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Comment by jsprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't existing autonomous vehicles already be tested that way? Aren't they?

Why do we need a new corporation-town?

I'm sure they are, to a degree, but if we're at all thinking about starting to replace wide swaths of our vehicles with autonomous ones over the next few decades, a wider scale test site, with things like a freeway and off ramps (from the picture), seems like it would be necessary.

The downside of testing all your autonomous vehicles in one little town is overfitting. It's easy to recognise the same darn freeway offramp that you've driven thousands of times, but your software needs to recognise every darn freeway offramp.

I was under the impression that some autonomous vehicles have been driving existing freeways and off ramps for many years.

Am I wrong?

No, but you're starting to be kind of pedantic.

What percentage of possible scenarios involving getting on and off a highway do you think autonomous vehicles have encountered so far? I would guess the number is quite low.

Now extrapolate that across a city. And the point isn't that it is not possible to test these scenarios in the real world, but that it would be far easier to do so when you can control scenarios to a greater extent.

The bigger point: When you create a new version of software, do you re-run your existing tests on it, or just play around with it in production and call it good enough? The real world is production. This would be your QA environment.

And your QA facility will not have every possible on-ramp, off-ramp, or other.

My point is that these things have already been tested on a much larger scale than this QA (I actually think it was billed as Research) facility would seem to provide.

No. I've seen Google's cars driving all around Austin recently.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/31/9233435/google-self-drivin...

There's actually a autonomous vehicle test facility in Concord, CA's old naval base where I reckon they're doing these types of tests.

http://gomentumstation.net/project/av/

It's being used by several different manufacturers apparently:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33945098

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