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Comment by gyc | Hacker News Reader

And maybe some kind of communication/message passing between vehicles maybe useful. For example, if a vehicle senses black ice in a certain part of the road, it can pass that information to other cars so they know to slow down when going over the same part of the road. So something like Waze but for road conditions.

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> And maybe some kind of communication/message passing between vehicles maybe useful.

I've made this suggestion before, but all commenters remarked about the risks of trusting another car, trusting another signal, hackers, script kiddies, and other malicious agents. The safest inter-car communication was determined to be adaptive cruise control.

We trust traffic lights without much issue. What's the difference?

A central entity controls the traffic lights; anyone with a few grand can go buy a car.

The same central entity also heavily regulates and monitors the roads. It's a soluble problem IMO. Very difficult, but the benefits are significant.

We already trust our safety to the cars in front of us - working tail lights & signals, proper securing of rooftop loads, etc. It's just a question of whether the incremental safety of knowing about hazards outweighs the potential for intentional mischief.

Look at it this way; if you get false positives about hazards in front of you, the consequence is maybe you slow down unnecessarily. If you get a false negative, that's really no different from no data at all - your car should behave the same.

Chances are self-driving cars will have signed code and unique crypto ids stored in security enclaves. Every manufacturer will be able to see exactly which car signed the message. If someone was sending bad messages they can just ignore that id, or more likely disable the car and send the location to the police.

Sounds like a situation where the Byzantine Generals yet again rear their ugly head.

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