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Comment by elaineo | Hacker News Reader

Can self-driving cars use bots to automatically fight traffic/parking tickets?

I don't suppose self-driving cars are ever supposed to get traffic/parking tickets?

A more relevant question would be, can the owner/renter of a self-driving car fight the company who sold/rented the vehicle that got a ticket for him/her?

Well, I guess that long before truly automatic cars come to life, we will have cars that you can set to a certain speed and it will just continue driving forward(much like Tesla's Autopilot, but working on any road anywhere). You might ask "well, why don't we make the autopilot follow the speed limits then?". Mostly because in some countries it's not easy to tell when a speed limit ends and in my experience GPS maps are not always 100% accurate. Basically in most of EU the speed limit begins with a sign and ends at a nearest intersection, without any visible sign indicating so. So the car would need to recognize what is an intersection and what isn't - which is difficult even for human drivers, sometimes you have a paved road going off the main road to someone's house, but it's not an intersection so it doesn't cancel the speed limit. Again, it could be solved by having very very detailed maps, but then it doesn't help with roadworks which set up temporary speed limits.

Anyway, my point is that until we have truly, 100% automatic vehicles which take all liability for their actions, vehicles in semi-automatic modes will continue getting speeding and parking tickets.

Or you get out and set your automatic car to keep driving round and round the block when you need it again you send it a command from your phone.

Back in the 80's at my employer if the traffic wardens where seen one of the messenger boys would be told to drive the partners cars around the block until they had gone

This is an absurd waste of energy.

Yes but that is what will happen

You say it with absolute certainty, just like people 50 years ago used to say with absolute certainty that we will have flying cars. Well, flying cars are also a huge and unnecessary waste of energy and they didn't happen at all. Automatic cars will probably park themselves in huge automatic multi-story parking lots, like in Japan, why the hell would they be driving around, whoever owns them wouldn't want to put extra miles on them unnecessarily. Even if the electricity to run them was free, you are still using up tires and wearing out bearings , shocks and other elements, it makes no sense.

Human nature tells me that this will happen in crowded cities no one is going to want to pay though the nose for the limited car parking avaible.

Exactly how are dense and expensive Citys like London and SF going to build those "Huge automatic multi-story parking lots".

Tokyo is much bigger and denser than either one of those yet it has them everywhere. I hope you know that I mean those vertical car lifts which pack many more vehicles than your regular car parks, and which can be relatively easily build underground. But you only need to look at Lisbon - a city which had a monumental problem with parking, and they managed to build dozens of huge underground carparks all over the city, under city squares and such, sometimes 10-15 levels deep.

> Mostly because in some countries it's not easy to tell when a speed limit ends and in my experience GPS maps are not always 100% accurate. Basically in most of EU the speed limit begins with a sign and ends at a nearest intersection, without any visible sign indicating so. So the car would need to recognize what is an intersection and what isn't - which is difficult even for human drivers, sometimes you have a paved road going off the main road to someone's house, but it's not an intersection so it doesn't cancel the speed limit. Again, it could be solved by having very very detailed maps, but then it doesn't help with roadworks which set up temporary speed limits.

My car today already tells me the speed limit. It's based on detailed maps and works great. There are many challenges to self driving cars, knowing the speed limit isn't a huge one. If anything autonomous cars are the opposite of speed demons.

They would probably drive around slowly rather than get a ticket.

There would have to be some probabilistic model balancing the energy costs of continuing to circle vs. the risk x cost of a ticket vs. the possibility that a legit parking spot will open up.

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