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Comment by 3chelon | Hacker News Reader

- Moving backwards to a safe and large enough spot when the route is too narrow to fit self-driving car and oncoming huge lorry (and there is no line marking the limit between road and ravine).

Surely you're missing the point? With V2V comms there will never be a need to go backwards. All vehicle trajectories become 100% predictable (mechanical failure aside). The problem of massive trucks on narrow country roads (which we have a lot of in the UK) is solved by simple forward planning. Hell, the trucks could get even bigger, so long as there are passing places.

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Autonomous vehicles can't rely upon V2V comms. There are far too many ways for such comms to degrade.

This kind of problem has long been solved in the mobile comms world by strong ECC codes and robust modems and channel coding algorithms. We routinely send autonomous vehicles into interplanetary space so I can't see that linking vehicles on a road is going to be a major blocker. Especially if they're on a redundant mesh network, or a smart highway.

Except the cases where you're likely to meet a large vehicle on a one-way road are most likely to be in extreme rural situations, where cell-phone coverage is far from guaranteed.

And if you expect you can force non-connected cars to not exist on rural roads sometime this century, you are delusional.

Delusional is a strong word.

Exactly 100 years ago they outlawed horse-drawn carriages from the streets of New York City (https://www.nytimes.com/store/horse-cars-last-days-1917-nson...). Based on that, I cannot imagine what the roads will look like at the end of this century, but is it inconceivable that manually-operated cars will look as outdated as horses?

Yeah, I think we can ensure that V2V receivers receive what transmitters transmit. What worries me is that the transmitters will lie. How difficult would it be for someone with a high-power transmitter — or many high-power transmitters — to drown out legitimate signals and present a false picture to receivers?

Could an anti-social person cause a bunch of cars to crash for kicks? Could someone with an axe to grind cause a bunch of cars to crash in order to further his goals?

Not a lot of cross traffic in interplanetary space though... Maybe the odd supernova.

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