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Comment by sap9433 | Hacker News Reader

If self-driving tech has become so advanced, I wonder why Waymo is not delivering anything? I wonder why is Tesla taking forever to deliver self-driving, why Uber discontinued its self-driving program, Why Apple ain't serious about Apple car yet?

Does this demo hide something that we should know?

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Because this has not much to do with what Waymo or Tesla are doing. What they've developed here is a control system, a way to make the car move in a certain way, follow a certain course. The problem that autonomous driving needs to solve is to have a car that can reliably perceive and understand what's happening around it, navigate any complex situation involving pedestrians, intersections, road work, parking, etc. The drifting DeLorean doesn't have to worry about any of those things, it only has to work in an empty parking lot. There might not even be safety measures to prevent it from hitting people. They use precise GPS to track the car's position (where it is on the course), so it's possible the car doesn't have cameras or LIDAR to perceive its surroundings.

I think in this demo they simply paint a path for the car to follow. The cones etc are there just to help us see whether it's following the path well. If there was a cone in the middle of the path, it would've run right over it.

Yes, this. Not trying to take anything away from this, but this car is essentially "running a program." I would love for someone to come on here from the program and publicly repudiate what I'm about to say. I bet they ran that "dance" hundreds of times, no cones or hay or obstacles, got it to the point where it was precise and repeatable enough to then set up the cones and barriers (I mean, we have robots that place parts to within 0.001" or better repeatably).

What would impress me (seriously). I go out the L.A. Colliseum parking lot, set up cones / a track that the car can definitely do (based on radiuses & turns in this video), the car "studies" the track (I don't care if a drone looks at it & takes measurements), and then the car calculates and executes a perfect path through the course the first time without hitting anything.

Again, not trying to crap on this, I'm just saying that anyone who's worked in controls, automation, engine control, etc. (I've done all these & more) isn't utterly wow'ed by this. Kudos, but we didn't just put a man on Mars.

Adaptive cruise control with stop and go can understand surrounding and knows when to stop and go. With that if I add paint path as this demo then self driving should work. But in reality it ain't. So There is something else which seems like too hard to solve problem with self driving . I want to know what is that

A couple traffic cones out in the street could direct this thing onto the sidewalk, where it would drift over pedestrians or slam into a brick wall without hesitation. There's a big gap between a car that can drive on a closed course and one that can navigate the real world for millions of miles without killing anyone

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