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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there must be some way to detect and avoid objects that occlude space the car intends to occupy but that also don't touch the ground inside that footprint.

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Maybe a lidar would've prevented these types of issues.

But how often is a car at risk of not clearing something in a parking lot? I don’t think they should be adding cost (manufacturing complexity, material/part cost) to specifically handle driving around a runway.

there are no rules about what kind of objects can exist in a parking lot. if they can't account for hanging obstructions, which are actually quite frequent everywhere, they probably should err on the side of "less likely to kill people" and just not offer it.

Hitting a partially lowered garage door seems the most likely.

Not a Tesla, just a plain old fuckup on my part - I backed into a fan box mounted about 3’ off the ground in a parking garage. Was too reliant on cameras and the backup radar- didn’t look and boom - nice big crease in my rear panel. So yes this sort of thing is not some sort of crazy edge case only encountered on airport tarmacs.

Other vehicles can be pretty far off the ground sometimes, and while I don't know if summon can avoid those, autopilot sure doesn't.

I feel like if you need to think about a case like this for its own sake then there may be some more fundamental problem with your approach.

I bet it'd work great on Mars, though. Not a whole lot of airplanes there, now or in the foreseeable future.

More flying vehicles on Mars than people.

Signs, banners, forklifts, scaffolding. Lots of things that humans would know not to hit, and automated cars should know not to hit.

Tree branches.

Probably not outside spaces, but here such thing as ventilation shafts in parts of underground parking infra are not exactly rare.

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