Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

It's fascinating seeing all the comments elsewhere anytime Waymo starts testing in another city along the lines of, "ah, but how will they handle X, Y, and Z here?? Checkmate, robots!" despite having already launched service in several other cities.

Granted, NYC is the biggest city in the US, so maybe that sort of reaction is more reasonable there than when people in Dallas or Boston do it.

>despite having already launched service in several other cities.

Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?

For example the first thing I can think of new for New York is snow and ice.

It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice.

> "Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?"

New requirements come up all the time in technology. The existence of a new requirement isn't in and of itself justification for skepticism - is there a particular reason to believe that Waymo is not capable of solving for the new requirement?

The answer may be yes, but simply "ahah! It would need to do [new thing]!" is insufficient. "[new thing] is likely intractable because [reason]" would be more justification for skepticism.

> "It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice."

Sure, but like above - is there a reason this is an intractable problem?

I'll throw this out there: your human-driven car already accounts for acceleration and braking on slippery roads, without the need for the human. Traction control systems and electronic stability control systems exist! They're in fact incredibly common on modern cars.

The interesting snow & ice problem for me is that humans will drive in winter conditions that are unsafe -- for example white-out blizzards. Robocars won't be able to drive in a white-out blizzard, so they'll likely refuse to do so. Humans should also refuse to drive, but people drive anyways.

NYC doesn't generally get white-out blizzards, so refusing to drive in them is quite feasible.