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Comment by jtmarmon | Hacker News Reader

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jtmarmon·

> Driverless cars with extremely fast response times

Seems like relying on low network latency for critical safety features is designing a fundamentally flawed system.

Is this really how driverless cars are being made or is the author just pulling things from his ass

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Surely it's the latter. Driverless cars that rely on Internet access would not be feasible, for obvious reasons.

Driverless cars will likely eventually communicate via some peer-to-peer wireless technology, but I would assume that would use a different set of protocols than our mobile phones do.

That is my thought as well. Ad-hoc networks, specifically mesh, have always stood out as the correct technology for this problem.

Even LTE is including Vehicle 2 Vehicle (v2v) communication and Vehicle 2 infrastructure (v2x) and so will whatever 5g becomes of course (5g will be the continued evolution of LTE + mmwave physical layer basically)

Driverless cars need detailed and up-to-date map information. After you enter a destination it will need to download and/or update that information.

It wouldn't be a safety issue, though. The car would not start driving to the destination until it had everything it needed.

So if you ever park in a dead zone, your car will have to be towed back to coverage?

If you're parked in a dead zone, and your car doesn't have manual controls, you should be able to return to the place you came from. Going some place else might be problematic. Tell the car to go home, hit the "stop" button once you're out of the dead zone, and then give it the new destination.

This is yet more speculation: while Google's efforts have produced cars that rely heavily on detailed pre-mapping of surroundings, there are others, such as MobilEye, who seek to have the car navigate with almost no pre-mapping. We have yet to see if one model prevails over the other.

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