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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

> * Failure to recognize an obstacle seems to be treated as a no-obstacle condition.

I'm not sure how else this would work. Do you mean the system may see that there's an obstacle, but doesn't know what it is, so it ignores it?

If that's the case, then fixing it is nearly an impossibility. Certainly you wouldn't want to slam the brakes for a plastic bag floating in the wind, but if every obstacle is treated the same, that's what you'll end up doing. But if you try to build a system that can make a decision on every kind of obstacle, it's an extremely exhaustive list.

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We saw a similar behavior in the self driving car that hit the person crossing the road at night in Arizona. It first recognized the obstacle far enough away to safely avoid hitting the person but it effectively couldn't decide what was in front of it or indeed if something was in front of it at all.

Presumably because it spent a large portion of the time in what we would describe in a human being as a state of mild confusion it didn't slow down or react in such instances and it struck the person it had recognized from a substantial distance going 40mph and killed them. Same as this car would have killed its driver.

Regulators shouldn't allow a car on the public roads that might cross the center line and murder a family who didn't get a say in the other drivers choice of vehicle even if said car on average kills fewer people because if we demand better we'll get it. There is too much money to be made for the avenue to be ignored. It seems to me that superior instrumentation could tell the difference between a plastic bag in the wind. It should be required until they can prove they can do it like a human being on vision alone.

> even if said car on average kills fewer people

That is only based on butchered up statistics. You would get very good statistics with a goddamn robot vacuum on a motorway, because it is a relatively uneventful driving environment. Guess where people will take over the wheel? In dangerous situations, basically self-filtering any negatives from the statistics. Very convenient.

For maximum clarity even if a future revision kills less people we shouldn't accept it doing occasionally doing crazy crap that could be fixed by superior instrumentation or engineering.

The goal should be as few casualties as possible NOT better than the incompetent idiots who currently drive cars.

You think as soon as it's safer than the average person they're going to stop improving it?

> Certainly you wouldn't want to slam the brakes for a plastic bag floating in the wind.

Maybe not )slam_ but if I am not confident what's the thing on the road ahead of me, I slow down. At night, when oncoming traffic can blind me, I slow down to give the driver (me) time to react. Otherwise if hitting obstacles is acceptable anyone can create a self driving vehicle.

If you are driving at night, and aren't sure if there might be a dangerous obstacle hidden behind some glare, damn right you should make a gentle brake check (to warn people behind you) and start shoulder checking for exits in case it gets weird. Defensive driving means you have a positive plan to navigate safety. You can't blindly assume your path forward is default-safe. Or you can yolo and risk being part of the 40k dead and countless maimed every year.

> You can't blindly assume your path forward is default-safe. Or you can yolo and risk being part of the 40k dead and countless maimed every year.

Or worse, be the one responsible for killing or maiming others.

He means that the system doesn't doesn't know whether or not there is an obstacle there at all. "I can't see anything" is treated as "go for it!".

The alternative is to require the car to be able to see everything all the time and treat gaps in its view as "might be something there", but doing that in the dark is really only possible with LIDAR at the moment.

>but doing that in the dark is really only possible with LIDAR at the moment.

Which seems a good enough reason that we need to add regulation that these vehicles must have multiple redundant sensors that can operate at any permutation of sunlight/night/rain/snow/fog.

Radar can also see at night, but has poor resolution. Sonar is good at looking through fog but may be unreliable at highway speeds. Lidar really seems like the only viable option here. Maybe even lidar + radar.

I think it's interesting that Elon Musk always says we don't need lidar because it's a visual world. Lidar is a visual sensor. Just an active one.

Because Elon is a scam that wrongly voted for vision-based technology and can’t back out of it without losing money.

We manage to get away with 2 2D sensors, that can actively move around and we have freaking 3 billions of neurons with extensive knowledge of the physical world. We are not giving back only a 3D approximation due to the angle difference between our eyes - we also semantically analyze it, knowing what a car, a tree, the sky, etc are, with their usual dimensions in directions where we don’t even see it.

I wonder if there's cost involved on the decision to not having radar or LIDAR installed on those cars.

Of course there's cost involved, which is why it needs to be regulated.

A human in my country is supposed to drive in such a way as to be able to stop in the distance that they can see road is clear. So it's not that crazy to ask from Tesla that the car slows down if it can't judge to road to be free, that's exactly what we ask from human drivers.

Not all humans manage to do that, and they're liable if they crash into some other car. Loose their insurance and cannot drive anymore if they do it too often.

> Certainly you wouldn't want to slam the brakes for a plastic bag floating in the wind

There's a reason you have radar even on AV's with LiDAR; the plastic bag doesn't absorb much energy

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