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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

I think that's a bit overly alarmist, there could certainly be competition in this space. _But_ this is an absolutely despicable move on Uber's part that would slow the adoption of self-driving vehicles to prop up their own (at that point failing) business model.

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"there could certainly be competition in this space"

I was assuming governments forcing all fleets to share data. Probably via some "safety / think of the children / OMG terrorists" bill.

I think for safety you might get benefit out of cars communicating intent to neighbors. Pervasive tracking and reporting would be unnecessary - but that is the logic, of course various governments could require all sorts of stuff in the name of anything. So yea, good point.

Beyond uses of local comms, N Non-local coordination could improve long-range routing, and even support automated allocation of infrastructure (like the way some roads—especially expensive-to-build-and-maintain ones like tunnels—reconfigure lanes for different directions of travel at different times of day to match traffic patterns, but dynamically and in more places.)

I think non-local comms will end up going through more pedestrian modes.

Road usage configuration is something that external systems will already force self-driving cars to obey, a lot of bridges are 3 or 5 lanes with a middle that switches directions, or have some partitioned third lane group that switches similarly. Broadcasting that information over the web/whatever may help car co-ordination, especially it may help with route planning and traffic analysis, but these systems should be rather strongly isolated from the car itself and be offered from a source open to the general public.

There is a lot of interesting stuff here, especially when you get into traffic balancing, but none of it would need to pass through a car relay network or anything of the sort - there may be economy in doing so, but that sort of a propriety (or open yay) caching of state wouldn't impact or impose requirements on car-to-car communications.

Hi, it's called V2V in the automotive space. The US Dept. of Transportation has a thing called RITA (https://www.itscosts.its.dot.gov/ITS/benecost.nsf/SummID/SC2...).

As an aside, Federal Transportation guys don't bother invoking terrorism, they just go with "yeah these are two ton things moving around and we are the rule makers."

If there are no data sharing then these people will come up with an idea to necessary monopoly.

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