<i>Let&#x27;s be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too.</i><p>Sure, but most human drivers can call upon a wealth of experience both with driving and interacting with the physical world in general. They have an incredibly rich mental model, allowing for adaptations that would be risky or impossible to program into an autonomous driver. For example, when lane lines are missing or obscured, human drivers will often follow the car in front of them... unless they observe erratic behavior that might indicate the driver ahead has lost control. What&#x27;s &quot;erratic behavior&quot; is a judgement I wouldn&#x27;t expect near-future software to be particularly good at.<p>Of course, there are areas like reaction time and feedback-based control where autonomous drivers will always be vastly superior to human ones. Which is why it seems to me that the safest option in the medium term is likely to be (as it is today) an increasingly software-assisted human driver. This is the primary reason I&#x27;m down on the chances for wide adoption of fully (or mostly) autonomous drivers in the next 5-10 years: Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative. The active participation of the human will fall off over time, but I think it will be a much flatter curve than many enthusiasts expect.