Turquoise taillights tell you this Mercedes is driving autonomously | Hacker News Reader

Turquoise taillights tell you this Mercedes is driving autonomously

arstechnica.com

28 pointsaddaon15 comments

It would be nice to have an international standard color to signify that "this agent is not under human control". It could be used for self-driving cars, LLM generated text, a symbol for diffusion generated images, etc.

When direct human agency becomes the exception rather than the rule, we'll need a contrasting color to signify that instead. The complementary color to turquoise is amaranth, #E04050. Not quite blood red.

The first thing that came to my mind is the difference between green traffic lights and the slightly blue lights used in Japan.

That's for colourblind people, iirc

This is due to the Japanese language.

They say blue (“ao”) instead of green (“midori”) due to the way the language evolved.

International traffic regulations state the lights must be green, and when translated that was stated as blue due to this. Rather than change the laws, they just made the lights the most blue shade of green they could at the time.

Over time those lights have become rarer and most in Japan are now a pretty standard green.

I can say that this particular little linguistic foible caused some confusion when dating my wife (who had recently moved to the US from Japan) because she called the green lights blue in English.

> As some cars gain more autonomy, it's probably helpful if they have a way to signal their intentions to other road users.

My first though was exactly that, this looks useful. That said, as I'm thinking about it bit more, it's not easy for me to come up with nice examples of situations when this signal is actionable, clear and useful. I doubt most people understand what level 3 autonomous driving means nor what to expect from a car driving in this mode in a particular situation, esp. when there will be differences across car manufacturers.

Now I’mma Make a turquoise (er, florescent-esq) fourth litebar that animates like those on the alien craft in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” when my ADAS is active. (Need to sniff the CAN out of a tail light socket to see if I can detect a signal related to ADAS or otherwise use a pi0w2 with CV to analyze the dash and repeat the indicator in an IR pulse.)

Just last night I was almost in a multi-car pileup triggered by some losers in their sports-car shells on SUV chassis (complete with PA speaker playing audio samples of yesteryear’s engine exhaust). They weave in and out of traffic like a video game, unaware they are triggering automatic braking and pre-collision alarms/preparations as they go…so very important to get this standard out there for them to recognize that “yeah, I can make it, but it’s going to cause the vehicle I pull in front of to auto-slam on their brakes causing the poor family crammed into a 2003 Elantra behind them to face plant into its bumper).

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38699707

How well does this work for colorblind people?

Here's a gradient for the kinds of colorblindness https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/color-blindness/ty...

You can look at the gradient and answer your question. If you're curious how to answer it in future, I googled "types of colorblindness gradient" and clicked the "Images" tab. There were quite a few examples and you can browse to multiple sources if you don't trust one.

location and orientation can also help, they should probably put these where it is not possible to confuse it with other lights on the vehicle

How does a color blind person know if it's green or red at a traffic light?

They can still see shades of gray and position.

Traffic lights have a specific design and orientation which makes it easier to identify which light is on. Plus, they're up on poles or other places around the road. By comparison, the picture in the linked story shows lights that are more or less in the same location as other lights on a car. If you have a difficult time distinguishing color and you look at them while driving or walking, it seems plausible that they'd be harder to distinguish.

I realize there's different types and severity of color blindness, but using color alone (or primarily) seems like not the greatest usability choice. I did consider these things when commenting.

Unless the car always drives backwards, I'm not sure how useful it is to inform everything behind the car that it is driving autonomously.

If you click the link, they have pictures of the concept. There are front lights as well. You'll have to scroll too, if you want to see those pictures.

There are front lights as well.

But, as a manual driver sharing the road with autonomous vehicles, these are probably the most useful lights to me. Even on an undivided two-lane highway, knowing that oncoming traffic is autonomous is of limited use -- if the vehicle does something incorrect and sudden, like crossing the center line, I'm unlikely to have time to respond anyway. (It's also unlikely I'll be able to see a forward turquoise light, at distance, over daytime running lights, especially since so many cars have such high color temperature forward lights.)

But the hazard that an autonomous vehicle poses to me is a pretty strong function of the time I spend near it. It's going to do something stupid at some point (based on current vehicles on the road) -- the questions are (a) how prepared am I and (b) how quickly can I get away from it. With rear turquoise lights, I know that I should increase my following distance, and that I should pass the vehicle aggressively and as quickly as possible; the increased hazard by passing at above legal speed (and possibly outside a legal passing zone) may be offset by the reduced hazard from getting away from an unpredictable death machine.

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