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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

A lot of that will be best solved by making a lot of other actors communicate directly with the car.

Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio.

Emergency vehicles, roadworks, traffic signs etc will do the same.

Or so I assume, because it makes so much of sense. I know there is vehicle-to-vehicle communication in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-vehicle

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> Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio.

I live in the capital city of an EU country, population 2 million, and there's a traffic light about two blocks away from where I live which has not been functional for about 2 weeks now. And the bad thing is that the other traffic lights from that intersection DO work, so you cannot rely on the road-signs, like one usually does when ALL traffic light from an intersection malfunction (from loss of power, mostly). So I'm a little skeptic that traffic lights will be able to "reliably" guide no-driver vehicles using radio signals anytime soon.

> Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio.

Most of the traffic lights in Las Vegas already support vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, although you need an Audi A4, Q7 or Allroad manufactured after 1st June 2016 and an Audi Connect Prime subscription ($33.33/month) to make use of it [1].

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/12/13923254/audi-v2i-las-veg...

Yes, I think you're right. We'd need to update a lot of our infrastructure to make it friendlier for these cars.

I should also add: - very fast mobile data, with no blackspots, so a remote driver can take over a car that's confused by a situation - a replacement for GPS, it's not reliable enough, the signal is far too weak - digital signal beacons embedded in lane markings, and edges of the road, and on traffic cones for roadworks

Why should local municipalities foot the bill for adding beacons to stop lights, etc? I get trying to make infrastructure friendly towards self driving cars, but the general public should not be footing the bill for someone's life choice to buy such a vehicle.

Because if we do resolve these issues, our roads will be much, much safer with autonomous cars. 2k people die on the roads each year in the UK, multiples more sustain life long injuries. I was in an accident, which could have been prevented were it not for the 1 second it takes for a human to react to a situation.

This is important traffic infrastructure, just like visual traffic lights and asphalt. That said, it can be paid for my many actors.

> so a remote driver can take over a car

nope. nope.

Right. Just like we paint roads to tell humans (and camera driven cars) where the lanes are, we should have digital markings to tell self driving cars where the road is directly.

The remote takeover seems entirely separate, and both promising and terrifying.

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