(Bloomberg) – Self-driving cars may be the future, but relinquishing control of the wheel certainly takes some getting used to.
It's one thing to (slowly) go-with-the-flow on well-marked city streets, for which many self-driving cars were initially developed and tested, but what happens when you throw icy winter road conditions into the mix?
The minds at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland seek to collectively reassure us with Martti, which they claim is the first fully-autonomous car to safely handle a snow-covered public road without spinning out on a patch of black ice and death spiraling over a cliff. (Okay, no autonomous vehicle ever has death spiraled to our knowledge, but such are our fears.)
According to a press release, Martti, a retrofitted Volkswagen Touareg, hit 25 miles per hour on snowy roads without lane markings in Finland's famously frigid Lapland region and likely could go faster without issue.
Radar, lasers, cameras
Most other self-driving cars rely on LIDAR — that's Light Detection and Ranging, which uses light from a pulsed laser to measure distances between objects — but it doesn't work well in whiteout conditions.
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