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Comment by antonioevans | Hacker News Reader

I live in NYC and the best use-case for this is taxis. Taxi do not take the same route twice. Traffic is a nightmare during different seasonal, temporal, or accident events. So like a Garmin device it should be able to "remap" the trip.

In our lifetimes this will be possible but maybe not in next 1-3 years. (I hope I am wrong)

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Google has covered large parts of the (populated) world with Street View. Pictures [1] indicate that the cars were equipped with laser sensors. So Google probably has enough data to have the cars drive new routes.

But thats not the point. Most of peoples daily driving routine is the same routes over and over, commuting to and from work.

Going even further: I'd imagine that you could train the car on a specific route by driving it manually. Such information could be crowdsourced, much as Google already does with its traffic data on Maps.

[1]: http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/streetviewca.jp...

I believed that as well, but now I'm not so sure. The density of data gathered by the Velodyne on the self driving cars is far higher than the SICK lasers in that picture. Also, the scene may have changed in the interim.

Yes, but we're still talking cars that measure metres by metres, and streets with lots of extra room. As you mention, the scene may have changed - so trying to preplan the whole route to the inch will only hurt you. What is needed is basic data above GPS, and I think the Street View lasers can be that.

I'm sorry I was unclear - I meant that the scene could have changed since the Street View team was last through.

The Google Maps data is surprisingly bad - we saw several presentations about the Car, and they highlighted how awful it really is.

I don't think that they're preplanning. I think that they're analyzing the scene for differences to simplify and speed calculation. Having good a priori data is really powerful.

The car already doesn't need to be on planned routes, it remaps the trip as needed. That was done back during the DARPA Challenges.

They're just limiting the car here for the media.

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