The pulling over to the side of the road solution doesn’t work at scale. What happens when it starts snowing on a 10 lane freeway during rush hour and 50% of the cars are self driving with this limitation?
It’s unlikely that, in a region that gets such snowstorms, a self-driving system that can’t handle them reaches 50% market penetration. That seems more like a “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” scenario.
OK then QED. The point some are making is that with at least the current type of lidar, that bridge may not exist. It may make more sense to devote resources to better radars and radar processing.
And I’m not disputing that at all. None of my statements say anything about any particular self-driving technology as I’m not an expert in the various technologies. My point is that what’s “acceptable” is a fundamentally a moral stance, and stated the minimum bar I believe all drivers (automated or not) need to meet.
This is simply a constraint that any system needs to work within, and it’s entirely possible that precludes the commercial viability of LIDAR-based systems. It’s also possible that there’s some niche market that fair-weather-only systems can be successful in long before the general problem is solved, and we shouldn’t artificially throw those out as “unacceptable” when there’s a reasonable framework for them to operate under.
