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Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

This could be a pay-to-ride-for-thrill startup idea. What a ride!

Until someone spills a bit of oil on the pavement and it drifts straight into a nearby wall because oily pavement is "out of domain" for its deep learning systems.

If you notice in the video there are no nearby hard walls, it's a giant open parking lot and the course is set up by soft pieces like plastic traffic cones. I'm sure a course could be made with appropriate margins for safety. Even so, in the ride world there are accidents but that doesn't stop people from riding.

Not to mention the fact that this system is monitoring the traction of all 4 wheels constantly and would detect the slip in milliseconds, transferring power to other wheels. It would be fine.

They probably already have a bunch of lubricant on that lot in order to reduce wear on the tires.

> They probably already have a bunch of lubricant on that lot in order to reduce wear on the tires.

That's a real skid pad at a real road course[1] with real rules and regulations[2], not some expendable engineering testbed greased up to save tires.

[1] https://www.thunderhill.com/renting/skid-pad

[2] https://www.thunderhill.com/s/Skidpad-Event-Guidelines-2018-...

On top of that, there's the deadman's switch on the console that stops the car if the driver releases it. Would definitely pay to ride in something like this.

It's an e-stop button (probably NFPA 79 Cat 0 implementation), not dead man's switch. This timestamp[1] clearly depicts an air gap between fingers and button while maneuvering.

[1] https://youtu.be/3x3SqeSdrAE?t=74

Hah you're right. That makes more sense, the other angles looked like he was holding it down the entire time. Thanks :D

it’s the skid pd at thunderhill. there are definitely walls, they are just off camera.

Yeap. That's where I sent my roommate from college to learn performance driving; a Korean dude with a CS degree from an UC turned California highway patrol (CHP) officer. (How many cops has anyone ever run into understood Big-O notation?)

Disclaimer: I learned a thing or a thing and half sliding around the back roads of the Sacramento levee system with water hazards on both sides. }:]

i did a track day up there years ago who was chp and was trying to explain you had to take trigonometry to me for taking the radar speed of a vehicle at an angle...

Vehicle speed within traffic lane, or relative speed along a vector to/through the radar device - which vector might be at a significant angle to the traffic lane?

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