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Comment by eggsome | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> For example, Level 4 full autonomous driving will require 6G.

My understanding of Level 4 is that it's basically full autonomy, but with geo-fencing. Surely that can be achieved with GPS and there is no need for any 2 way comms? (this is assuming that all compute is "on board").

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I feel like driving a car from "the cloud" is just asking for trouble, surely no one's planning on doing that right? Maybe a-sync updates like where the geofence should be, or new software would be fine but not something realtime (which I assume is where they're leading with this 6G business).

Could you imagine the crash reports? "Sorry you plowed into the pack of school children, RDS was failing over at the time."

After the Bambu malfunction, I'm imagining a thousand self driving cars backing through the garage door in the middle of the night and driving to a location creating massive traffic jams for everyone to wake up to

No, the main reason geofencing exists on modern autonomous cars is to assure connectivity. A ton of work is offloaded. Not immediate driving decisions, but classification problems and similar are offloaded. Object detection is local, route decisions and object classification is offloaded. Further, there's fairly limited cache of "landmarks", the route significantly relies on things like street signs and other roadside identifiable objects to identify it's position; without a database of those it doesn't know it's current road position very well. Lane markings turn out to be too ambiguous for these AI cars to use. It has a bunch of those cached, but street signs go stale very quickly, and two-way communication is used to keep these dbs up to date.

> No, the main reason geofencing exists on modern autonomous cars is to assure connectivity. A ton of work is offloaded.

Which means that they're not autonomous. Autonomous means being able to operate on its own.

"will require" dose not mean "has a technical prerequisite of"; it simply means no Level 4 car will ever be available that dose not include always online tracking.

I think there are regulatory requirements on connection as well.

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