How will driverless cars handle Canada's nasty weather?

Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 2:42 PM - With Ontario now leading the way for the testing of driverless cars in Canada, how will these motorized automatons handle the bouts of nasty Canadian weather?

For years, the automotive industry has been unveiling an ever-increasing number of automated features in our cars and trucks, and companies around the world are already testing cars that can get us from point A to point B with no human intervention whatsoever.

While Canada has been lagging behind the rest of the world on this trend, that will change as of the new year. On Tuesday morning, Ontario Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca announced that, as of January 1, 2016, Ontario will be the first province in Canada to allow the testing of automated vehicles on its roads.

So, with driverless cars soon heading out onto Ontario motorways, even if they're simply navigating test tracks for the near future, exactly how will these robotic vehicles cope with the rain, snow and ice that can make driving a challenge for human drivers?

Well, at least at the moment, the answer is "not well."

Take, for example, Hyundai's test vehicle from their 2014 competition. The car certainly wasn't perfect during its first day on the course, even with sunny skies and dry track conditions. It made several wide turns, some resulting in it nearly bumping into barriers on the side of the road. Overall it did quite well, though, successfully completing the majority of the competition's tasks.

As seen in the embedded video below, however, during day two - with rainy weather and slippery track conditions - it struggled to perform the most basic tasks.

WATCH BELOW: Hyundai's test vehicle is taken through its paces during rainy weather - be advised that the car emits a siren throughout the video, presumably in response to the road conditions.

Watching the entire video is certainly eye-opening, and pay particular attention to the upper left hand panel, as that is view from the car's rooftop-mounted camera.

Just the sequence above (starting at around 5m 40s into the test), reveals how the kind of wide turns it was pulling at intersections the previous day nearly causes a fender-bender as the car drives up onto the curb. The reason for the failure? The software couldn't detect the cobblestones of the corner due to the camera settings.

Prior to that (at around 4m 10s), the car takes a fairly simple corner far too sharply and ends up on the shoulder. The reason? The camera settings were wrong in this case as well.

In addition to these, the car had trouble staying on its intended path at times (1m 55s), it failed the pedestrian detection test (2m 50s), as it should have highlighted each of those in its camera view, and it missed some road signs that it clearly caught during its dry run the previous day (8m 40s).

And these are just the problems that arose due to rain, and the wet and fogged-over conditions of the camera lenses.

What about dense fog or heavy rain? How about snow, which can not only reduce visibility but can also produce treacherous conditions as it piles up? How would an automated car deal with driving along highways covered with a 10 cm thick blanket of snow, or roads slick with ice? How would it deal with snow banks piled up on corners so high that it can't see over them?

Apparently, examples of testing done in snow are a bit harder to come by, however if the rain tests don't convince that there would be abundant difficulties, even the automated features currently in vehicles have trouble during the winter months.

In February, Fortune.com spoke to Sam Abuelsamid about his experiences just with the current features on his 2015 Kia Sedona, during a snowy Michigan weekend:

Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst for Navigant Research, a marketing intelligence firm based in Boulder, Colorado, has been driving and testing a 2015 Kia Sedona equipped with advanced autonomous driving systems. Starting on Saturday night, as heavy snow blanketed southeast Michigan, he noted how the weather was neutralizing some of the Sedona’s advanced technology features.
He posted a picture of the frozen nose of the Sedona to his friends on Facebook, with this comment:
"We’re a lot farther from general use self-driving cars than those in Silicon Valley would like you to believe. The radar sensor in the front and the rear camera are completely covered. While the snow was falling, I had to turn off the parking assist because the falling snow was triggering the ultrasonic sensors causing the system to beep continuously while there was nothing around the vehicle."

As Ontario takes its first steps into this market, perhaps weather testing is where the province, and Canada overall, can excel. With the wide variety of weather conditions experienced across the country, this may be where companies develop the breakthroughs needed to make these vehicles safe year-round and all-weather.

Sources: CBC | IEEE | Fortune.com