At least in Toronto traffic they’ll mostly be capped at 10km/h, doubt they’ll have any high speed collisions with the terrible traffic here lol.

You are confusing predictable continuous low level noise for sheer chaos. The chaotic potential Montreal has in winter, and it uses, is spectacular. The fact that it is so unpredictable in exercising this merely contributes to the problem.

Freezing rain, for example. My god.

I find the anarchist traffic of developing world cities to be more aligned with natural game theory principles than proscriptive protocols. For a computer it may be simpler.

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This could still be a problem. Human drivers are still available on these days today, and if services like Waymo take over and theres less Uber (et al) drivers, then we'll have no support on the worst days.

Same thing when people tout how FSD is basically "done"... and talk about their anecdotes driving around SoCal and such.

Don't hear many anecdotes about FSD in Pittsburgh on a night in January...

Denver also gets snow. Waymo has been open to the public for rides from Sept 2026 in Denver. And they started test drives in Sept 2025 I believe

Yeah, I've seen them going around. The last one I saw at Jackson Square looked like the safety driver was driving. This is probably the worse urban environment for Waymo to be. I'm not sure how they're going to handle the roads or the people dancing in the streets (as well as mules, pedicabs, wacky bikes, scooters, drunk people and all of the wonderful chaos). Not looking forward to them becoming operational here.

You have crashed into a cone.

Recursion depth limits exceeded

I'll giddily await the moment when a Waymo gets swallowed by a random sinkhole.

I was visiting my brother there shortly after the bus-hole happened, and the winter market had several vendors selling bus-hole related merch. I regret not buying any.

I wouldn't say Montréal is more dangerous, but it is 100% more complicated for drivers. There are so many variables that change suddenly. A road is fully plowed and salted, you turn right and everything turns to shit with tons of snow on the ground. You keep going, suddenly there's ice *underneath* a layer of snow so the car starts skidding, and the plow's going the other way trying not to swallow your car whole.

You're talking about one variable I'm familiar with, but it's one variable. With snow cover in a plain, you just drive much slower and turn on your hazards.

Yeah, I regularly drive from Saskatchewan to BC in the winter.

I'm generally enthusiastic for electric vehicles, but batteries and FSD don't really work in a 12 hour blizzard at -40. Doesn't match my use case. :)

I had a similar thought from my time living in Alaska. half the year there aren't any lines on the road other than the occasional tracks from the previous car that drove on it, and that's if the wind is low. It's not unusual to have half the road covered in a foot or two of snow from a drift. Humans can see them and usually avoid them, but it involves strategically using the oncoming lane. Would be interesting to see the nav system deal with that!

(well, there is Mont Real, for which the city is named... But I'll agree it's not much of a mountain.)

"montreal doesn't allow right on red".

That is not uniformly true throughout the metro area, especially in the major burbs.

I remember the traffic in Cairo (1970s).

It was absolute chaos. They had "half-cars" driving around (front-wheel-drive cars, with the back end missing, and replaced with a rickety wooden cart; sometimes, just like a drag cart, with no wheels).

Not much snow in any of these, or occluded vision. Which drivers seem to struggle with, a lot.