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Comment by kondrich | Hacker News Reader

If you don't mind me hijacking this, you mentioned this in the article:

Nevertheless, we found an incredible amount of industry and investor resistance to our teleop-dependent approach.

Why was this the case? I can't see the harm in using teleop.

TBH - In the early days the "cool AV people" seemed to act as if teleop was an admission of bad engineering (your team isn't good enough to perfect L5). If everyone else is right on the cusp, and you're not trying, you must be some sort of loser.

There are still a number of folks who think that teleop can never be safe - surprisingly sophisticated people hold onto that dogma. We wrote a whitepaper about it for investors, and I'll share that at some point as I open up more and more of the Starsky vault.

Those sophisticated people were correct, at least for now (never say never). Teleoperation can work in some limited specific circumstances. But latency, reliability, and coverage of current wireless data networks are insufficient to allow for widespread teleoperation on public roads.

Lidars break. Radars fail. Cameras run into issues. Drive by wire systems malfunction. Computers vibrate to death.

All parts of an autonomous system break. Safety engineering is measuring those breakages, and designing a system that is safe when it inevitably breaks.

If you're the operator, you can choose to only drive on routes that should have sufficient connectivity. If your remote driver is only issuing high level commands (i.e. not responsible for safety) latency starts to stop mattering so much.

The problem here is the availability bias - you've seen your phone fail so you know that telecom links can fail. As a layperson you might not think about how the rest of the system suffers from the same limitations - but they do. You engineer around them.

How do you engineer around a backhoe operator cutting through a backbone fiber and knocking out the cell towers for an area?

The situation becomes clearer if you take a look at the traffic today with a human operator in each car. Also in this model, engineering and human failures happen. Engines break, tires get punctured, brakes fail, and humans make errors. We still accept the deaths and injuries caused by car traffic, and don't prohibit cars.

So it is more than sufficient if you can show that AVs - on average - cause less harm than human-operated vehicles.

To your specific question: when the AV loses connection, it would do the same as a human driver when a tire is punctured: turn on warning lights, slow down, and stop at the roadside. Like in other car failure situations, that might cause an accident in some cases. However, that is fine, as long as it is rare enough.

(disclaimer: I'm not working in AV tech, I don't know if current AV technology handles this case as imagined)

That doesn't make the situation any clearer. Coping with mechanical failures isn't the primary concern. The issue is how to handle edge cases where the AV software is unable to decide on any course of action.

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