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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Uhm, it seems like the auto industry is still letting its imagination run away with self driving cars.

I don't see how a patent like this can be granted if we still generally don't have working self-driving cars. Even Tesla is getting forced to admit that "Full Self Driving" isn't really full self driving.

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Patents don't need to be safe. You can patent a transportation device that works by firing a human out of a cannon, or a self driving car that simply runs over pedestrians, or even just a method of killing someone.

"Systems and methods for autonomous motor vehicle operation":

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EzmEZ9oXEAQOiY1?format=jpg&name=...

> You can patent a transportation device that works by firing a human out of a cannon, or a self driving car that simply runs over pedestrians, or even just a method of killing someone.

Can I patent a self driving car that runs over pedestrians so that I can sue any company whose self driving car does it that hasn't paid me a license fee?

No, Tesla is prior art

I am pretty sure that no one at the patent office cares if your invention works or not.

Not quite true. They will stop you from patenting a perpetual motion machine (typically by saying that you have not provided enough detail for someone to replicate your work).

Except they can only do that if a patent clerk (who is usually not a physicist or engineer) can TELL it's a perpetual motion machine. After millions and millions of patents, there are bound to be a bunch that should not have been granted, even if those patent clerks are 99.9% good at their job

Patent examiners (the modern term for patent clerks) have at least a bachelors degree in a technical field relevant to the subject they review. That might be physics, engineer, chemistry, or something else. Examiners are assigned to specific art unit (e.g. an examiner with a degree in chemistry might be assigned to art unit 1710 and spend their entire career examining patents for chemicals involved in "Coating, Etching, Cleaning, and Single Crystal Growth").

I'm sure some things do get through on occasion, but examiners are most certainly subject matter experts.

This is news to me! I'm very glad to hear this. Renews a bit of faith in the patent process.

Patent examiners are being moved to a system where they are "automatically" assigned applications to review that may or may not have anything more than superficial in common. I've got a parent that's a patent examiner and they have been complaining loudly about the move because they often don't know much about what they're reviewing anymore.

That's too bad, I had not heard about this.

That's not really true. It has to at least be plausible. Usually.

One exception that comes to mind is a couple of patents some physicist working for the US Navy created that probably aren't real technology. Anti-gravity devices and the like. Why they admitted those? No idea, but possibly this was done as part of some sort of hearkening back to the cold-war-era strategy of 'waste the enemies resources on a goose chase' kind of thing.

Very interesting, TIL!

They do care -- but there is no requirement that you prove it works (such as by providing a working example), so there's lots of room for error and fraud there.

Maybe this is a good thing. A lot of stupid patents will all expire by the time they could actually be used.

I rode halfway across San Francisco in a self-driving car last week. Seemed to work pretty well.

The videos of self driving Tesla are available on Youtube. Those can be quite convincing.

Nikola also had videos of their electric trucks "driving" on YouTube. These were convincing enough for people to invest millions. Not a high standard.

Quite convincing after they edited out all the dangerous mistakes.

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