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Comment by cleansy | Hacker News Reader

I hope they do not start using remote controlled cars on highways.

A car going at 60mph (~100kmh) travels at 26m/second. 4G has a ping of ~70ms* on top of the time from the cell tower to the operator's computer.

However, I found quite a variance in pings when browsing on the phone, anywhere from 200-300ms at times (maybe due to changing the tower).

So round trip might be at 600ms. Then we account for variance in bandwidth, human reaction time etc. All in all we might be looking at a delay of at least 1s. Guesstimating, of course. That's still 26m of a 2 ton vehicle going at 100kmh without oversight.

* According to https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online...

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If you need to have enough people that someone can intervene "instantly" then there's not likely to be much of a saving anyway.

Instead imagine a system that is "good enough" that at it's most risk averse configuration it will drive itself in normal conditions, but occasionally it will seem to slow down for now good reason, or even stop, while it waits for a human to intervene because its not sure if its correctly reading the environment ahead.

It would need to be good enough to be able to work well enough of the time to be able to reliably come to a safe stop, but it would mean you'd be able to have one person monitor many vehicles.

This is the supermarket self-service checkout model. Nobody likes them, because most of the time it doesn't work and then you have to stand around waiting for someone to intervene.

Interesting. Here in Norway I have nothing but good experience with self-checkout. It just works. Only thing is if I buy alcohol I have to wait for someone to click that I am over 18. It even has less queue, and queues are the worst!

In the Netherlands they've closed all but one regular check out line, and instead of paying cashiers they pay people to tell you to go to the automatic one. The reliability of the self check out (how often it craps itself and waits for assistance) really depends on the supermarket chain you're at though. At some it never breaks, at some it breaks almost every time (so hardly anyone uses it there).

I use one of these self checkout kiosks every day and I’ve had a problem maybe only one or two times. They’re a huge time saver.

Personally I have few problems with the self-checkout system, but I'm inevitably behind a knot of people who do have problems.

I found them a bit unusual, but they work quiet well.

I now tend to prefer to go to the self service, because it's usually faster than the normal checkout.

The exception is when I know I will trigger an age check.

But to the car comparison: If that happens enough that people won't use them, then they're not good enough unless it drives the cost down enough that people decides it's worth the wait.

I've found it highly depends on the store and how recently the machines were installed. My Walmart that just got renovated with self-checkout lines has snappy machines and a very intelligent weight system (often allows you to take items off the scale without supervisor intervention), while a Kroger that has had the machines for at least 5 years can be super slow and may take ~3 seconds for the scale to detect a new item.

They work well where I live and many people use them.

I'm Curious how you are arriving at the 600ms since ping is already round trip.

Latency could be significantly reduced with 5G, but would still be a problem if the operators are in other countries.

But, I think the bigger problem is coverage and reliability. Relying on mobile networks for this type of life-or-death functionality strikes me as extremely dangerous, and that would remain true even if we increased reliability by a factor of three.

quick internet search says 5g is mainly a range of 1K, usa is 9.834 square km, yes this doesn't cover areas that have no roads but lets call it 1/4, that's still around 2.2M towers you'd have to add to make this feasible. Plus all the support infra. But hey at least we'll have power everywhere so we can put super chargers at every one of these towers!

I don't think realtime control will be much of a thing; keep in mind that companies don't actually want to pay people, that's why they're investing so heavily in automation and robots. At best it's going to be humans that will direct, tell a vehicle how to handle a situation it doesn't know yet. But all of the basics - driving, steering, avoiding obstacles - should and will be automated.

This is why connected cars are hoping for a quick spread of 5G. A fully-fledged 5G network would have transmitters placed on every other lamp post with a stable connection to the backbone. With such a system, the rtt should come down to sub-50ms for high priority traffic if properly set up. The obvious downside is the amount of transmitters and fiber you need to set up for this, but the smart vehicle people are seemingly quite confident in their ability to convince operators to install such a network.

A 200ms round-trip would still be comparable to some drivers on the highways right now, but it's certainly suboptimal.

There's no such thing as a stable connection to the backbone. That's a myth. A single construction crew digging in the wrong spot can take out a whole bundle of fibers. Now your 5G network has a huge dead zone.

So have the other side of the highway independently?

The point of this would be for two situations:

- awkward roads with cones, tricky parking etc

- high speed collision avoidance where the car transfers legal liability to an offshore contractor immediately before impact

I know that's a bit tongue in cheek there but what a fascinating idea. Programmatically transferring liability to different locations or entities that are better able to diffuse the consequences.

Imagine a HFT bidding market like adwords. Guilt as a service. Wonderfully dystopian. Paging Mr. Doctorow....

That almost sounds like what happens when you look at a text message while driving. Your eyes are off the road for only a second. We already know the dangers of texting while driving.

I agree this would a bad idea.

But, I there are scenarios where remote operation is safe. Maneuvering in a tight alley. Any scenarios that don't require speed and where a failure scenario is bricking an already stationary vehicle. It could also be identifying obstacles (car thinks steam venting from the sewer is a solid object) or approving rule-breaking (allowed to place a wheel on the sidewalk.

When Shuri was basically live-driving cars in South Korea from her home base in Wakanda in Black Panther, I thought, "wow, those Wakandans must really be advanced! They got the latency on a transcontinental wireless link down to nothing!"

Makes you wonder how Wakanda flew under the radar while simultaneously setting up advanced tech in other parts of the world. I assume they would have launched satellites and laid pipe and what not. But then it's similar to Pym particles or Tony figuring out time travel in a night.

Quantum entanglement maybe - that's certainly the line id have gone for.

Cars can go at 30mph. Problem solved.

Thus creating the problem of slowing down transportation which will have economic and social effects on society.

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