They were enjoying the recognition that they needed to code for hipsters on fixies. Does say a lot, though: "this is the LIDAR profile of a bicyclist at rest. Code as pedestrian." "this is the LIDAR profile of a bicyclist at motion. Code as vehicle." Now they gotta go through and say "IF bike.motion(velocity) <2mph, bike.motion = bike.rest. IF bike.rest(velocity) >2mph, bike.rest = bike.motion." And now you know why I don't code.We repeated this little dance for about two full minutes and the car never made it past the middle of the intersection. The two guys inside were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop.
I propose a more robust system whereby all hipsters are required to wear special hats that emit an infra-red beacon; naturally these would have to be vintage garments with the circuitry added, creating a whole cottage industry around the production and distribution thereof.
Here is a 60 Minutes segment about driverless cars that I just finished watching about 3 minutes ago. Apparently they are also having problems with lots of things, like figuring out snow or rain, but Google wants to have those things figured out in 5 years. The Feds are worried about things like what happens if the human is napping or reading and does not respond in a timely manner to events.
The feds are dumb. Nobody with half a clue will license half-autonomous vehicles for exactly the reasons you list. What will get licensed will be fully autonomous vehicles with the liability wholly in the hands of the vehicle provider, and that vehicle provider will go "nope, we ain't driving in snow." People keep trying to make this issue a lot more complicated than it is and it just isn't.
Or they'll figure out how to make driving in the snow reliable enough to do it. Sticking RFID chips in those highway reflector things would go a long way, and after a few years of autonomous vehicles being widely deployed and not getting in accidents I'm willing to bet the DoT is agreeable.
Realistically I expect we'll see not a switch to autonomous cars but a continuoum of cars taking over the most difficult jobs as tech matures. ABS, cruise control, traction control, electronic stabilization, intelligent transmissions, brake assist, collision avoidance, collision breaking and countless other systems will ensure that by the time autonomous cars are ready to take over we will be driving cars with arcade controls preventing us from being stupid.
Yep. That Fed guy was thinking about today and not tomorrow. Notice how he was writing with a pen and paper. (I hate to admit it but I am pretty terrible at that nowadays.) That is why Google is currently road testing cars without steering wheels or peddles or drivers. If these cars are relying on humans not to mess up they will not be successful or approved. And when they do figure out ice, snow, rain, etc. imagine how much easier it will be for even a native let alone a tourist from Arizona to "drive" to Whistler. Ice and snow is a real bitch. Especially at night.