Hacker News Reader

Comment by kart23 | Hacker News Reader

Huh? Are you actively advocating for everyone's car to send location data, and have the ability to be remotely controlled? Terrible idea. The difference between cars and scooters is that you buy a car that you OWN, and you rent a scooter for 10 minutes.

View on HN

No, remote control is not required. It would probably be implemented as every car having machine vision to recognise road signs, or a built-in sat nav with the map data including speed limits. Both of which are already available on production cars - the new "feature" would be linking those to a speed limiter.

Of course, whether this would be popular with voters or car companies is another matter...

My 2018 Honda regularly detects the wrong speed limit (45 miles per hour limit, but it detects 70) and will fail to detect any speed limit. It also seems like it can't detect Florida's interstate speed limit signs at all, since they have both the maximum and minimum speed limit on the same sign.

This, on a software discussion board. So many horrible errors in such a small package! I sort of have ~3 different map+nav systems, and they won't even agree with each other what the situation is, never mind the Real World (tm). Speed limits specifically: they are in agreement about 80% of the time.

Machine vision, triple meh. Even with strictly standardized set of easily recognizable shapes, this is useful for post facto mapping ( https://blog.mapillary.com/tutorials/2017/08/21/mapping-traf... ), but nowhere near realtime without false negatives.

Machine vision is okay for ex post detection (e.g. https://blog.mapillary.com/tutorials/2017/08/21/mapping-traf... ), but realtime decision making? Nope. Never mind detecting people (RIP EH), even detecting a standardized set of basic shapes is harder in practice than in theory.

As for built in sat nav - I have three (3). Their notion of current max speed matches about 80% of the time...and that doesn't always match the actual max speed in meatspace.

State provided speed limits by city block can be stored in a chip the size of a lentil, and easily updated over the air. No need to broadcast anyone's location.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com