Hacker News Reader

Comment by tintor | Hacker News Reader

Such detailed database of fine grained road geometry gets stale very quickly, due to road maintenance and road construction. In US highway lanes are shifted sideways frequently.

View on HN

But are they not continuously updating the road database with their fleet?

For common routes, yes. For getting to John's house, where the path there sometimes floods, no.

So the first waymo to get to this less used road to john’s will not have the data rather than every waymo that travels down a new highway, that then becomes a problem if it rains.

One car with an issue of first coincides with rain on a less used road?

Well, it's closer to: any car with stale data and sufficient water depth is a financial and PR disaster. These cars are not cheap, and a tiktok of someone being driven into the water is even more expensive!

As soon as the car descends below what was mapped it should be able to know there is a discrepency.

Satellite monitoring is also available for detecting extensive road work which they could use to invalidate and send out something to remap.

Sure, if you drive around slow enough so you can stop in time. Lets say coefficient of friction is around 0.5. That means you can drive around town at a brisk 12mph, if you need to stop within 10 feet (with 0ms reaction time).

People usually drive slow too through flooded sections. They don't have the advantage of any descent of the car diverging from HD maps, or any water level visually below HD map surface serving as an immediate warning.

> drive slow too through flooded section

This first requires knowing you're in a flooded section. That's the gap here, is it not? My point is that you can't use descent AS a "flooded zone" detection because then your speed, by the harsh mistress of psychics, is very limited everywhere you go, flooded or not, because stopping distance has to be kept very short since just a few feet of overshoot, when your flood detection triggers, is the difference between ruined engine or not.

Maybe that's their fix, if a flat mirrored surface is detected, slow way down, because perceiving depth of muddy water before getting in it is hard.

I'm assuming there is no issue detecting water over the road, only depth below it that has changed since the HD map was made.

And, we're full circle at this point.

They had an issue detecting them here. But my understanding was people were saying beyond seeing the flooded section there is a fundamental problem that they can never solve that if there is new construction under the flooded section lowering the level of the road they can never deal with that. But as long as it is not a sudden dip or sinkhole I think HD mapping can still help with that since they can monitor the cars altitude as it traverses it and detect divergence from what is mapped early.

Earthquake or sinkhole?

I traveled to Austin 3 weeks ago and there were entire highways not on Google Maps.

Apparently they were built in just a few months.

There's some places where Apple still thinks I'm driving through a cornfield even though the development is a few years old, now.

I suppose I could inform them somehow, but it's not worth the bother.

I don't know how they don't notice thousands of users driving through these "cornfields" at 60mph every day, though. You'd have thought that'd raise some alert?

I’ve literally watched my car (only car around) trigger the yellow heavy traffic warning (because I was driving slow to look for something).

Yet thousands of cars doing 60 mph through a cornfield and over a river doesn’t trigger a “maybe a freeway was built here?”

Advertising slightly heavier traffic isn't the worst thing in the world. Telling hundreds of motorists "There's a navigable road here" when there isn't, is a bigger problem, for both Apple's PR team, and the motorists in question

Verifying indepenantly is probably the reasonable response

Seems like that would be easy to do with some current satellite imagery?

Waze was pretty public about how they used it, with automatic flags and route updates with no/little human intervention. I assume everyone else is doing the same, since it's so obvious. I'm sure they know, but if it was a cornfield a couple years before, there's a good chance it's lower on the priority list, in a "how many people will this impact" sense.

I’m still amazed at the people who claim that Apple Maps is as good as Google Maps nowadays. If you live anywhere where there’s lots of development, it’s definitely not. It’s also terrible when businesses or places of interest move. My wife’s business moved a half mile down the road and a single message to google maps got it moved in a couple days. Apple Maps took about a year with multiple requests and even multiple messages to their special “escalation” email address.

Agree that Google does a much better job of pulling in latest road and business info, even in the US, even in California, even in Cupertino.

But if you’re not going to some brand new addeess on a road that didn’t exist six months ago, Apple maps are just so much more readable and usable. Sucks thst the fata isn’t as good, but damn does it show what a difference colors, fonts, and tasteful selection of what to show and what to hide nakes,

I routinely have to drop into Google maps (international travel, and some newly developed areas) and it always feels like time travel to a 90’s website. Except for the whole “data is current” thing.

Pretty sure they already rely on such a database for positioning, so they already have that problem.

But yes, this wouldn't work for other self-driving systems that don't rely on HD maps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com