Level 4 inherently means a limited ODD. That means there are conditions and situations in which they aren't allowed to operate. No one is even claiming that these vehicles operate safely in snowy conditions today, so why draw this specific line in the sand?
It's also worth noting that AV companies have done snow testing. Waymo specifically tests in Tahoe. None of that data is publicly available for us to even discuss, though.
Simple: because I live in an area where these conditions are common, so self-driving cars will be 100% useless to me until they can solve it.
I am glad that they are starting to be feasible in areas without as many different road conditions, but until they can handle the conditions in my area, I can only benefit from them extremely indirectly.
...And furthermore, because it is frustrating to see people talk about "self-driving cars working in normal driving conditions and being ubiquitous" (which hasn't happened in this thread that I've seen, but I've seen it a bunch in the past) when what they really mean is "self-driving cars working in SF and a few other limited areas in the US Southwest". It just reeks of a lack of concern for anything outside Silicon Valley—which is a depressingly common problem on this site.
Waymo tested in NYC for years. The state was fairly hostile to the efforts and passed a few laws to restrict competition with the taxis. That's a major reason why there isn't much interest in New York state.
There have been various testing and public deployments across the southern half of the US, not only California and the Southwest. Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida all come to mind, plus Pennsylvania due to CMU. The deployments in California and Arizona are the most mature, but they're not the exclusive focus.
I'm not going to get into the bits about silicon valley, because frankly that's not a terribly interesting conversation to have.
It's fascinating that your defense of someone being tired of the CA-centric attitude here is to then turn around and hide behind the NYC-centric attitude.
If it's not SF or NYC, it barely matters to most HNers, which is rather annoying to see. It very much obviously causes a heavy bias and arrogance since there's no realy balance to the areas outside those two metros.
Those companies dont give a flying f** about you or your snow.
They want to create autonomous taxi for a city and monopolize the public transport.
They might be producing PR materials about private self driving cars. But they don't want that, its silly. They want to own all cars and rent them to as many people as possible.
It's also worth noting that AV companies have done snow testing. Waymo specifically tests in Tahoe. None of that data is publicly available for us to even discuss, though.