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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

We're going to get driverless cars one way or another. Even if the problems are much more intractable than we first gave them credit for people are too clever.

Take driving in the snow, for instance. It might be completely impossible to do it safely for the next twenty years by having a computer manage the drive path, but designs might create the ability for cars to form mini-trains where the lead car is driven by a human and the cars fall in line together. Then you could still get in a self-driving car, it could still get you from Toronto to Ottawa. It could even get you right to your front door! They'd just have to pay some train drivers (conductors?) when the weather is too harsh for to put it in full auto mode.

We're going to get there. The benefits are too obvious and we can work around the persistent problems.

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>We're going to get driverless cars one way or another.

Sure we will, no doubt about that.

The question is when?

In 10 to 20 years from now level 4 sounds reasonable, in 2 to 5 years from now it sounds not, notwithstanding the (daily) announces about this or that new autonomous driving system or related "breakthrough".

Obvious question: why just not take the train? In your example I’d have to depend on other strangers for my private travel, one of the most important things that made me purchase my first car in my 30s, I don’t want that.

I'd rather depend just on there being a handful of other people who want to go where I want to go than on there being an active railroad as well.

At least in the US, transit is unfortunately quite bad on average, and that doesn't look to change anytime soon in most areas.

I actually think the European model is superior (dense towns with trains between), but we have what we have.

Snow seems like one of the easier problems, honestly. Pretty much all the "technical" problems seem pretty straightforward. Waymo already posted an article where they talked about how they can filter falling snow out of their LIDAR input, for example.

It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around. Those don't always have easily generalizable answers.

> It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around.

For these cases, the car could have a manual mode (?)

A huge benefit was people without a license being able to use the car alone.

Ok, how about remote-controls :) Like where you have a control-center with trained drivers who take over in case of problem-situations.

Construction zones also occur in areas without good cellular data coverage.

How can it be both hard to handle a construction zone that you need to break the law to get around and also easy to handle snow piles that you need to break the law to get around?

So construction signs now need a QR code on them to provide guidance. Companies that work on the road like that are presumably regulated somehow, right?

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