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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this approach to get level 5 automation right away. It's too wide a scope to implement. Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation?

You drive up to the highway, and then relax until you need to get off - sounds like a great start to me. You can equip that highway with a boat load of sensors and transmitters to understand these fancy brainy machines. After a few years, build more such highways with the lessons learnt from the experiments.

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By and large, there's no particular reason to think purpose-built highway infrastructure is needed for autonomous vehicles. Maybe to alert for construction zones but we're pretty close to having autonomy on limited access, well-mapped highways today.

The problem is that, while this would be a really nice car feature (and probably great for safety), it does nothing for the people who don't want to own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call. Unfortunately for these folks, the autonomous highway driving is relatively near-term while door-to-door autonomy is probably decades away.

I wish people would wake up and realize this. My hope is that all the hype around self driving cars will result in some momentum around more limited applications.

But it might be another of those the perfect is the enemy of the good type situations.

   it does nothing for the people who don't want to own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call.

Classic disruption (not in the sense that it is often used) would be to start with a niche so limited that it doesn't seem useful to almost anyone, and then expand from that use case.

If you could make a Tesla owner's commute from SF to Sand Hill Road a much better experience (via autonomous-only toll road), I'd say that's one hell of a start.

This process to build such a highway in california is beyond even the considerable means of Elon Musk - just the land acquisition and environmental review costs are staggering.

Thus the Boring Company was born.

Dedicated infrastructure for autonomous driving is a non-starter. However, allowing full hands-off on certain roads, perhaps only in good weather, would still be a feature that people would spend a lot of money for. It's not clear at what point people will be legally allowed to watch a video on their commute but we can probably see a path to getting there.

Wow - a toll road that excludes everyone except the super ultra rich who can afford the latest shiny cars. Exactly what California needs.

We’re testing autonomous cars in my municipal and so far they suck.

If the lines aren’t painted on the side of the road, they can’t drive.

If they meet a road sign they don’t know, they can’t drive. We have several “special” signs In Denmark, but a lot of the times it’s because the sign was too faded/dirty/covered in snow.

Of leaves, branches and some such are on the road, they can’t drive.

If traffic misbehaves, they can’t drive.

If road quality drops, or there is big pools of water on the side of the road, they can’t drive.

Basically they can’t drive.

I can’t tell you what tech we are testing, but we are trying two different manufacturers and they are both “cutting edge” and we’re testing a fleet of 16 cars over 3 years.

Another municipaly managed to get an autonomous bus going in its city center though, so it’s definitely still coming, it’s just really really far away.

Interesting insight. I wrote my concern while living in Denmark as well.

About 10 years ago, I read a paper from an Institute of Transportation in Australia about the use of low power microwave transmitters along the lanes of the highway which can "guide" the intelligent cars along the highways and also the idea of a car mesh that can communicate learning( as in I found a pot hole here that wasn't in our map, be careful!) That sounds a very practical approach of course with the government investment on roads. After all, it is the government's charter to build public infrastructure! The car companies need to work with public policy and not try to make something within their bounds.

Yeah, well, if it's too hard to paint a line on the side of the road, imagine what would happen with maintaining arrays of low power microwave transmitters.

I think they come with different problems and can help add redundancy to data input. I would be scared to sit in a self-driving car that depends only on visibility of lines at the edge of the road. However, if there are enough data points available to the car at all points in time, then it makes the probability of failure low enough.

Imagine a system that munches visual clues + RADAR/LIDAR data + Microwave or RF transmitters embedded in the road + GPS/SATNAV + data from other cars via local mesh network. Now, that I'd think about trusting a little bit. Also, I'd definitely be watching 007 movies while my car drives me :-)

Who is "we"?

"We have several “special” signs In Denmark..."

By and large there is - if you live in any non first world country and have seen actual traffic.

I had a motorcyclist riding on the shoulder of the highway going in the opposite direction as traffic only this Saturday.

I bet i could use a bored child and a drone to stop level 5 cars.

Fully Autonomous vehicles are a fools errand. Volvo has it right.

Because if your self-driving cars need special infrastructure to work you just have very inefficient trains. Autonomous driving is difficult because of rare situations. We already have solutions that work well in good conditions. To figure out what's missing it seems crucial to me to test them in real traffic on normal roads that they have to share with unpredictable humans.

I would love to have a car that became an inefficient train on the highway. I believe tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles would pay a lot of money for one. It isn't the ideal for the future, but it would still be a very desirable product.

I don't think he means constructing new highways for autonomous cars; just making sure the tech works flawlessly with a few existing, high-traffic, morning/evening rush routes. Would save a lot of stress from the daily commute and allow for a gradual ramp up in supported routes.

> Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation?

Go ahead and do it.

FWIW, there are lots of constrained environments with fully autonomous vehicles. Volvo themselves have autonomous trucks operating in mines:

http://www.volvogroup.com/en-en/news/2016/sep/news-2297091.h...

That’s not the same Volvo that the article is about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_Cars vs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo

Well I learned something new today. I had no idea that Volvo cars are now a part of a large Chinese company.

Volvo cars and Volvo trucks are separate companies. Volvo Group sold Volvo Cars to Ford in 1999 and now Volvo cars are owned by Geely.

This approach? Quote from this article:

”The cars would be able to run in fully "unsupervised" autonomous mode on certain, pre-approved and pre-mapped freeways in their respective communities”. Volvo said that drivers would be able to fully disengage from the driving process, instead spending time reading a book or watching a video.

Except that it didn't happen.

> Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation? > You can equip that highway with a boat load of sensors and transmitters to understand these fancy brainy machines.

Because car companies are not in the business of building highways is my guess.

The "starve the beast" strategy has crippled our government. If this were the early post WWII era we'd have major government projects to do this kind of infrastructure and do it well.

I’d say our assumption that the big stuff should be done by the government cripples our thinking and stops us from encouraging more innovative private projects. I’ve lost faith in government in a way that goes beyond candidates and parties - I think the structure is broken. I do not want to wish any more power in to the hands of thieves. That is - Congress and those who buy the congress people.

> those who buy the congress people.

You mean the private-project innovators here, right?

Spot on.

I can't for the life of me understand why people would think that the sponsors/"corruptors" would act better without a government, even when parts of that government is corrupted by the private entities.

Also: if you want to see real corruption, just take a closer look at how regular small businesses operate. Befriend an employee of a grocery store. Or at a company selling lightbulbs, furniture, etc. I guarantee you from personal experience, your moral compass will go haywire from the stories you'll hear.

(Also, you'll unfortunately discover that a subset of customers are total assholes. These days I believe that working in a customer service, or other field that has you interact with a wide variety of people on a daily basis, is the best way to ultimately lose faith in humanity.)

I can confirm this. I used to work at a gas station and my bosses would regularly steal gas and write it off as a "business expense" when going to and from home.

Also, customers were the worst. Either from wanting free stuff because they came in so often to wanting preferential treatment because they were older, the vast majority of customers seem to want everything handed to them on a silver platter.

Nah, my company sells lightbulbs and many other things. Yeah some people are unbelievable, and the fraud... but most people are decent. We work hard to be ethical and I think everyone who works here would agree that we have a working moral compass.

The idea that our government is starving is amusing.

Well in a way it's starving because it's become so greedy that it can't get enough food to feed itself anymore. Most governments create more debt than they can ever manage.

Spend some time around it. Anything discretionary is funded below sustainable levels, even if that costs more.

There’s a reason why most government offices are full of 1970s olive tile and orange cubicles.

Without a major political shift, the US will not be leading the way. This kind of major project seems impossible from both parties currently.

It's not only the US; this disease seems to be affecting all western nations. I feel that we'll have to wait for China to successfully deploy such a project, which will finally provide enough political coordination (read: envy) to convince some western nations to just copy it.

Nah, Singapore will just invest in the infrastructure necessary to make it possible when it’s not good enough for California yet and pass the laws and regulations to make it happen. Probably ban non self-driving cars at the same time.

  Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation?

This seems perfect for an ICO:

Use an ICO to build an autonomous vehicle-only highway stacked with sensors etc. SF to Oakland for instance. Token value increases as more people use the road. Token has inherent value because it’s the only way to access the road.

What advantage does that give over a more traditional toll road approach? I.e. Raise money, built road, charge toll.

Just a more efficient way of raising money and giving liquidity to the investors that believe in the project early-on. Except, unlike bitcoin the coin has inherent value because it is the only way to access the road.

I like this idea too, along with also adding a network so that the cars could all communicate to each other. I have always found horns and turn-signals to be lacking in the amount that can be communicated to other drivers.

The problem with an inter-city highway is that you would have to require every car driving on it to be able to recognize and interact with those sensors. That would be decidedly unfair to those who cannot afford to upgrade their car to go on that road.

So that does bring up an interesting question though, when and where are we going to have roads where only autonomous vehicles are allowed?

I remember seeing this done in the series Tek War, driving locally you drove yourself then entered a limit access highway and the car was able to take over.

the pros for all is that it is limited access, we already have many areas with HOV and Toll lanes that can be adapted, very simple driving conditions, easy to visually mark and electronically mark as well. Heck you could initially finance it by making them all toll lanes until widespread adoption / etc

> initially finance it by making them all toll lanes until widespread adoption / etc

That's what they said about I90 in MA and that was how many decades ago. The government doesn't get rid of revenue sources.

Multiple manufacturers are already selling cars that can self-drive on the highway, to varying degrees.

Isn't that what Tesla does already?

Because self-driving on a highway is a solved problem. It's the edge cases that are hard.

Instead of letting cars drive by themselves, they should first learn to park by themselves. Eventually emitting standardized sound, so that bypassers know that the car is in an autonomous parking mode, so extra care should be taken.

The sampling rate of the sensors should be diminished, maybe halved or even more, in order to make it harder for the car to park.

The car should observe, also with a low sampling rate, how the driver drives the car, make it's own prognostics on how it would drive, and compare them with what the driver chose to do, in order to learn. In that case the driver should be able to indicate the car that a certain action he/she performed, should be forgotten by the car, flagged as an illegal or dangerous maneuver.

When a car can do that well, park and project, then the sample rate should get upped in order to feed the car with more reliable data. If it handles that data without hiccups, and increased reliability, then a next stage can begin.

Lexus has had autoparking for over a decade.

You can even get a Ford Focus that will parallel park by itself. That's a fairly cheap car.

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