The capability we have today is working on fully mapped, well lit, dry roads. No one has an automatic car that could navigate in heavy snow/rain or unmapped terrain. There's very few ideas how to tackle it, unless we equip every road in some sort of trackers. I fully believe that in short time we will have all sorts of very clever cruise control systems which are essentially like Tesla Autopilot, maybe a bit more versatile. But fully autonomous vehicles? I stand by my statement that they are very far away for commercial distribution, unless you plan on selling them in Florida only, or only for use on private land.

There's another HN post just today, on auto-driving in snow! So we are close.

I know, I actually read that article :-) It says that the car could navigate the snow-covered road based on the data it collected from the same street when it wasn't covered in snow. So.....I get the idea, but that's not really "working in snow".

But that's about how humans do it. I think it was completely legitimate, worked fine, and can continue to work in the field.