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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

People have been claiming it's six months away for half a decade. I'll believe it when I see it.

One very real effect of all of this research, though, is that if we did end up with an autonomous-only environment (dedicated lanes?), we wouldn't need special infrastructure - as some have suggested in the past - or a new software protocol to get all the different brands to coordinate. Probably even the ones we have today could just follow the normal rules and be sane drivers and would do perfectly. Human drivers are the only problem we can't solve.

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My town has never fixed a stop sign that’s angled toward the wrong road. Humans just assume it’s for the smaller road. I’m not sure how a self driving car will ever figure it out.

People had similar concerns when motorcars first became available. i.e., my horse can jump over obstacles that motorcars never will, and so on. Eventually humans made roads specifically for motorcars.

That's exactly my point: we'll have self-driving cars when they have their own space. Not before, even given 20 years of progress. Maybe we'll get that dedicated space before then, maybe not. It's a much bigger socioeconomic hurdle and may or may not actually be worth it financially.

Maybe there's a partial solution though: drive your car manually to the next onramp from where on it drives automatically until you arrive in the vicinity of your workplace from where on you'll have to drive manually again for a bit. So sort of like the dedicated bus lanes we already have nowadays. If your car doesn't have autopilot, you're not allowed to use them. If your car has autopilot and detects a car without it in front of it, your car falls back to manual mode...

great question - I assume a set of local knowledge will be added by curators or lawsuits over time... Large tech companies have a lot more pull with government than individual drivers, they might even get that stop sign fixed!

Well, if the roads would be optimized for autonomous cars then any signs on them would be used as a fallback. Autonomous cars would mostly rely on something like road databases, active "stop beacons" or passive "stop markers" (like reading a passive RFID tag)

Sometimes even human drivers can't figure out what gesturing police and paramedics and construction workers want us to do. They will need a way to mass override "follow the normal rules", or owner or mturk takeover.

most of those situations are there because of human drivers in the first place.

Why would there be gesturing police and paramedics on the road if there are no accidents? And construction is easy. You just update the road database that every car uses to drive.

All self driving cars that communicate with each other would dramatically increase the throughput of our roads. In a perfect system, the number of cars that can travel the speed limit is limited only by the number of cars that can fit on a roadway. With humans, we got nowhere near full capacity before a ripple effect causes traffic behind to slow to a crawl. Self driving not only helps the traffic problem, drafting at distances which would be unsafe for humans would also increase efficiency.

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