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Comment by FunnyBadger | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice. The problem is the same as self-driving cars: they work but ONLY in certain very constrained and limited application scenarios that limit their adoption.

Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.

Airships will never do well in thunderstorms or other similar severe weather.

Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.

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> Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.

> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas

Another failing is to assume your experience is the norm and failing to identify significant market niches.

I'm not sure if you meaning to, but you comment hints that you think self driving cars won't succeed because they cannot drive well in blizzards. I will tell you now that a significant portion of the worlds population has never experienced a blizzard, let alone attempted to drive in one.

If you were just using blizzards as one example of many for the reasons automated cars will fail to catch on, my apologies. That said, I think it's a great go to market strategy to identify a smaller niche to start with, and slowly expand as your product utility increases to service broader markets.

> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.

I vouched for this comment based on this paragraph. I have watched this play out in press releases over and over: an innovation is presented as the next huge revolution in X, where it is actually a great improvement only in section 3.5.227 of X, and overextending it to try to revolutionize the entire field kills the innovation.

> Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.

to be more specific, human visible spectrum cameras looking for white lane markers will never do well in snow country.

For certain situations, different technologies are useful.

Drivers without polarized glasses won't perform optimally in snow or rain.

You include technologies like lidar, infrared, and radar and self driving can "see" a lot more in the snow and rain at a much longer distance than 20/20 vision through a safety windshield, with wipers.

"Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly marked roads, aren't sharing with human drivers, she drive at a "safe" speed will do just fine.

> "Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly marked roads, aren't sharing with human drivers, she drive at a "safe" speed will do just fine.

Then you've just reinvented personal rapid transit, which has failed in the past because in general building totally separate rights of way only really works out cost-wise with really space-efficient modes like trains.

Don't forget infrastructure updates and vehicle to vehicle communications!

There's a corollary to your last paragraph:

Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups succeed, too!

Every innovator I've talked to, when I asked them, "if you knew ahead of time all the problems with your original idea, would you have gone through the trouble?", all answer pretty much the same way: The only reason they saw it through was that at any point, they thought "That's gotta be the worst part. Now how hard can the rest of it really be?"

One fine example of persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges paying off is ASML development of EUV [1] [2] [3].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/asml-extreme-ultraviolet-lithogr...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/inside-asml-the-company-adva...

[3] https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories

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