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Comment by bostonpete | Hacker News Reader

As someone who commutes 35 miles twice a day, I can't wait to have a self-driving car. But I don't see how a car with no steering wheel is viable given today's infrastructure. What happens if I'm in a snowstorm and the lame markings are occluded? What happens if I need to drive down a dirt road or driveway? It seems like most drivers will need some way to take over from time to time...

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As a commuting Canadian I'm interested in this being addressed as well, as I'm sure millions of others are. All the self driving lab work seems to be taking place in California. If I value my life, shouldn't I want to buy a self driving car that was designed in Michigan or Wisconsin? Who can even answer that question right now? Perhaps its a matter for self driving car v2.0 to address?

Honestly, my prevailing theory is that this highlights how much further we really are from practical self-driving cars than Google's marketing department wants us to think. I think the self-driving car project needs to always sound 'a little over a year away' as good PR for Google, though they know it's much further from being truly serviceable.

A year away in California and other states with good weather.

I have a suspicion we will see some amazing demos of self driving cars in the snow and rain, once they are good at it. It's brought up every time we talk about being these cars to consumers, if Google or whoever have truly mastered these situations I think they would like people to know.

Researchers are working on this in Michigan. The University of Michigan has a new MCity test facility[0], and I know one of the projects they are working on is how the cars handle snow. They basically still do LIDAR and match the z-plane (height of objects nearby) to localize the car when road markings are hard to see.

Still lots of work to do though!

[0]: http://www.mtc.umich.edu/test-facility

In the descriptions I've seen, the Google car doesn't rely on the lane markings in normal driving. The lanes are pre-mapped and it can use any mapped landmark (including but not limited to the lane markings) to determine its position relative to the lanes.

The Google car also does not drive in snow AFAIK. Maybe that's bad for you but it's not a deal breaker for the first deployment of self driving cars as there are plenty of places where it never snows.

> The lanes are pre-mapped

Should be interesting to see how it handles detours and temporary road re-routes. How would a self-driving car handle a two-lane two-way double-yellow-line road with one lane closed and a flagger alternating both directions of traffic through the same lane?

I think it probably can read lane markings, as well as construction signs, flaggers, etc. I know it've seen videos of it detecting hand signals given by bicyclists. It just doesn't make sense to rely on lane markings during normal driving because lane markings are often or missing or obscured or just plain wrong.

Ignoring lanes and driving using an old map seems a great way to plow into oncoming traffic.

So does blindly following lane markings that were incompletely erased and are now incorrect. Clearly the Google car does not do either of these things, because if it did then it would certainly have crashed many times over by now.

I've always assumed the current generation of auto-drive AI is going to be released, but rated for perfect-visibility climates only. This means it'll be fine for vehicles like self-driving 18-wheelers travelling back and forth through the Nevada desert; but the only place you'll be likely to see it in passenger vehicles is in the local taxi/car-sharing services (i.e. cars that never leave their metropolitan area) of cities in extremely temperate regions. So they'll get them in California, and Texas, but not anywhere northern-enough for snow or eastern-enough for monsoons.

If Google can map most of the modern world with Street View, why can't they equip those same roads with sensors (that don't need to be visible) for their self-driving cars? Or better yet, given they have HD satellite imagery, will they just know exactly where the car is on the road (to the lane) at all times?

This is referred to as SLAM - Simultaneous Localization and Mapping - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...

Asphalt surfaces, in general, aren't long-lived and require regular maintenance -- likely, those sensors would be destroyed during maintenance (which almost always involves pouring molten asphalt). This means that Google would have probably have to regularly re-install the sensors.

Not sure if it's possible to do that easily, but it might be.

How real-time is their HD satellite imagery?

Do they need to be sensors? I figure something like a hefty distinctive pattern of nails would be good enough to pick up with magnets.

Cheap, easy to plonk down in the middle of a lane as you're pouring asphalt, if there's a pattern it's relatively hard to confuse with debris.

That's been done, in the form of magnets driven into holes punched in the pavement. Early systems just followed the magnets, but today, they'd just be used as an additional hint. It's quite possible that we'll see those in areas with heavy snow. Volvo has been testing this.[1] One of Volvo's arguments is that magnets are also useful for snowplow guidance. Heavy plows often chew up the infrastructure when snow is heavy enough that the road isn't visible. In some areas, poles are placed alongside roads so the plow drivers can tell where they're supposed to be plowing. Sometimes this works.

[1] http://www.gizmag.com/volvo-road-magents-autonomous-cars/311...

One possibility is that the cars would operate like drones. There would be a trained remote human operator who would take over if something went wrong.

As far as driving some inaccessible location, I'd guess the cars would be more or less like personal trams. Just people who take public transit now, if you needed to go down a dirt road, you'd walk or take a folding bicycle.

I don't think they can legally sell a car without a steering wheel. If they manage to make self driving cars legal at all they'll require someone in the driver seat.

Self driving cars are already legal many places. Nevada, Florida, California, and Michigan all have laws on the books that specifically address self driving cars. Nevada issues special license plates for them.

California DMV requires a steering wheel and pedals though; recent ruling (hinder's Google's tiny self driving car).

I never said they didn't, I was replying to "If they manage to make self driving cars legal at all."

They are already legal and they are coming, this isn't a far out concept. Semi self driving (requiring a driver to take over if needed) consumer cars probably will be first then fully automated ones a few years later.

Your smartphone.

Yes, let's have people control their car the same way they fly off the track on racing games. :)

You may have to find a teenager to drive for you. For safety.

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