Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

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Once upon a time I was a young punk with a fairly nice car. I had about 6 years of driving under my belt, and less than half of it was with a manual transmission.

I was up in Palo Alto during a light rainstorm, and we were on our lunch break. I was driving two coworkers in my 1988 Acura, one of whom was an absolute freak who drove his sports car super-aggressively.

I was at an intersection in the left turn lane, waiting for an opening. Traffic was fairly heavy and the roads were slick. I saw a possible opening and took it, but there was a car in oncoming traffic faster than I had anticipated. Having begun my maneuver, I counterintuitively held my foot to the accelerator, rather than stomping the brake, and my Integra obediently sped through the turn without incident.

Both of my coworkers commended my presence of mind and I was relieved that my driving skills were validated. Our company was involved in selling software components, and I have no idea what a "self-driving" car would've done in that situation, but as I had discovered, staying the course and stomping the gas pedal was counterintuitive in that place and time, but ultimately correct and safe.

Hopefully, a self-driving car would have waited for a safe opening to make the turn.

Bad weather & bad visibility, most of the self driving solutions to date just hand back control to a human driver. In other words, hand back control at the last possible second in the most difficult driving to a human who has been in an otherwise relaxed and lest alert state. Winning!

It's like if spell check only worked on words shorter than 6 letters.

This is wrong, only the shittiest self driving in name only systems have that behavior. Any real attempts at it (i.e. not Tesla or comma) do not expect or require a human takeover immediately. For example, Cruise and waymo don't even have humans to take over, MB has a 10 second warning (and actually the human doesn't even need to takeover at that point, the system will slowly bring the car to a stop).

Well as we see Cruise's solution is to stop dead in the middle of the street until a service team comes out to resolve. If there was a human driver they would be handing back control.

Probably pretty fun if you happen to be a passenger when this happens.

I’m sure there has to be a No True Scotsman fallacy regarding self-driving cars.

No true self-driving car would have attempted the turn.

A self driving car wouldn't be in that situation in the first place.

That is a bad assumption to make. It absolutely has to be able to handle scenarios like that since it will need to be able to navigate low visibility corners and very unpredictable drivers. There are some videos on Youtube of a Tesla navigating tight hilly suburbs and it is surprisingly aggressive given the low visibility and low margins for error.

I wonder if low-visibility areas can be mapped and self-driving cars could route around those areas to begin with.

Low visibility is contextual and temporal. You cannot map what an intersection looks like until you get there and it is too late.

If you were to blacklist every intersection that could possibly be low visibility given weather, season, time of day and traffic conditions.. the car is going to be taking a lot of long routes around many many blacklisted intersections.

Probably 50% of residential driveways could be classified this way, and yet the vast majority of people make it out of their driveway the vast majority of mornings.

Yup. There's a great video of someone driving in .. I want to say the smokey mountains, talking about how well FSD is doing in his Tesla. Casually driving, chatting with his wife in the passenger seat.

Until it.. out of nowhere, crosses the double yellow lines around a turn and is barreling straight towards a cliff. 3 if not 4 of the cars wheels crossed the double yellow lines before the driver was able to intervene and basically save their lives. Had their been oncoming traffic, there may not have been a driver alive to post the video after. Another 1-2 seconds and they would have been been over the cliff.

Exactly, it would have crashed at the previous intersection already. /s

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