We can't even bloody keep the yellow markings on the road visible, and "paint" is a technology we've had for thousands of years. Where in dog's name is the money for installing and maintaining all that smart infrastructure going to come from?
They'd have to know they were compromised first. I think that is a big 'if', and creation of a centralized repository of backdoor keys makes for tempting targets.
I mean, every technical system can be shutdown and will shutdown sometimes, isn't that a inherent weakness of such a system?
if that beacon does not respond disable automation for that part?
Just like bullying: bullying itself is annoying, but what I found annoying is the inconsistency of it. At some point, my bullies were friendly, at another point once more bullying. If it were permanently on-going and not sneaky, they'd be found out by e.g. teachers long ago already.
On the other hand, wouldn't a ddos be visible in the logs?
Logs should be checked centrally anyway, so a 30 second flood of messages should be visible.
But in the end, you are right that it will be hard to do this the right way.
This is why we have security. And honestly modern cars are so computerized already I think your argument applies to them as much as autonomous cars.
Yes, we have security. Yes, cars can (probably) already be hacked, perhaps even en-mass rather than in targeted ways.
But: one the big advantages of machine learning in cars is that every car can learn from the experiences of every other car. That makes them monocultures. Monocultures are fragile. You find the weakness of one, you find the weakness of all.
I want the benefits of the former without the risks of the latter. I don’t know if that’s even possible.
That's where competition comes in. Just like AMD vs. Intel or OSX vs. Windows. If you find a weakness in one, you don't necessarily find a weakness in the other.
Hence, finding a weakness in Tesla doesn't mean it will work against Waymo or Uber.
That's a sunken cost fallacy. Only because other things are hackable as well doesn't mean there is no danger.
> And honestly modern cars are so computerized already I think your argument applies to them as much as autonomous cars.
I've said that in my comment above as well, but it was in an edit before you replied so I guess you didn't refresh before submitting the comment.
It's really not a sunken cost fallacy. It's good evidence that the "think of the terrorists" angle is overblown. There are plenty of other problems with self-driving cars, but not that one.
When did the whole OnStar botnet start? I think it's earlier than 2010.
as of 2017 it is no longer legal to sell a car with no backup camera, and 99.9% of cars implement that with a digitized head unit that, wait for it, connects to the internet.
thus, very new-manufacture cars in 2020 do not connect to the internet, bluetooth, sometimes wifi, etc.
Cars are already getting hacked. The whole point of the post is to highlight how car manufacturers have no concern or competence for security, is will be like the boeing scandal but much worse.
At worst, youre a troll. Cars are no where being hacked at the scale or magnitude that affected the numbers involved in the Boeing fumble. No where near. Not even remotely close.
Autopilot doesn't need to be 2x or 10x better than a human driver -- it needs to be 100x or 1,000x better, or nobody (sane) should touch it.
The problem is not that autopilot is superior than your own driving in the vast majority of the cases! The problem is the 1 in a million times when it makes a trivial mistake that virtually no human would, and kills you instantly. Like driving under an obvious semi-trailer, and shearing your torso off.
An understandable example: You have two games of chance, both with identical 5/6 chance of winning.
One game, you'll play immediately (and as often as possible). The other, you would never play, not even once.
How is that possible? Both have identical 5/6 chances of winning? But, one is "ergotic", meaning that the odds hold over the long term as often as you play, and one is "non-ergotic", meaning that as soon as you lose, you're finished.
One is a single dice roll.
The other is Russian Roulette.
Self-driving cars are Russian Roulette. One "mistake" on the part of the system, and you're dead. The fact that the "stats" prove that it is safer, overall, don't change the fact: you and your family are dead.
Non-ergotic stats are not comparable to ergotic (group) stats.
Given a population of a million all would prefer a 1 in a million chance of death under a semi to a 1 in 10k chance of being smeared in a more average fashion.
Your argument is the same one used against seat belts with people advocating a strictly inferior survival strategy to prevent a rare misadventure.
Let's say those driver-hours would have resulted in 3 deaths of others (in vehicles or pedestrians) but your autodrive results in 1 different death (which wouldn't have occurred with the human drivers).
Your stats are no comfort at all to the loved ones of your victim.
It's like the Trolley Problem but the humans are unidentifiable.
I would always pick the most valuable to me side and pull the switch or leave it be to bring about the better end result. Given the availability of self driving vehicles that reduce mortality choosing to drive oneself and kill more people is an unethical choice that will be as little comfort to the 3 victims as the one.
I would always pick the most valuable to me side
Real life is complicated.
Why did you include the fact that they were killers fleeing police? Are, you supposing that I will somehow infer this in the 2 seconds I have to react or you just positing completele nonsense to muddy the waters with emotions?
Pedanticaly one would virtually never choose to hit pedestrians instead of cars because pedestrians don't have crumple zones or air bags.
The big question is should cars prioritize the owners health or the greater good and If the latter what is the greater good.
I don't think people will turn on a product that might decide to kill them to save a school bus so it's simplified to minimizing chance of fatalities while protecting the owner absolutely even if this risks others.
The only thing that matters is the overall odds there is no inherent mathematical difference between the 2 scenarios.
There is no difference to prefer more likely death in common scenario to less likely death in a stupider scenario.
If you believe otherwise you ought to explicate with numbers.
The 1000x better demand is more a stupid human illusion of control thing like fearing flying more than a road trip of equal distance.
> In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.64 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.
It's pretty unsurprising that at least augmenting human attention and input with machine attention and input reduces accidents. I agree that the cross-over point in time for full automation being safer than human drivers is a total unknown though.
It seems to me that knowing the autopilot isn't 100% perfect is a good reason to not rely on it in more dangerous or complicated scenarios (construction, roads with poor markings, school areas).
I haven't followed too closely here though, just curious if that is a reasonable hypothesis.
There were some stats that if you compare model S deaths to other luxury cars in the same price range they are about 3x higher for the S. Death rates in luxury cars are much lower than the average vehicle.
I think self driving tech will cut roads deaths eventually but it needs more work.
So even if it's just on highways, Autopilot is still out-performing humans by 2-3x, if not more.
On average, ignoring better luxury car rates mentioned elsewhere, and that I have no clue if this is representative. I would be surprised if broader data was so much worse that it would reverse the relationship though.
[1] https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2019/06/09/tesla-aut...
The pool of "all vehicles" traveling on the road, comprises very old cars and pickup/trucks/vans, and all kind of drivers, including teens (or however inexperienced drivers) and older people that may be more likely to have slower response times or some other condition, like (say) poorer vision.
Besides the fact that Tesla's are at the most a few years old and being on the pricy end (which should imply that they are properly maintained), they are "sport cars" (in the sense that they have very good handling and breaking) and they are driven (I believe) by a certain subset of drivers, relatively young but with no or very few inexperienced drivers.
So even if it's not as good as the healthy-and-wealthy bracket that might be safer, if it's better than the average then it'd be potentially significantly better than the non-healthy-and-wealthy. In that light this seems like a massive win.
And - to be fair - think "Sabrina" (the movie with Audrey Hepburn), really rich people traditionally had professional drivers (chauffers) which maybe had an even lower rate of accidents.
There was a competing study done against cars with similar price/age/safety equipment that didn't have the auto pilot option and Tesla caused considerably more accidents.
When you are comparing numbers. You compare like-to-like. Tesla specifically prohibits engaging Autopilot in difficult situations and encourages during long boring straight drives.
First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.
In that figure of 479.000 miles commercial traffic is also included. Commercial traffic makes up around 60% of all accidents. We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc. Another big category that needs to be excluded from the general figure is motor cycles, that generous source of donor organs, to make it comparable. Passenger vehicles in general are more safe than the overal figure and thus closer to Tesla's figure.
Second point is that Teslas are hardly part of the second hand or n-hand market yet. It is even a question if Tesla will tracks that data in those markets. In those markets you will see more young people as drivers (something to do with income). They are responsible for a majority of the traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles (something to do with tendencies to discount the future and to overestimate their own capabilities).
Third point is that the really good figure comes from auto pilot, but that only works in places and under conditions that are already far less accident prone like highways under normal weather conditions.
The good news from the figures is that enabling the safety measures make Tesla drivers better drivers: From 1.6 miles to 2.1 miles roughly a 25% increase in miles traveled before an accident. That would lead us in the direction of mandating level-2 automation in all new cars for more safety rather than trying to push for level-5 for some brands.
You're doing that the wrong way, aren't you?
If 479k is total miles across an average of two cars, then the single-car equivalent, the number you'd compare to the Tesla numbers, is 240k.
It doesn't really make sense to adjust the Tesla numbers to do the comparison, but if you did you'd be doubling them, not halving them.
> We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc.
Neither of those reasons makes them incomparable.
- Only Telsa: distance_travelled / num_accidents = v t / 1
- Two cars involved, but counted as one accident : distance_travelled / num_accidents = 2 v t / 1Eventually being better than humans seems like it's obviously going to happen. Not driving drunk, not getting distracted, and not sleeping at the wheel alone are advantages enough that I would be amazed if the balance doesn't eventually fall in favor of the self-driving car. Self-driving cars don't even have to be particularly good drivers to be better than the average human, given how much the human average is dragged down by recklessness.
Tell that to the jury when your self driving car runs into the side of school bus full of kids (which will happen given any reasonable adoption).
Self driving cars would have to be held to an almost insanely high standard to be “winnable lawsuit” proof.
A car manufacturer can already be sued for things that go wrong, in a car, but the world keeps spinning.
It's far too soon to claim we've hit peak performance.
We live on a planet around a midlife star. The amount of resources available to us over the next 10,000 years is staggering.
It's easy to say they are better, when there are so few of them. (Compared to the amount of human driven cars)
DELTA DASH NOVEMBER OSCAR NOVEMBER OSCAR
Aren't sanity checks basically common sense? I would suspect they already play a major role in making autonomous driving a reality.
We could also imagine a world in which more subtle attacks could reliably and fairly quickly cause injury/fatality accidents, which might appeal to terrorists.
That is a privacy nightmare without regulation on scrubbing extraneous information, done before upload: for example blocking out of pedestrian data; not just faces but clothing and gait, and probably also any data captured through windows.
It would be ideal to have a limited view of just the roads and signage, and have a retention plan that gradually keeps less and less historical data.
For accident review more of the data might be required, so vehicles should keep the last 24 hours of raw data.
Having a central database capable of being scraped and process to determine where any person is at any given time is a non-starter. Care needs to be taken to scrub all extraneous data from the fleet's network.
Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the supermarket.
I don't have link for the story. But idea behind this is not that one should not cheat on his wife because he will get caught. To be really a human and be honest, one must not have an urge to cheat on his wife(husband) because he loves her. If someone has dirty thoughts and only thing that is preventing a person from fulfilling that is that "Tesla will know"...
People should be able to cheat, they also should be caught, but being good only because you are constantly watched?
This argument looks like "because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say".
You have a choice to not use the autonomous car, to not use the apple watch, to choose a privacy-conscious internet carrier.
The problem is self-driving vehicles implemented with fleet data that vacuums up everything will spy on everyone, not just the driver.
They need to be implemented with on-board redaction.
Otherwise there is no choice for anyone, the companies or the ruling party can do facial or gait recognition on pedestrians and other drivers, and scrape license plates of of all parked and driving cars from the data stored in the cloud.
With just Lidar I imagine this is less of a problem, but at least pedestrians in that case will still need to be redacted for gait recognition.
My first comment wasn't about your regard to personal privacy, it was with regards to everyone's. One person's data is mostly worthless; everyone's is priceless.
Edit: Health data is also end-to-end encrypted (accessible by your devices only, Apple servers don't have keys, if you forget your passcode you lose the data); https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202303
If there are only autonomous cars that track your position how are you going to make trade off?
Right now I don't have Facebook but no one in my family or friends is contacting me. Why? Because I don't have Facebook. This is my trade off. Real trade off would be if I could select different provider and still be in contact with my family and friends. Right now it is monopoly degrading my quality of life. If I would have different options that I could for example pay for but they would not use my data as tracking that would be different.
If there would be way to pick your autonomous car provider by price/privacy it can be trade off.
If it is one option that you can use or not use it is not about trade off. I am not native English speaker but trade off for me is when you have multiple options to choose. No that you have all or nothing....
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/12/14/fitbit-jane-s...
As a pedestrian being observed by AVs, your [valid] choice has a significant impact on my ability to choose privacy over convenience.
That sounds like it's taken right out of an Orwell story.
I'm also active in trying to wrestle more control of the data being collected on me.
And I am not willing to give up my privacy for your convenience and not happy with those who'd willingly give up theirs in a way that sweeps mine up with it.
Any number of parties could lawfully and unobtrusively start slurping up all sorts of data which is in a kind of plain view, and nobody would really be the wiser.
That's a terrible design.
The obvious way is that the sign/beacon itself pings a server every 5 minutes, and when that stops you know it's broken.
I don't want to disappoint, but the future will have no privacy whatsoever.
Continued encroachments on privacy and personal autonomy may indeed deteriorate them, even cripple our ability to protect those rights, but simply worrying about that doesn't mean I must go gentle into that good night.
If you can be photographed legally in a public place, what's going to protect your privacy in public?
Im also curious how situations will be handled where there are two speed signs: the regular posted speed and a temporary speed for construction. How does it know which to obey.
I personally don’t think it’s possible to make automated cars work well without a ton of infrastructure support.
In a wired world the distance to everything is zero. If you can find an 'in', you can carry out this attack in any place in the world, from the comfort of your nerd cave or barracks.
People do destroy yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now. I've known more than one person with an appropriated road or safety sign as a home decoration.
FWIW I am a near-term self-driving car skeptic and have been for a long time. I just think that these are not the kind of issues that really pose a major obstacle whereas drunk people wandering across the street are.
It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person would and make correct on-the-fly decisions about traffic signs when snow obscures the sign and a little bit of ice and muck obscures its cameras ever-so-slightly, making some of the sensors go half-berserk.
Then it should do the same a person is required to do in that scenario - slow down and exhibit caution. Otherwise you will get a car that confidently drives forward because it "knows" a sign is there. If the sensors can't cope with that then the car shouldn't be on the road at all, period.
>>Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use?
Because the same local authorities don't even have the budget, time or competency to fix the most minor issues with our roads. Potholes go unfixed for weeks, there's no budget for cleaning, for salting, for repair of missing signs, lamp posts or simply for review whether existing signage is actually appropriate after changes they make. But yet the same authorities should be tasked with real time updates to some database of signage? I'm sorry, but I'm just trying to be realistic here - we can write legislation to require authorities to do something, but in real world that's just not going to happen reliably enough to trust it. I know I wouldn't.
Really depends on where you are. I agree I can't imagine it in the USA, but in the Netherlands, where every square metre is documented, attributed and zoned (yes including the leftover grassy triangle bits between highway ramps, everything). We could totally do that if necessary.
I don't know if documenting all the traffic signs would be the right solution. If anything I would imagine this database to include way more virtual traffic signs than are actually there. Not for the legal traffic rules, but virtual ones that would be nice if they existed and everybody in the flock held to them.
Point is that worldwide there is a huge variety in the quality of roads, the quality of signage, driving culture and attitude, and the general predictability of the environment. Some places will lend themselves more naturally to the first forms self-driving cars will take than other places that are more "free form".
The only way I can see that working is if there is some kind of geographic location of various stops and the like, but at that point, you need consistent connectivity to obtain that kind of data, right? May work in larger towns and cities, but what about rural areas?
Fortunately there was almost no traffic.
Signs get vandalized or stolen all the time here in Uruguay. Mostly vandalized.
We won't lose that capacity.
The nails aren't structural, only a signal.
Multiple nails mean the signal is highly redundant, depending on density.
Regular maintenance could detect weakening signal (rusting nails) and result in new nails being inserted.
Iron oxide remains (weakly) magnetic.
Treatments (galvanised nails, coated, etc.) could slow corrosion.
The overhead lane markers in Hokkaido work well, but would be an expensive retrofit elsewhere (not the poles themselves, but the foundations)
FWIW though, it probably is possible to use this sort of technology for buses and shuttles. You can’t fix markings on ALL the roads, but you can make sure the markings are good enough on main arterials to have a dedicated bus lane.
For sure. And I feel like they're going about it backwards by defaulting to maintaining norms of private property and leasing things starting with private/personally owned property and developing ways to lease it to for communal use.
They'd probably have a more viable business model if they had started with communal property and charged rent or usage fees for maintenance instead. Jitney cabs or dollar vans have been around forever, and their big challenge was figuring out how to do dispatch and routing in a way that didn't give people intolerably long wait times.
From one of my previous comments on a different post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638171
- - - -
Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the roads will benefit everybody You seem to have a rose-tinted view of the world we live in.
Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal
conditions?
Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice?
Have you ever lived in places that are not
perfectly flat? or lived in places that
are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?
Did you have sporting gear / work gear that
you had to lug? Did you know some people have
to fetch their own gear to work
Did you have to take calls during transit?
Did you know its common practice for employees
to call into meetings during their commute and/or
help assist operations via conference calls?
Have you had to shop for more than a baguette
or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome
that gets for even a family of three?
Do you have the slightest clue how much casual
violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]
However doing away with cars or vehicular traffic is just pollyannaish madness.
[1]
Teen robbed at gunpoint at Fruitvale, BART officer says writing a report is a 'waste of resources'
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-repo...
- - - -
edit: formatting
No they won’t. This is just willful self-delusion on the part of transit haters.
Most of your concerns are either just plain petty (like, just wear headphones if you don’t like hearing other people) or lacking in perspective (cars kill way more people than whatever safety concerns on a transit system you want to gussy up).
In peacetime, self-driving cars are a nice-to-have that can save many billions of driver hours and a few traffic fatalities. In wartime, they're literally a matter of life or death. The side that can handle all of their logistics without exposing their precious humans to enemy fire has a huge advantage over the one whose supply lanes can get picked off one by one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
There were of course other civilian concerns as well, but Eisenhower's arguments at the time of the plan primarily cited the importance of Germany's autobahn system during WW2 as a justification.
If we're going to beacon up a road, they easily make the most sense.
The interstate system already has working self-driving, even without any beacons. Inherently-safe roads like interstate freeways are already almost solved, and you can already buy a Chevrolet today that can self-drive the interstate system 99% of the time.
It's all the dangerous roads that need the help. The ones with bicyclists and pedestrians and parked cars and uncontrolled access and such.
I am extremely skeptical that beacons, sitting out in the heat, and the sun, and the cold, and the rain, and exposed to whatever we use to maintain roads at that juncture, will not be "a wear item".
I do not think people have a solid grasp of how many millions of miles of road would need to be technified for self-driving cars to be widely viable.
Most likely, it's going to be a niche thing, tightly restricted to certain places that can afford to build and maintain the infrastructure.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=road+reflectors&t=ffab&ia=images&i...
And you say "private contactors will save the day", please, stop drinking the Ayn Rand Cool-aid.
Curbs, signage, lights, poles, drainage infrastructure, lower lifts of asphalt and granular material, ...are all non-wear items. This doesn't mean they never need to be repaired, but rather that they tend to get replaced after unintentional damage. Off-surface beacons (what the original comment suggested) would be in this category.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_syst...
Trains aren't exactly new technology, yet here we are with them still not functioning properly during what was actually a pretty routine snow storm. It doesn't leave me very optimistic for self driving cars, which will be significantly more compliced technology.
Sources
Footage of conditions in the city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek8dN9AoGbo
Hydro woes and 150km/h winds in the region: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-al...
Transit status snapshot: https://www.vancourier.com/news/metro-vancouver-snow-results...
School closures, Blizzard warning: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-al...
Interviews about the ice buildup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWgx99k585s
Finally, a bit of fun; how Canadians deal with weather: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/video-shows-people-skiing-snowboarding...
Self-driving implies intelligence, and fully-automated trains simply follow rote rules, and apply the emergency brakes if something unexpected happens. Not intelligent.
Put another way, self-driving has unbounded complexity, while a fixed number of vehicles on a protected, grade-separated railway is not very complex at all.
Self driving trains will require more coordination, with central dispatch to tell them when/where to go. That leaves the intelligence on the train much more basic.
There are hard limitations on sensing onboard the train. Tracks that bend around hills, etc. I have some exposure to wireless communication for trains, and one of the limitations is that you can often not get a line of site even from one end of the train to another.
Since railroad tracks rarely get up and go walkabout, you can instrument them (conduction, video, lidar/radar) to the limits of your preferences and/or budget. Information can be relayed to both central control and individual trainsets.
They have signals to tell them “stop”, they have speed limits posted, they have route knowledge. All detectable by computers, even without changes. Fast trains have in cab signalling in any case.
They have no decision about where to go (signal box sets the points/switch track), they have no decision on when to go (signal goes green)
The only bit which may need human input is the “ok to depart” notification when all the doors are clear at a station.
Autonomous driving is a marginal improvement on an already deployed technology.
Cars are already equipped with suites of sensors giving them far more complete information than any human can process. Cars can already react faster and hold lanes with more precision than humans can.
What’s lacking is general intelligence. The ability to creatively respond to unexpected situations, even when it’s something you’ve never seen before.
That does not jive with your numbers (1 disengage per trip, roughly 10 miles), unless you're saying that Waymo's numbers are juiced by few city miles?
Call me back when waymo can drive in all seasons in random places anywhere in the US.
Doesn't have to solve all problems, only sufficiently large problems.
0 visibility in snow happens often.
What I think is that self-driving cars may also force us to confront ways in which real-world driving environments are inadequate, so that we can make them more adequate. For example, there are intersections where stop signs (or other signs) are present but not visible. Humans know they have to stop there, so they stop anyway. Self-driving cars could systematically find and report these locations, and might get the city to do something about them.
The full description of the system can be read at https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/advanced_snowp...
Alaska uses GPS for their precision plowing - https://www.truckinginfo.com/329914/how-alaska-dot-uses-gps-... . Note that to get the 2" precision you need high quality GPS receivers.
> The trucks have two GPS receivers mounted atop the cab. These receivers cost about $10,000 each, Shankwitz says. "That's probably why this hasn't been deployed in many other areas; it's just too expensive and most applications do not require that level of accuracy."
> The two-centimeter accuracy actually comes from a third receiver -- a high-precision, stationary ground-based receiver perched atop a microwave communications tower in nearby Valdez. It's accurate to within millimeters and it acts as reference receiver for the plow-mounted systems.
I don't see this being standard on self driving cars.
That said, ground penetrating radar is being looked at and appears to be a lower price point. https://phys.org/news/2016-06-vehicles-high-precision-advers...
However, I'd argue the lanekeeping and "where am I" problems this stuff solves is dwarfed by the common sense and logical reasoning & recognition problems.
But you are right, road maintenance is never cheap.
It would probably be easier to have a swarm like national airtraffic AI, all cars flying, all cargo in blimps than to maintain a complex ground network of "smart roads"
All the road and infrastructure taxes being funneled by the politicians to, other areas as they see fit to placate their constituencies or finance their pet projects.
Same with out-of-control grossly over-budget projects that dont deliver the bang for the buck.
If we - as an electorate - insisted on superior paint or "marking technology" for surface roads, we shall have them in one form or the other.
That obviously has downsides too, but unreliable road markings would be a pretty silly blocker to ever having a self-driving car. that's a solveable short-term problem.
Having atom-resolution maps doesn't help a bit it you don't know where on it you are.
My 2006 car was fine driving underground for 10 mins with no gps signal, but got confused when I drove it onto a train and it moved 30 miles without the wheels turning. Then after a few minutes got a gps signal again and fixed itself. Had an option to manually set the position and heading too.
Cars today don't have any defense against people dropping bricks or pouring paint off an overpass, but somehow the system still works.
On the contrary, over the years I've read on many occasions how drivers and passengers have been seriously injured or killed by the morons who get a kick out of dropping objects from an overpass.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/wilson/mt-juliet...
One bricked GPS system can attack an entire country. Or planet.
Driverless lorries that go from one service station to another will be the first fully autonomous vehicles I think.
Another possibility is Automaker X partnering with comms / infrastructure Company Y (e.g., Comcast). Put another way, if they can get to the point this is the dealbreaker then it's easy compared to what it took to get here.
"We can't even keep the bloody yellow markings on the road visible"
Here's a bloody example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGWhjojt5dw
So although there's nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence, it reads awkwardly. A native British English speaker would be more likely to use your suggestion. It's just one of those barely documented curiosities like adjective order (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...).
I live in a wealthy jurisdiction, and the road markings here largely are not what I'd consider to be "perfectly visible". I'd guess that currently, probably 3/4 of painted lane markings have one or more of the following issues: a) obscured by snow/ice, b) faded c) road under construction and lane markings don't correspond to current lanes.
Where the car would freak out and stop, you don't even notice anything is missing.
Between vastly reducing car traffic and separating it from pedestrians the problem of fully self driving is greatly simplified (probably not eliminated).