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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.

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The maps Google uses for their self-driving cars, as I understand it, require constant maintenance. Also just the amount of data is huge. If this weren't the case, surely they would have driven in many other places by now?

I would actually love for someone who works at Google to chime in here. It'd be great to find out their system is more robust than I think it is.

I think they could do it every week, compared to the value of completely self driving cars. Especially if they get say UPS to add sensors to their trucks. The post office does something similar every single day.

Every self-driving car on the road is automatically remapping everything. Any discrepancies, like a new pothole or a disappearing tree, can be reported to the mothership for resolution and pushing out to all the other cars in the area.

Considering how often GPS gets confused here in DC, I'm amazed we are suggesting relying on it to drive the car.

They are using it for navigation not lane following. You can supplement GPS with dead reckoning for tunnels etc, but high quality maps let's a car be aware of landmarks and then use them to figure out where in the world they are. EX: With enough precision there is plenty of information in the picture to figure out where it's located. http://socialforest.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Forest-Gr...

Considering how often human drivers get confused here in DC, I'm amazed that we rely on them to drive cars.

There were 4 million miles of road in the USA in 2013. Sure you could drive them - but drive them in a special sensor-equipped vehicle? In a fleet of such vehicles? In a reasonable time? Its a big job, and $2.50 a mile seems pretty low.

2.50$ is more than double what trucking costs per mile that should cover every lane mile at normal speeds. Now building 100 cars with this equipment is not going to be free, but trucks also burn far more fuel. Anyway, you doing this is hard, for a multi billion dollar per quarter company it's pocket change.

Add in hiring, benefits, vehicle transport and repair, sanitizing the data, hiring managers to manage the folks that do all that... any large project is unexpectedly expensive.

Still point taken that its just millions.

"benefits"

This is Uber we're talking about.

The drivers of the fancy LIDAR vehicles are direct hires:

https://www.uber.com/careers/list/20169/

> "Sure you could drive them - but drive them in a special sensor-equipped vehicle?"

Street view already did it... Not 100% coverage to be sure, but pretty darned close.

Any idea what that cost them?

How did you get to this number? I'm familiar with a few "map the world" efforts, and this seems an order of magnitude too small. I'd love to hear about a breakthrough.

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