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Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

If we consider remotely controlled vehicles, they seem like the perfect step for self-driving cars: Assuming self-driving on simple conditions(like the highway), while letting people do the complex driving, and maybe people with lower cost of living and salaries, such service may be cheaper than a taxi.

And this could create a large business, doing many miles every day, which would be the perfect means to gradually expand the role of self-driving.

Yet,non of the big companies choose this(and i'm sure they're aware of this). Why ?

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I see 2 reasons. One, the whole point is to fully turn the driver role into a perfectly efficient commodity to reap rewards of zero marginal cost like typical tech companies. Two, remote driving probably involves some life threatening amount of lag.

Companies definitely are implementing remote control but they don't like to publicize it because it runs counter to the "autonomous" narrative.

In America cars have an important cultural role as a symbol of freedom and the idea that your "autonomous" car is centrally monitored and controllable is not a very good selling point.

But yes, all "autonomous" cars will absolutely have remote control functionality of some kind, at least a kill switch.

Why? - Isn't that obvious? A simple two second hickup in the cellular connection could kill everyone in the car.

Wouldn’t remote control cars require a near zero latency network connection at all times in all areas?

Yup! Even with LTE average-case latency of around 100ms (and easily double that for 4G/3G-only areas), worst case latencies are easily measured in _seconds_. According to Google, driver reaction times are measured in the range 0.7..3.0 seconds. Now add to that the bandwidth requirements for at least high quality front/back video and instrumentation.

I doubt anyone is mad enough to think in the general case remotely piloting a vehicle in a safety-critical scenario using these consumer networks is an even remotely sane option

Phantom Auto, mentioned in the article, demoed their RC cars in CES last month, and they were ferrying journalists around using a driver 500 miles away. Latency isn't as much of an issue as one might think, but to maintain network reliability phantom uses 5 different networks simultaneously.

Waymo and Cruise (GM) are both building out call centres with agents that have some sort of remote control over the car.

Both Waymo and GM have emergency stop buttons connected to an air gapped computer that can take the vehicle to a minimum viable risk condition (which basically means pulling over to the side of the road) for security.

It would be computer assisted remote control, similar to how a drone works. The remote operator provides general directions but the computer has direct control over the vehicle systems to implement those directions in response to sensor feedback.

Human reaction time is very slow so to do better than a human definitely does not require zero latency.

this sounds a bit like what Cruise is planning to do. Not remote control, but remote instruction

>“The specially trained operator [then] provides a domain extension to the vehicle to help define safe operating boundaries (e.g., permission to use the opposing traffic lane where cones are demarcating a new path of travel)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...

You need sensors, primarily cameras, on the cars. Some of them are already there, ok.

Then you need to stream that data to a sort of cockpit at a distance, reliably and with minimal delay or lag spikes. Cause you know, otherwise you might kill the occupant(s).

It doesn't seem an easy problem to me, at least not if you want to make a business out of it.

Just for comparison, and maybe someone can correct me on this, aren't military drones more or less just uses for bombing and they're not supposed to run into opposition? I don't think fighters are remote controlled.

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