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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

Good for avoiding LIDAR speeding tickets. Bad for avoiding self-driving cars.

I'd argue it would probably be a better value to use a $2k lidar jammer than to use a paint job that highlights every spec of dirt on your car!

> Good for avoiding LIDAR speeding tickets.

no subject knowledge, but

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIDAR_traffic_enforcement

lists US detectors as operating outside of the visible spectrum - does this actually block those frequencies?

Lidar on self driving cars have a hard time seeing black cars. Vanta Black is probably even harder to see.

Cops tend to shoot at the front license plate or the head lights so i doubt it would actually help.

If it were me designing a laser speed camera, I'd have it be a pulsed 1500 nm laser with a beam spread big enough to cover a car at 200 yards. You don't need to hit just the license plate to get a good return from it.

>Cops tend to shoot at the front license plate or the head lights

That sounds pretty ambitious. It's difficult enough to hold a laser pointer on a stationary license plate size target 20m away.

The beam spreads a bit and they don't need it all to be reflected back, nor for very long.

Only if you are rolling around without a highly reflective license plate.

A lot of places don't require a front-plate, which should help with that problem.

Where I am, the reflective coating peels off within a few years...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/peeling...

Dunno why the government only gives/negotiated a 5 year warranty on something that people keep much longer than that.

I'm sure the Tesla in space has Black-Hole-Avoidance™️ technology at least.

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