>Santa Clara County which has pretty moderate weather year round.
Except no one has figured out how to drive in the snow or even heavy rain. Moving self-driving cars to Detroit won't magically fix that. I imagine we're a breakthrough or two away in computer vision processing and fuzzy logic/AI to crack that nut.
While I fully appreciate the self-driving car and have watched more than a couple videos on how they work, they all require the ability to see things like lines painted on the road, a decent distance ahead, etc. What happens when heavy snow comes down and driving is less a deterministic act of following lines and crossing intersections and more of a poorly thought out social contract involving every driver's idea of what workable chaos looks like? What happens when your visibility is terrible? What happens when veterans know what roads to avoid and which to take but the GPS-based self-driving car goes the cheapst/most logical way? What happens when you're at an intersection that's out or the lights are covered in snow and everyone is stopped honking at one another? Or a car is stuck in the middle of the intersection? Do you dumbly drive through or avoid that route because its not plowed correctly or plowed at all?
As a Chicagoan, I know driving in the snow is a bitch. The success stories of the self-driving car will come from places like Santa Clara for the foreseeable future. We're just not there yet and Detroit can't help us, nor can we help it.
>I do think Marc is right in that specialization is the key.
Uh, we tried that in Detroit. Regular cars. Didn't work out too well. I think Andreeson suffers from the ivory tower economist disease. He's out of touch outside of his domain. He just points fingers at things and acts like this is all a simple command economy, "Do this there! Do that here!" Life tends to be more complex than that.