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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

The other day I was joking with friends about how I'd love to have a car with a deployable surveillance drone to help with parking and so if I'm stuck in traffic I could have my drone scout ahead and see what's up.

Turns out BYD have one of those already! https://www.theverge.com/news/622963/byd-dji-vehicle-mounted...

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I could see a future integrated feature among cars brands doing this with their cameras. Teslas in your area on the road are already monitoring everything, then flag available street parking spots so autopilot cars looking for parking are dispatched to the nearest one. No need for drones if you already have a sufficiently large fleet of cars on the road.

Why wouldn't we just wire up all the parking spaces with sensors and then have a city wide parking app just for this? That seems far more efficient and safer over having a fleet of parking scout drones randomly flying throughout the city.

Because the car owner has an incentive to spend a couple thousand extra for a scout drone, but cities have very little incentive to spend many millions on a major infrastructure project that achieves the same. Despite that being cheaper than everyone getting a drone port in their car

It feels intuitive that cities would have the same incentive to maximize use of parking spots as they do having them in the first place. Cities want commerce to flow.

But let’s simplify it down a bit further: pretend all parking spots are for-profit. These lots would want to communicate vacancy to maximize use. Much like how motels are motivated to tell you when they have vacancy without you having to stop to find out.

The correct answer seems to be: because our economic model requires that new junk be constantly invented in order that we have something to buy. Alas.

Dear god, the street level noise pollution of flying taxies, but democratized so everyone can have it! :/

Makes me happy for once about the restrictive drone policies where I live.

Make the drone carry a couple of orange cones (or just look like an orange cone itself) and you can even have it save the spot it finds until you get there.

Get a deposit down on the Xpeng AeroHT! https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/xpeng-land-aircr...

Basically the Larry David periscope car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQRm1cg8T8I

His idea was like a back up camera, but front-facing and elevated (retractable).

> The other day I was joking with friends about how I'd love to have a car with a deployable surveillance drone to help with parking and so if I'm stuck in traffic I could have my drone scout ahead and see what's up.

The Yutong electric buses that Ember use around where I live have something like this but I guess it just uses the cameras mounted around the bus. When the driver closes the door, the central screen on the dashboard does a kind "fake drone flyaround" of the bus, even showing reasonably realistic depictions of vehicles on the road around it.

A lot of modern SUVs have "360° backup camera" features which work similarly - the car uses footage from cameras mounted around the vehicle to synthesize a top-down view. It's great for backing out of tight parking spaces, and I can only imagine it's even more useful on a bus.

This is both really cool and also fucking insanity - the lengths we’ll go just to avoid building better train service.

To be clear, China has no issues improving train service at the same time.

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