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Comment by ProllyInfamous | Hacker News Reader

>autonomous driving in inclement weather

They'll do what we've been so-well-trained-for at self-checkouts: the passenger might be given control of the vehicle in such situations (e.g. loss of network connection).

>within 5 years

As for predicting the future: I think within five years ALL vehicles on public roadways will require a beacon for travel, simply to alert other self-driven vehicles & intersection controllers. This process will be gradual, akin to "insurance discounts" for allowing driving habit monitoring (e.g. without a beacon, traffic lights won't auto-cycle for you).

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> As for predicting the future: I think within five years ALL vehicles on public roadways will require a beacon for travel, simply to alert other self-driven vehicles & intersection controllers. This process will be gradual, akin to "insurance discounts" for allowing driving habit monitoring (e.g. without a beacon, traffic lights won't auto-cycle for you).

I personally think within 5-10 years, forward facing cameras will be mandated on all vehicles, starting with commercial/heavy duty vehicles. Yes, there's some degree of a privacy argument with it all, but the safety and liability boosts dramatically outweigh them.

Assuming that happens, either your suggestion could also happen, or a visual solution to the same thing could also be in play.

> They'll do what we've been so-well-trained-for at self-checkouts: the passenger might be given control of the vehicle in such situations (e.g. loss of network connection).

Who handles liability if you get into an accident? When does it take control of the vehicle away? The most likely scenario is the car pulls over safely and asks you to get out or wait.

There are _many_ people who cannot or will not driver. They won't just take over control of a vehicle they're unfamiliar with. Teenagers, the elderly, people without a driver's license, people injured, ...

Not going to happen, too many risks. If anything, the future is autonomous vehicles without a steering wheel. I am expecting Waymo to invest into that next, after they finish expanding into several states and prove their growth and monetization strategy.

This five year prediction seems odd to me. Autonomous vehicles have to navigate in a world that was designed for human driven vehicles. If you were to design an autonomous transportation system in the middle of New Mexico from scratch it would almost certainly look nothing like what we have today which is comprised primarily of visual cues designed to be highly noticeable to human eyesight. That’s to say nothing of cars themselves being designed around the assumption of a human driver.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s very difficult to imagine that if AVs take over let’s say over the next 30 years that the end result will still be running on the same infrastructure we rely on today and that if we will still be a society where most people drive most of the time that AVs will really be all that transformative in the first place since they would be filling a sizeable but still relatively small use case- taking a cab around a major city. I can’t tell whether it’s the amazement of seeing a driverless vehicle or the actual utility of it that generates the excitement

In the United States? That discounts how resistive to change and fragmented the various municipalities that own all the roadways are. The various states can't even mandate a shared speed limit, they are not going to all agree to (and pay for) retrofitting all of their traffic lights to a single standard.

What's the value of a beacon vs vision+Lidar for autonomous vehicles?

Yeah, a beacon isn't that useful unless you want to require that all pedestrians wear them as well. The only self-driving-car-related serious injuries/deaths I can remember are Uber hitting a pedestrian and Cruise running over a pedestrian.

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