If You Hate Driving in the Snow, a Robot Can Now Do It For You

Self-driving cars may be the future, but relinquishing control of the wheel certainly takes some getting used to. It’s one thing to go (slowly) 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 collectively to reassure us with Martti, which they claim is the first fully autonomous car to handle a snow-covered public road safely, without spinning out on a patch of black ice and death spiraling over a cliff. (OK, 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.