Technology

Self-driving cars succumb to snow blindness as driving lanes disappear

Ford engineers believe they found a solution to snow-blanketed lane lines. The technology scans roads in advance with lidar to create high-definition 3-D maps that are much more accurate than images from global-positioning satellites. (Ford\/Bloomberg)
KN
By:
Keith Naughton
February 10, 2016 05:00 AM

DETROIT (Bloomberg) -- In Jokkmokk, a tiny hamlet just north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, where temperatures can dip to 50 below, Volvo Cars’ self-driving XC90 SUV met its match: frozen flakes that caked on radar sensors essential to reading the road. Suddenly, the SUV was blind.

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