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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

It's not so simple - you can't simply follow the highway as you have done hundreds of thousands of times, because if the paint stripes have changed since Monday, then these might also be new (or temporary) stripes painted by a road construction crew overnight and you now must follow the new stripes.

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Now imagine all people have Tesla, and someone makes a prank on the middle of a bridge, they paint a line that makes all traffic plunge down, imagine now that they are so confident they removed the driver seat, you have all those passengers looking on the windows on how their cars are driving them to their deaths and there is nothing they can do.

So should this cars follow some line blindly?

I think that this tech should stil be called a drive assist, and assist the driver, Tesla rushed it in enabling the autopilot thing, I am sure if you compare the stats with similar cars(expensive,safe and with drive assist) the stats will be against autopilot, I do not understand why they had to rush the autopilot and not keep it as a driver assist, to warn you and prevent some crashes)though it seems it can't protect from frontal collisions with static objects)

You could say the same for trains though - they follow a track in a similar sense to Tesla's autopilot. Someone could perform a "prank" by putting something on the track in order to derail a train. How often do you see that happen? Painting a line on the road is obviously easier to do, and could also happen by accident, but I think the chances of any danger are extremely low.

Hopefully when we start removing the driver from cars with autopilot, they will be following some sort of under-road NFC-like guidance system rather than painted lines.

There’s a theory out there that a penny on a rail can derail a train. You wouldn’t think people would do such a thing, with such disastrous consequences... but they do. Thousands of times a year.

Actually derailing a train takes serious effort; but people still try constantly. Derailing a Tesla seems somewhat easier, so I guess we’ll see.

On youtube there are old black and white films produced to show the result of rail sabatouge. Even with a foot cut from the track the train did not derail. Quite impressive. I used to flatten coins as a kid all the time by leaving them on the tracks.

It is much harder/expensive to place a big truck on heavy object on a train track then painting a line. The trains also have a driver that will try to stop the train so reduce the impact.

This self driving cars can be tricked by bad conditions or some optical illusions, like you have a t-shirt with some pattern on it and the Tesla car will coma and hit you

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