How do self driving Tesla's do in white out conditions?

I’ve got one of the earlier versions of autopilot. It’s not full self driving but it’s great and I use it for the vast majority of the miles I travel when I’m not in an urban situation with lots of stoplights. In very heavy rains (or I would imagine snow) there is an error message that pops up saying “the [camera name] is obstructed. Autopilot is temporarily unavailable.”

My car is equipped with radar that penetrates snow/fog so it should still give me the automatic emergency breaking if it detects an obstruction before I can see it but I think Tesla has moved away from this tech in favor of camera based systems. Again, my system isn’t full self driving and it’s a bit older compared to the new stuff, but I hope this helps.

Also I don’t think anyone has any business driving in full self driving (or autopilot for that matter) in whiteout conditions. It’s not safe.

When I use Autopilot, I’m basically a team with my car. It’s better at some things than I am, and I’m better than it at others. Combined I feel like and even better driver than without it.

In the radar-equipped testers, I hear from a trusted source that they will auto-pilot at 70 mph next to other drivers who have almost no visibility due to fog, and so are going much much slower . . .

What could go wrong?

@Zaku The radar is forward-facing, are you referring to the ultrasonics that surround the perimeter of the car?

@Zaku A second-hand report, so I’m not sure which sensors it was relying on, but I meant to write “Tesla” where I now see I wrote “tester”. The car was I think a 2018 or so Model 3 LR.

Set desired speed and let it auto-drive in fog. Car got in the left lane in a 2-lane highway and happily zoomed through the fog, passing numerous slower blinded human drivers in the right lane (and probably terrifying most of them).

From what I have read, snow and other bad weather and visibility problems do degrade the ability to drive safely, both self driving cars and human beings for that matter. My guess is the computer gives up and pulls over before a lot of humans would, which makes the computer most likely the safer options.

On a side note: my husband rode in a driverless uber a few months ago in Arizona.

@JLeslie Not in a Tesla in the fog. See above.