I was surprised in the past couple months to see it say “Construction zone detected: Navigate on Autopilot limited”. It’s at least a start, but it’s still a long way from the level 4 autonomy that Elon wants for his fleet of Johnny Cabs. That will need to deal with this and nearly any other anomalous condition.
I think level 3 autonomy will come much sooner. At level 3, the vehicle is autonomous during nominal conditions, but can detect anomalies and alert the driver to take control whenever it loses “confidence” in its control of the situation. Totally anecdotal, but based on my experience with autopilot that feels possible in something near Tesla’s timeframe.
ETA: Only had brief autopilot experience in the snow earlier this year, but it gave up pretty quickly and forced me to drive. I’m interested to see how it behaves next year, but in no rush to see more snow soon.
By no means am I claiming it’s perfect. Just that it’s doing much more than line following at this point. From the videos I’ve seen, it usually does ok following tracks in snow. I don’t know about when the entire road surface is white and the only clues are snowbanks (it doesn’t snow where I live).
I take over in construction zones. Autopilot does have some sense of cones changing the notion of a lane, but I don’t yet trust it enough for that. It’s not smart enough to reduce its speed in a construction zone, for one thing.
It does do well even with faded lines, and in the presence of old, outdated lines. There are some roads around here with really poor markings and it does about as well as a human.
Self-driving doesn’t have to handle every situation to be useful. I don’t trust myself in the snow, either. I suspect that in the future, a new duty for tow truck drivers will be retrieval of self-driving cars that gave up due to conditions. They won’t need a tow, just a human with a bit more flexibility to get it out of some tricky spot.
I totally disagree, Level 3 is worse than having humans drive all the time. If you don’t drive most of the time, you’re going to lose your skill & finesse. As kids become new ‘drivers’ but never get practice because they’re usually a passenger, they won’t develop the driving skill; then the car suddenly stops & says, “You, human, take over in the worst of conditions.” It’ll make that snowy, or (lightly) flooded, or construction zone road like recent the traffic jams at the top of Mt. Everest - a death zone.
ISTM the car should be able to compute co-efficient of friction from small fluctuations in the accelerator being held. Wheel speed at all 4 wheels during regeneration and, so forth. Braking to zero should be only within the safe distance the sensors can detect with speed limited to that limit. Increased sensitivity to range increasing speed capability. Of course, YMMV, Objects appear closer than they are… IMHO.