"When I go I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and afraid like the passengers in his car"

Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre".

Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.

You couldn't see anything. As soon as there wasn't a car 20 yards in front of you, it was a complete whiteout. Ice built up on the wiper as quickly as you could possibly reach out of your window and clear it. Radar would probably be nice, but I don't think it'd be enough to keep driving. The cameras and lidar would be an absolute wreck.

I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but that is really the final frontier for AI driving I think. Waymos aren't even allowed to drive in a snowstorm right now. I suspect that you'll be dealing with Caltrans closing the pass for the rest of your life.

Humans and Control System Models need feedback to operate, and worse still... when any input into the vehicle's controls produce zero results, you will spin out.

My concern with a model in these conditions is that it wouldn't recoginize the fact that other cars were in the ditch and that it should probably slow down

As for autonomy, Waymos have LIDARs which at least provides more redundancy.

I see these as different design tradeoffs so no judgment implied.

I want to move on my schedule and convenience, I don't want to have to warp my day to day around someone else's departure schedule.

Exact same reason why Uber and Lyft were considerably cheaper than taxis in many big cities when they first launched (eg: Lyft in Seattle in 2013/2014), running at a loss, and the pricing has now incrementally grown to become the same as, or even more expensive than traditional meter taxis in some places.

There is also no reason to compete with Uber/Lyft on price because they are just leaving money on the table. When Waymo first launched, we saw them try to undercut (Waymo was about 20% cheaper than Uber/Lyft) but now it's about 20% more expensive. People are willing to pay extra for Waymo, so why would they charge less?

The margin on each Waymo ride is currently very, very high. I don't expect Waymo to cut prices until real competition arrives.

The rain will be a real test though!

What's the hot fix for this? Are they just stuck until a tech can physically go out and reset and move them? Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?

Silly stuff like this happens all the time even with human drivers, I feel like the important piece when hearing that the technology encountered an issue is how long did it take to resolve?