems don't help with the problems I am talking about.

You have to drive completely differently in heavy snow, significantly slower, brake sooner, turn less sharp, accelerate much slower, leave significantly larger gaps, leave space to move out of the way and be ready to move if someone behind you is coming at you too fast and can't stop in time, etc. I've spend my entire life in the midwest.

The traction control system in my 2023 camry didn't help one bit when I applied the brakes on black ice and the car didn't react at all, it just kept sliding at the same speed across the ice.

bryanlarsen a day ago

That all sounds like something that should be easier for a robot to do than the typical human. If programmed for how to drive in heavy snow, a robot should be able to switch driving modes much easier than the typical human brain.

Waymo has been trained in Buffalo NY for winter conditions, unlike most NYC drivers.

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dboreham a day ago

Is it possible to train a machine to drive in snow? Yes. But consider that humans are trained to do so by means of things like: actually crashing, observing others crashing, talking to people who crashed, and all of the above is highly localized. Where I live there are many days in winter when someone not from the immediate area should not drive at all. But I might if there was a good reason because I have 25 years experience with the specific roads, conditions, how those conditions relate to wind and on and on. Training a machine to know all that seems feasible but unlikely to be commercially viable. It's just not a problem that can be solved with a simple closed loop control system like ABS or traction control.

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- bc569a80a344f9c a day ago
  
  > talking to people who crashed
  A reasonable counterargument is that autonomous vehicles can actually do that to a degree that is much, much more effective than humans. You might have 25 years of experience, but at 8 hours a day for 365 days of those 25 years we'd only need 8 cars driving for a year to match that. After all, training data and event logs generated by cars can be shared, and models can be upgraded all around. And of course that scales to more than 8 vehicles rather easily.
  
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