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Comment by fghh45sdfhr3 | Hacker News Reader

The lack of a turn signal made me chuckle.

That is such a software development moment :) Probably too easy to implement, that's why they forgot it.

But the fact that the car often needs the human to intervene is a bit more interesting. Why would a human better know if there is enough space for two cars to pass each other in a narrow street?

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If I was google I'd be erring on the side of extreme caution. The first public accident that happens with one of these cars is going to get plastered over every media outlet in the world.

That they had the car in "super safe driving" mode for a media event seems entirely reasonable, even if the car probably could've navigated the narrow street with 95% confidence. The obvious path of attack is targeting the safety of an automated driver. Lose voter confidence and the whole thing comes crumbling down to be delayed another decade of legislation.

That's my guess, anyway.

The first public accident that happens with one of these cars is going to get plastered over every media outlet in the world.

There's already been an accident, the car hit another car from behind. But supposedly this was in manual mode.

Source? I thought the car was hit by someone else.

edit: Found it, http://www.slashgear.com/googles-robot-car-accident-blamed-o....

You were correct. I had thought they were rear ended by a human.

Turn signals are a small subset of the "signal knowledge and intent" lights/outputs that a self-driving car might want to use to communicate with the humans and, some day, other self-driving cars around. The team might be working in the direction of a more general implementation of such things rather than hooking up a temporary system for just two sets of dumb on-or-off lights.

Probably depends on the accuracy of positioning and real time 3d modeling of the environment. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't down to the centimeter level yet.

The system likely has a bubble of safety around it to allow for sudden changes close to the car. This makes the "car" far larger than it would actually be.

The lack of turn signals makes me highly suspicious. There is more to this omission than meets the eye, I am quite sure of it. As you say, adding turn signals in should be straightforward. The computer presumably has its turns planned far enough in advance. So why doesn't it?

I am actually even less inclined to trust these so-called "self"-driving cars now. Not like I even trust the human-driven variety all that much...

If the turn signals are not on the CAN bus it could be annoying to implement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

They've made a self-driving car. The merely annoying parts are going to be the fun bits! Everything else is going to be difficult, if not bordering-on-impossible. I find it very difficult to believe that there is any technical barrier to computer-operated indicators.

Wouldn't it be sufficient to wire in a computer controlled switch in parallel to the mechanical switch that the human uses to control the turn signals?

Or just add a new set of turn signals independent of the built-in ones.

The lack of "support" for turn signals is probably a way to ensure that a human is always present and aware during operation.

It's a really clever, simple solution. They've turned the absence of a feature into a feature.

I don't know why the Google engineer would lie about it, though.

Or it could just be that the turn signals aren't wired in to the computer system. On my vehicle, the wiring for the turn signals is pretty basic, there is no computer involved.

Sure, but wiring something that simple up to their system should be very easy as well.

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