A road safety plan that will lead to cars communicating with each other
engadget.com
engadget.com
Motorists already have strong incentives to make their vehicles safer for themselves, but they have very little incentive to make things safer for people outside of their vehicle. For that reason we need better regulations and infrastructure that account for those externalities.
By all means lets look into some of the tech solutions. But politicians (policy makers and pundits) are not the ones to listen to.
Is it really though? Is it?
While I'm sure it's happened, death via golfcart is a pretty rare occurrence. Death via a Dodge ram, on the other hand, happens all the time. [1]
Giant trucks are super popular and super deadly. I was nearly killed by one myself (driver ran a red light while I was in the cross walk). While I wouldn't outright ban them, I definitely would be up to something like requiring a CDL before you can buy one.
[1] https://www.autoblog.com/article/most-deadly-cars-other-driv...
I have no interest in unproven high-tech approaches when we haven't even implemented very basic proven pedestrian safety measures like eliminating street-level parking around pedestrian crossings to increase visibility, or mandating pedestrian safety tests for motor vehicles.
I'm guessing you don't live in the south. Pickup trucks are a major way of life for a lot of people. They certainly wouldn't be happy about increased regulatory burden.
Attitudes on roads vary wildly based on the community in question. There's a large surface area of this country that doesn't care to have non-vehicular traffic sharing the roadways.
Urban communities will prioritize different needs than suburban and rural communities. The two ends of the spectrum aren't really compatible because these are wholly different lifestyles that are geographically separable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle)#/media/File:1990...
Well depends what you need to do with, of course.
A quick search suggests that this Toyota can tow 3300lb (if the trailer has its own brakes, or only 1650lb if not).
So if you need to tow more than that, it won't work. 3300lb is very little, even our tiny (19ft) and light travel trailer is over 4000lb.
Of course, what is silly is the people with trucks that are never used to tow or carry anything heavier than a bicycle!
Plus, if work vehicles became lighter, work trailers would be forced to as well.
Try shopping for utility trailers. Anything affordable is very heavy steel & lumber. You can get light(er) trailers in aluminum but the price is much higher. I've never actually seen a contractor with one of those, too expensive.
And of course there is all the materials & equipment they're towing on it for the job. How do you suggest any of that become lighter?
given your example it's "want", not "need"
> 3300lb is very little, even our tiny (19ft) and light travel trailer is over 4000lb
Quick googling tells me that most European caravans are sub 1500kg / 3300lb, even the more spacious ones, "very little" and "tiny" are really subjective
Yes, how is this relevant? "Wants" are what drive humanity forward, not mere subsistence.
> Quick googling tells me that most European caravans are sub 1500kg / 3300lb, even the more spacious ones
Can you post a few links? Tried to find the most popular travel trailer models in Europe but not finding a good list.
Unless you're building the whole thing from carbon fiber, anything spacious is necessarily going to have some weight.
Ha, so it's spacious, not tiny and very little anymore...
Here's what seems to be the biggest one of that random brand well ranked on Google, 1330kg: https://www.caravelair-caravans.com/models/exclusive-line-58...
Playing gotcha word games is not the HN ethos.
To clarify, you brought up spacious travel trailers:
> most European caravans are sub 1500kg / 3300lb, even the more spacious ones
In contrast, the one I own is very small at 19ft, as mentioned upthread.
- the wheel wells are clean
- it's got a tonneau cover on
- no hitch receiver, it's empty, or there's no rust on the ball
- aftermarket anything (lights, step bumpers, lift kit, etc
- no dents, major scratches, or foreign materials on the bed or tailgate
Full disclosure: I have a Dodge 1500 in the driveway right now. In my defense the used truck market is fucking insane, I got this basically new for 60% of what a thoroughly used mid-sized truck would have cost me, and I actually do construction and timber work so the thing gets worked.
Mine is also used to haul a bed full of gravel when my drive needs repair or dirt for lawn correction. Not to mention I have a family.
Rear facing child seats while being 6 feet tall. Most cars I've tested don't support this. (Prius) Or no children can sit behind me because my front seat is sitting so close to the back seat that legs don't fit between. (Camero/Mustang)
Camry and Pasat seem to work, but warranties wouldn't cover things like bad child safety locks.... Not to mention, you can't haul things like gravel. =/
You go from full truck down to flat cars, completely ignoring the vehicles in between like soft-roader SUVS or the venerable minivan. Does none of these vehicles meet your people carrying needs?
People pay double (or more) for gas every year so they can drive around an empty bed and maybe save $50 on a rental once a year.
The gravel isn't for the driveway, but the road. However, we have hauled gravel for flower beds. It's about time to replace fence and some wood around the garage.
No, I don't haul daily or monthly, but more like quarterly and as-needed. (Tillers, Lawn mowers for example)
That is the problem which needs to be solved.
Small cars don't usually fit families well. =(
LOL - I'm imagining a Prius for a family of 6 =P
Because they are killing pedestrians and cyclists at an increasing rate in North America, while the same collisions are coming down in other developed countries. If the industry doesn't regulate itself, the government needs to step in for the common good.
And many of us aren't happy about the number of pedestrian deaths caused by these behemoths. Which one should we prioritize?
In my observation, vehicular traffic anywhere doesn't care to have non-vehicular traffic sharing the roadways. That doesn't mean that pedestrians, cyclists, or regulators should necessarily defer to their wishes.
What about electric vehicles?
Just note that looks can deceive on weight.
A Ford Maverick pickup truck is under 3800lb. A Tesla Plaid Model X is over 5300lb!
Pickup trucks don't need to be heavy. Japan has kei pickups, in the US, we had small pickups in the 80s and 90s. And then they disappeared throughout the early 00s.
A small truck with a small engine does small truck things, and has decent fuel economy and tremendous visibility.
But we can't buy those new anymore because you can't get a small truck to hit cafe standards, so large trucks it is.
The kei trucks aren't really a good replacement even for an S10 since so far as I can tell they won't run at highway speeds, but they're really good replacement for the Canam and Polaris money pits people buy (and are certainly way more capable of real work).
I don't own a truck anymore and now my "hack" is to remove the middle seats from my minivan and fold down the back row seats. That creates enough room that I can fit full 4'x8' sheets in it (with zero room to spare). I've hauled drywall and plywood in it with no problem. I sometimes get weird looks from folks when I roll up to the back of my minivan with a cart of plywood at the big box store.
Pretty sure the tiny bed on my grandfather's 1970 Datsun is larger than the beds on some of these behemoths.
Is it really dads? I've seen claims that is actually moms demanding this, dads just go along. (dads would be happy in a minivan, but their wife won't let their husbands be seen in one)
If you need construction materials delivered, this can accommodate almost anything. However usually for things like a stack of drywall, you would order a truck with a crane - simply because it's quicker to unload. For personal use the answer is simply to get a trailer. Here a lot of gas stations rent trailers by the hour for a reasonable fee, so it's very easy.
RVs also fit into this category. Most of them are under 3.5t, so you just need a standard car license. Some larger B class variants (which I guess in the US would still be considered small) need a C license. Caravans (travel trailers) are designed to be ok to tow on a standard car license, but in some countries you need extra training. Larger RVs don't make much sense here, as you won't be able to go anywhere with them.
People who have boats either leave them docked, or have boats that fit on a trailer that can be towed by a standard car. Nothing special needed. Same for cars, just put them on a trailer and drive away. Professionals often use car carrier variants of the Mercedes Sprinter et al, which can carry one or two cars, and another towed behind.
As a driver of a compact car, the fact that they put the headlights at the very top of the massive grille is just terrible, and there seems to be an arms race between pickup manufacturers to place the headlights as high as possible.
Again, by comparison to medium-duty vehicles, the Freightliner M2 106 puts the headlights right above the bumper.
[...] one in every 22 Dodge Ram 2500 drivers has a drunk driving conviction on their record. The national average is one in 56 drivers, meaning Dodge Ram 2500 drivers are more than twice as likely to have a DUI conviction on their record compared to all other drivers on the road.
That’s an order of magnitude higher than I would’ve guessed. Unbelievable!
And make them both as small as possible and as bright as possible, resulting in pinpoint sources of very bright light which completely destroy the night vision of any oncoming drivers.
DOT used to regulate headlight brightness, placement, and beam pattern, it seems that if these regulations are still in force they are being completely ignored without consequence.
That stopped being true in the late 90's/early 2000's when HID headlights entered the market, and the standard was further updated a few years ago (after a decade's delay) to allow for adaptive-shape headlights (ie ones that can control the shape of the high beam, for example to still provide high beams, but not in areas occupied by oncoming traffic.)
DOT still does regulate all or most those things and many other elements about vehicle lights you probably never thought about (and I'll get back to headlights in a couple of paragraphs.)
Ever notice that most cars with "animated" turn signals have a portion that lights up immediately, or the entire signal lights up full brightness immediately and then fades, versus fading up or gradually lighting up a larger area? That's because of a DOT regulation that says X amount of area / brightness has to come on when the signal first lights up. This is why Audi's animated tail lights, for example, usually have two areas - one that is animated and 'grows'...and another that lights up fully. Ditto for Mazda's 'pulsing' turn signals.
Ever notice that a lot of "cute utes" and crossovers with hatches have either brake/turn signals in the bumper awkwardly very low, sometimes in addition to ones on the hatch? That's because DOT regulations require turn, brake, and marker lights be mounted in/on a non-moving part of the body. Got a friend with an Audi Q-series? have them step on the brake / use a turn signal, then open the hatch and do it again. Bam, those red lights way down in the bumper you never see light up...now light up in place of those on the hatch.
DOT has standards around placement of turn signals near other lights (DRLs and headlight beams.) That's why on many vehicles the DRLs go out when the turn signal comes on, or in fancier european/japanese cars, the DRL and turn signal are the same element and it switches from white to blinking yellow.
DOT also used to require that only two sets of lights on the front of the car be turned on at once. This is why some cars deactivate fog lights when the high beams are turned on, and some older cars don't turn on the lows and highs at the same time.
Fun fact: DOT used to require rear facing fog lights only be on one side. I'm not sure if the regulation still exists, but back in the mid to late 90's, european car manufacturers started ignoring the regulation, installing bulbs in both tail lamps, because they would be inundated with customers complaining to dealers that "one of my tail lights is out." Thus the whole damn point of a rear fog light - is it one very bright light, driver's side - which is different from two or three very bright lights (brake lights!) - was largely erased.
But...back to headlights. DOT regulations used to require sealed-beam headlights well past when the rest of the world had moved to 'aero' headlights with reflectors shaped to better distribute light across the road surface and limit light spillage where it would blind oncoming traffic or be wasted.
DOT regulations used to require a crazy amount of light spillage off to the sides because they predated reflective road sign technology. I'm not joking when I say that DOT headlight regulations up until some time in the 80's had not been updated in around forty years. Many EU and Asian cars had to be sold with US-only sealed beam headlights when ROW (Rest Of World) they were sold with aero headlights, because they had to meet inferior, outdated DOT standards. This raised costs for imported vehicles and allowed US manufacturers to save costs by not developing better headlights, and US manufacturers and their unions liked that because it was effectively a tariff on imported cars.
Why did the standards eventually get updated? Ford bet the company - billions in late 1970's early 1980s money on the Taurus (successfully. It saved the company.) Ford needed aero headlights to meet its aerodynamic drag goals (which were insanely good even by today's standards.) So, suddenly Ford wanted aero headlights to be legal. Bam. Aero headlights became legal. And suddenly ever ford was getting aero headlights. They were still garbage compared to what was sold in Europe; many car enthusiasts with 80's/90's era cars illegally imported and installed european headlights because the beam patterns were so much better.
Nothing happens to US vehicle regulations unless US auto manufacturers want it. We lag the rest of the world in almost every standard imaginable. We lag on passenger car features (it took until something like the mid 2000's for ABS to be required!)
For example, in the EU, trucks are required to have:
- ABS, stability control, and automatic emergency warning/braking systems (and I think side collision warning systems? not sure.) - Full mirror coverage - bumper features that keep them from riding up a passenger car they rear-end - trailer rear end crash bars that keep cars rear ending trailers from going under the trailer and decapitating the occupants - modern emissions controls - electronic logbook systems
In the US? A 1970's peterbuilt that belches black smoke, has sealed beam headlights, flat side mirrors looking back, no ABS much less stability control/braking...is A-OK. Similarly, our rear collision safety standards for trailers are very watered down because of trucking industry lobbyists. Saves the trucking industry tens of billions, and costs the rest of society probably hundreds of billions if not trillions between injuries/deaths/property damage/lost productivity and health impacts from essentially unregulated emissions.
There are "coach builders" that focus on skirting emissions regulations - completely legally - via regulations that let an old, pre-emissions-control truck engine be installed into a brand new truck body.
I could go on and on about how asinine, outdated, and ineffective US motor vehicle safety and equipment regulations are. I could go on even further about how completely ineffective motor vehicle inspections are even in states that require them, because they're conducted by a private business with a vested interest in ignoring customers not meeting standards or purposefully violating them.
And you should. This is fascinating! You answered so many nagging questions I’ve had for years about the weird behavior of fog lamps and DRLs.
Any reason why some manufacturers allow the lights to remain on when the ignition is killed with an obnoxious beep (Ford, VW), and others don’t (Subaru, Toyota)?
But, variable resistors that are rated for a lot of power (roughly half the power of the diodes at max brightness) will add to the BOM.
1: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2001/09/28/01-2443...
It boggles the mind that people drop absolutely inordinate amounts of money on the King Ranch Escalade doo-doo trucks that don't seem to do work any better than any truck I've owned, but cost an arm and a leg when something goes wrong. The Telsa truck looks like one of the worst offenders: it's rare to see a vehicle that is THAT stupidly designed inside and out.
If it is a truck then dents from loading and hauling cargo are normal (though cargo should be tied down). Likewise scratched paint caused by off road driving are normal things for trucks with 4 wheel drive (buy a 2 wheel drive if you are only driving on road). If it is a truck you cannot consider cosmetic damage in the value, if it is road worthy then the value is about how many hours are on the engine and nothing else. (this just killed the used and trade in market for trucks so if you buy one you better keep it for 15000 engine hours)
I know everyone says that the EPA killed small trucks in 2008[1] but Toyota replaced the "Toyota Pickup" with the less-practical Tundra in '95, and embiggened it in 2004, so I'm not convinced that companies would make them even were they legal.
https://mobikefed.org/2020/10/research-risk-death-pedestrian...
Modern pick ups are urban tanks meant to out weigh other vehicles protecting the occupants. That’s why people buy them, because they are scared. Of the other scared idiots in the other urban tanks.
Otherwise there should be nothing bigger/faster/louder than a standard gas-powered golf cart.
Bonus: golf carts are fun. When was the last time you had fun driving at 25mph?
I would like to see the cost to register these behemoths to be commiserate with the actual cost to society.
Toyota Camry 1979 – 980–1,060 kg (2,161–2,337 lb)
Toyota Camry 2024 – 1,480–1,660 kg (3,262–3,659 lb)
This is the problem: All cars are getting bigger and heavier. By a lot. But us squishy humans still have the same impact tolerances we did 40 years ago.
While cars are undoubtedly heavier now than in the past, they are also in most cases the most fuel efficient they have ever been. Some of the weight is a direct result of fuel saving technologies in many cases; hybrid systems and traction batteries often weigh more than less efficient legacy ICE powertrains did.
I would like these vehicles to be sent to the landfill immediately.
So you'll never have anything delivered anymore nor have a contractor be able to show up and work on anything. How will that work with your plan?
One example of this that drives me crazy is how soundproof vehicles have become. Horns and sirens keep getting louder to make up for it, which makes being near traffic incredibly painful. Sirens are often 120+ decibels, a volume that is unsafe for listeners for more than 10 seconds. All cars should be mandated to easily be able to hear a 100 decibel siren.
It would help drivers use it more thoughtfully, instead of pressing it multiple times at the slightest feeling of inconvenience.
Waymo cars do not have, or need, a vehicle to vehicle communication system. They talk to their HQ, but that's not part of the main control loops. Most of the problems Waymos have to avoid don't communicate much, if at all. Traffic cones, pedestrians, bicyclists, and people in wheelchairs have to be sensed directly. Once you have the sensing to do that, large vehicles should not be a problem. (Yes, Tesla has had trouble sensing fire trucks, semis, etc., but that's a Tesla problem)
It doesn't seem to be necessary that traffic lights and signs broadcast their status to vehicles. It's not something Waymo has asked for.
So what is this "V2X" thing supposed to be for? Surveillance, probably.
[1] https://www.its.dot.gov/research_areas/emerging_tech/pdf/Acc...
I understand this as traffic cones, pedestrians, bicyclists, and people in wheelchairs being V2X-enabled too, somehow.
I refused to leave, so they called more government thugs (i.e. the police) to help them drag me out, but the police told them they have to give people three weeks notice before making them homeless so fuck off.
Somehow, as in handwave: "Unless everything is equipped with a correctly working, charged and network-connected tracker, it has no business being on a road." Well good luck with that, outside of a fully instrumented testing area.
Well, there's a less compassionate reading of this, too: "wasn't tracked, therefore not our problem, sincerely: vendors, insurance companies, et al."
Lots of metro trains systems use a lunchbox sized wireless tags placed strategically in stations for redundant safety and precision braking control. Said train systems also goes down daily for rather extensive maintenance(cost justified by scale).
Few people knows what oils for cars is. No way they can readily transition into verifying electronic tag signal integrity reports for every individual traffic cones in the shed.
But they didn’t signal, they came from nowhere, blah blah. There’s only one hand sign drivers recognize.
Likewise, why would you ride a bicycle there? You need proper separated infrastructure, i.e. a segregated bike lane.
There's more than enough space for that, but drivers scream bloody murder if you take away one of their 8 lanes to make a bike lane or a proper sidewalk or a speed bump or whatever (even though this would actually ease congestion for cars!)
But yes horns are for car-to-car.
But - where I live, good 80-90% of cyclists on the roads are absolutely mad a-holes, and I try desperately not using more appropriate words. Red light with all traffic stopped doesn't exist for them. Unfortunately they are part of road traffic on many places, even though some good additional cycling lanes appeared recently.
I've personally as pedestrian have been almost hit 2x by cyclist going above 30-40kmh who zoomed through crowd of pedestrian crossing without even touching breaks, on red light. He drove not further than say 5cm from me, felt quite powerful wind wave he generated. This can easily end up in me being dead or permanently crippled (wife worked at emergency and they had exactly same case few years ago, the 40 year old pedestrian hit by cyclist on red light came in full consciousness, was dead within 2 days).
If you have such a person doing very dangerous stuff, rather than quietly tolerating and enabling him/her, horn is way more appropriate if it can make a positive difference. And as a car driver I've seen so many cases like that. I've seen probably drunken cyclist trying to smash kick side mirrors of cars stuck in traffic jam.
Just to be clear, I talk about Switzerland here. But not places are created equal - Geneva in this case is literally on french border from 3 sides, has tons of french folks living in it and even much more commute daily for work there. Suffice to say, Geneva has absolutely horrible traffic of all types compared to rest of the country (plus also highest crime).
Bikes should be on dedicated lanes, if Dutch or Danes can do it and managed to put it into tightly built medieval cities, many others can too. Then all the power to you guys. But mixing with traffic where every cyclist is an hard-to-avoid obstacle, on very narrow roads, thats recipe for many unhappy participants and some bad situations. In US this should be easier since every city US road I've ever seen is absolutely massively wide, often equivalent of 2 lanes here.
Confirmation bias everywhere.
Maybe because you have to be one to have the courage to share the streets with inattentive car, scooters and moped drivers, and don’t forget pedestrians who walk around like zombies looking at their phones.
You have a 2-4 ton hunk of machinery that's oozing safety features designed to destroy every part of itself, including all of it, in order that you survive. In contrast: I have a bike. Who do you think comes out worse if our two selves collide?
Next time you're going on the road, park your persecution complex.
Runner here, I only communicate with cyclists by means of rude hand gestures because cyclists think they own the road and leave no room for pedestrians. At the stop sign near my house, not one cyclist slows down or stops and infact many have yelled at me when I am running across. V2V probably wont solve this problem but I wish cyclists start to yield to pedestrians and stay a safe distance away from us runners because we dont want to get hit by cyclist folks.
Nobody has common courtesy and they all think they own the road. Everyone. It isn't just drivers. But drivers are nonetheless the most dangerous because they're operating heavy machinery that kills you on impact.
Common courtesy should be a more important component of the whole education process.
It's a lot about subjective safety feeling: Many cyclists feel safer on sidewalks, runners feel safer without cyclists, scooters and cars around them and motorists feel quite safe all the time in their metal box. Separating traffic, slowing down cars in towns and cities is the only way forward and even though it might seem very slow going or even small reversals like in Spain are taking place: It will happen within our lifetime.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/traffi...
It is a totally different world on US roads these days. There is so much dumb shit I've done on a bike in my 20's that I refuse to tell my kids about and that makes me cringe thinking how lucky I have been and after about 2 weeks of commuting this summer I have abandoned that dream and instead choose to ride where the cars can't go. I am fortunate to have access to a massive trail system outside my front door but will avoid as much vehicle interaction as I can here on out. Aside from the crazy, impatient drivers there are so many other ways you can get destroyed by a massively oversized car or truck that the distracted driver can barely see out of. Not to mention the erosion of trust that people are going to actually behave on the roads, as illustrated in the above article. Riding on city streets was always something that put my faith in other humans to the test and since I already know the answer, the safest thing one could do is to simply remove yourself from the equation.
And I know I'll probably get some dickhead typing an angry reply about how one time a cyclist didn't obey a stop sign or something and therefore we're the scum of the road fit only to coat the tread of his tires, but just like, this is not the same goddamn situation. I'm moving about a hundred pounds of light metal and rubber, and you're moving between 2 and 4 tons of machinery. Fuck off with this ridiculous equivalence.
Cyclists are pretty much the least predictable "vehicle" on the road.
Are we a car today and following the laws? Or are we going to blaze right through that red light intersection because we're a bike! We're so close to a new Strava PR, after all! Sudden left turn across traffic - look out for me, I don't even look over my shoulder!
I have been pushed off the road by a Tesla merging into a right turn lane -- a vehicle with a million sensors that should have been screaming at its driver. My friend, who was on a bicycle and following the conventions and laws of the road, was killed by a driver making a right hand turn.
Many states (in the US) have minimum safe passing distances required for drivers to adhere to when passing a bicycle. Maybe 90% of the time (anecdotally, in very liberal-leaning, bike-heavy areas of the Bay Area in California!) they don't. And so in return, we take the lane (as we are permitted to do, by law), and pissed-off motorists try to kill us.
The biggest difference is motorcycle riders don't ride in the bike lane until suddenly and without warning they pop into the road lane and ride straight through stop signs and red lights.
Cyclists are often the plague of the road. Can't decide if they want to be treated like a real vehicle, or a pedestrian. They often choose both, whichever being convenient for them at the time. This often leads to the interactions you have described.
Can cars be better around cyclists? Sure, without any doubts. But... cyclists need to do better around cars too. After all, the cyclist will always lose that fight.
I think not.
18 percent – driver failed to see cyclist
24 percent – cyclist ran a red light or failed to stop for a stop sign
22 percent – driver or passenger opened a car door into an oncoming cyclistIt is arguable the 22% caused by open car doors is also negligence on the cyclist's part. Riding that fast and that close to doors that may or may not suddenly open without warning is negligent. It would be akin to a lane-splitting motorcyclist failing to anticipate someone might change lanes without warning during heavy traffic.
To ride out of the door zone in many cases requires taking the lane and riding outside of a marked bicycle lane, if present. Cyclists can and should do this, but it is no surprise that many don’t, and it is no surprise that drivers complain of those who do.
disagree. the most typical bike lane in America is nicknamed "dooring lane" - a painted lane that forces cyclists to ride in the dooring zone. As for speed, I've been stopped at a light and had a parked driver open their door into me without even looking. If riding next to parked cars is dangerous, then it's the street designers who are to blame.
I've had cyclists collide with me as a pedestrian and run right into parked cars because they aren't looking where they are going. Way too many of them think that everybody is responsible for their safety except for them.
Another cyclist and I stop at a stop sign, him waiting to turn left, I waiting to turn right, onto a main road (which notably does not have a stop sign).
A car traveling straight on the main road comes to a complete stop and waves at us cyclists with a "go ahead" hand gesture. We remain stopped, because the car has right of way.
Meanwhile there's a small traffic jam forming on the main street as some maintenance vehicles are waiting for the car to move so they can turn onto the side street. If us cyclists were to follow the car driver's "instructions" we would have to violate right-of-way for multiple flows of traffic.
Finally the car driver gets fed up at everyone else's insistence on following the law. Makes a rude gesture, shakes their head, and continues straight. The maintenance guys can finally turn, then the bikes.
I guess my point is: car drivers need to do a better job of following the conventions and laws of the road.
This includes people who put on their hazard lights when slowing down in traffic on the freeway. The entire world has decided brake lights are the universal signal for slowing down and/or stopping - yet these knuckle heads think that's not enough. So they do unexpected things and unintentionally create more unsafe conditions where people might not understand what's going on and try to go around thinking it's a disabled vehicle, etc.
In general, people need to stick to the well-defined and accepted rules and conventions of the road. That's how everyone stays safe.
I appreciate people who do that when the traffic ahead of them is stopped, not just slowing. It's hard to anticipate or evaluate a full-speed -> stopped situation, and hazard lights in addition to brake lights clearly communicates "this is an extreme case". If they're being used routinely in slow-and-go traffic then I will agree with you, but fortunately I don't see that where I live.
I cannot but believe that every person that says that has never done any significant cycling on an urban area. If you’re riding a bike you don’t need to do a “stop” and every sign, (note that I said “need” not “should”) just pay attention and slow down as needed, same as red lights. Stopping means wasted energy but you also have to remember that you are the one losing in ANY crash, doesn’t matter if you’re right or not.
For cyclists it is a device that makes your bike have the electronic image of a huge oversize truck and escort vehicles or a whole battalion of Hell's Angels or something.
And then we discovered a memory leak in some vendor's V2I component which was supposed to slurp vehicle position data from DSRC and feed it to my controller. We couldn't get it to run stably in the cabinet, so the whole thing just kind of... stopped. Then they put me on some pointless project, so I quit. This was 2017.
Last year, I ran across somebody on youtube demoing my project. I got in touch, just to say hi, and he asked me for tech support--he didn't know how to configure it. I said:
> There's a readme on the SD card, plus an SDK that should get you started writing modules for various detector types.
He said:
> What SD card? I see what looks like a memory chip, but it's soldered onto the board.
They had told me I was building a research platform, and then when it finally ends up in the hands of a researcher, it turns out they've changed the hardware to make it useless for research. I was so angry. They never wanted to change anything, they just wanted some intellectual property that they could use as a bargaining chip in some way that had no impact on the intersection whatsoever.
This "V2X" business appears to be the updated branding, and it's a good idea at its core, but from what I know about the people implementing it, I'm not going to get very excited about how it'll turn out.
Older controllers use line voltage for their clocks, so they drift much more quickly than you'd expect from, for instance, a wristwatch.
So I'd guess that you already had a rather small window in the coordination during which you can get service based on your sensor, and then the clock drift has put that window in the exact worse spot.
But yeah, changing the paradigm from presence-based to trajectory-based was the whole point of the project. If we could make these things trajectory-aware then there would be no need to manually coordinate them and then have that manual coordination fall out of sync (even with an accurate time source, you've got weather and construction and all kinds of other things that throw it off).
The intersection I have in mind has a left turn on it. The left turn is not timed and will only cue under two conditions: at the opening phase to main traffic, and if there is no oncoming traffic for the initial ten (or so) seconds. Otherwise it waits until the entire phase is complete (with a 120 second timeout) before it resets. At night time it will cue almost immediately.
One question that I have though, and you'll have to pardon my ignorance. Would it be efficient for intersections to always be red until a vehicle approaches? Then only allow X number of vehicles before turning red again. Basically turning the traffic signal into an "advanced" stop sign, with the expectation that you stop by default. Unless the system detects there is no cross traffic. Then you can have much more rapid phases and it protects against folks racing to the next green (red when they arrive) light.
I expect that there are certain conditions which would indeed benefit from what you're describing. Especially if the signals could inform one another that a platoon is heading that way. On a straight shot under light conditions you might end up having to stop only once, after which you're now on a path that was coordinated precisely for you.
Traffic signals in holland seem to operate similar to how I described. I'm just not sure how that would translate to somewhere like the US where you have much higher traffic volumes and faster (crazier) drivers.
It's pretty hard to believe its 2024 when this happens.
Without that clarification, I think the first thing readers of HN will think, justifiably, is "is all of my car's information being broadcast all the time to everything", for plenty of reasons – dragnet surveillance, disruptive attacks ranging from Flipper pranks to state actors, etc.? It's not clear whether that's true or expected of this V2X initiative.
After some quick digging, it looks like so far, it looks like only very domain-specific features have been "implemented with V2X", and will be for the forseeable future (see p7+ in [1]) – oversize vehicle complaince, pedestrian in crosswalk, blind spot warnings. How that's implemented will probably need a lot more digging.
It is not that I think some one will take my car from me so much as the industry may just work to make everything not new obsolete. A new $30K car (or even $8$15K used) is a steep price for an individual to pay to meet regulations.
Think of it in the same category as driver assistance technologies (like radar cruise control, forward collision warning, lane assist, rear cross warnings, rear cameras, or blind spot warnings/cameras).
It'll almost certainly never be mandatory to be road legal but it'll probably be a standard feature on most new vehicles.
I'm calling it here and now: this absolutely will become mandatory in the nearish future. 100%.
Same as in Europe with the speed regulator thingy in the cars... advisory at first now mandatory in many places.
Even when they started mandating airbags in new vehicles, it took something like seven years to go into effect so car manufacturers had time to plan. And then they didn’t make cars that didn’t have airbags illegal.
Even the most universally embraced ideas take time to roll out.
It will happen within a handful of years though. Too much potential for control to let it pass...
California is also working on legislation to require cars to be aware of where they are so they can notify the driver if they’re speeding.
I think many of us said the same thing about backup cameras, but since 2018 you can't buy a car in the USA without one. So you have to get a screen in your car whether you want it or not.
If you cycle into grocery store, you may get chased and attacked by dangerous dogs. Many people gave up cycling and jogging for that! And in grocery store more dogs and excrements! There are rules against all of that, yet it is widely ignored.
Lidars will get vandalized pretty fast, because they will impede flow of traffic. Or thugs will use it to stop passing vehicles to make kidnapping easy!
We already have this thing, it’s called a red light.
Is there a name for this, when people come up with a plausible sounding scenario for crime driven disaster, but it does not actually have basis in real world? The ‘razor blades in candy’ scares parents every Halloween but is completely made up and has never been reported.
Peter Thiel had a similar moment on Joe Rogan podcast where he explained his elaborate social theory based on how chimps behave, but got the basics of chimp behaviour totally wrong
TL DR: tech people suck at predicting human behaviour
The ability to arbitrarily stop vehicles would be very useful for this kind of crime because it could be done in less crowded areas. And criminals could more readily select for expensive vehicles, young women or whatever else they're wanting.
[1] https://www.crimeonline.com/2024/04/12/video-florida-woman-a... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usuo0jOcHJA
Ofcourse there are places where vehicles have to stop naturally, you can’t avoid that.
To steel man your position though, a fake police costume would probably be just as effective at stopping vehicles arbitrarily. And despite being cheap it's a relatively rare occurrence.
It reminds me of Scott Alexander's "The Buying Things from a Store FAQ": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-buying-things-from-a-st...
Also I agree with ChatGPT that it's midway between these two things:
> Urban legend: This is a widely circulated but false story or belief that often serves as a cautionary tale. The "razor blades in candy" story is a classic example, as it's a narrative that spreads fear but lacks evidence.
> Moral panic: This term refers to a situation where public fears and anxieties about a perceived threat (often related to crime or social issues) are exaggerated by the media or other influential sources, even though the threat may be minimal or non-existent. This can lead to widespread but unfounded concerns, like the Halloween candy scare.
Movie plot threats:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/movie-plot_th...
In an oversimplified system where Car A broadcasts "I'm braking" allowing Car B to slow down and avoid a collision, the attack vector is a simulated "I'm braking" message that causes car B to slow down/stop even though Car A is not braking (or may not even exist).
Broadcasting current mode of operation doesn't really seem connected in the same way to me. Sure, it might be a way to "attack" another car by sending the same signal, but that's totally different from someone accessing the car remotely for other purposes. If you fake a hard braking signal, to my car, then my car will respond by slowing down and then transmitting that as well to other cars.
It's not safe. It never will be safe. Ever. Self driving cars should have absolutely zero networking capability, at all.
Anyone saying otherwise is ignoring te reality of software development history, and extremely naive.
Thus if your car needs to communicate with anything for "system updates", it's been designed wrong. People had cars for decades, with digital control systems and zero networking capability. It's literally not required, at all, to develop, maintain, or have a car that operates perfectly.
One of the main problems is that cars literally have too much software onboard. There is no need for an app store for a car. No need for networking. No need for update-to-date info. None. You have a smartphone, and that can connect to an entirely isolated screen in the car, if you want maps displayed for your own edification. Anything networked, eg bluetooth, etc, should be entirely isolated from the rest of the car.
In terms of self-driving, updates can be applied manually. USB sticks aren't that uncommon. Dealers are available. The amount of times new city streets are created is extremely rare, and you can always close-destination and direct manually beyond that point. Cars can then remember a location, and draw in a street as if finds it, thus enabling easy return.
The truth is it doesn't matter how "convenient" something may be, you don't just brush security and safety aside to do it. You don't make people's lives easier, at the expense of safety, security, and so on. You just don't.
And that's what every networked car represents. Brushing aside safety for convenience.
I've been waiting for hackers to remote-hack the battery charging module in cars for quite some time. Depending on the unit's configuration, some car models could be hacked to all explode and burst into flames due to overcharging, at specific times.
How would society respond, in 1 in 10 houses caught fire at 2am on the same night?
* There'd be fires everywhere, and those fires would spread, as there are not enough fire departments to deal with even 1 in 100 houses catching fire in a night
* Massive amounts of infra would be compromised
* Massive amounts of transportation capability would be gone
Society would be devastated. It'd be worse than an air bombing campaign.
Yet I'm willing to bet there is a path from most car's networking -> charge controller, along with it being remote flashable with a new firmware too.
Madness. Stupidity. Insanity.
Other discussions are about how people coordinate cars in a group. This is ripe for trouble, even with just people messing about. People would game this system to push other cars out of the way, using it to gain pseudo priority. Teenagers and malign actors would cause all cars in a swarm to emergency brake, but sending emergency brake intentions. Cars would be manipulated into running into each other, or into guardrails, after being sent "emergency swerve" info from cars in front, or "I'm beside you but I'm emergency swerving into your lane!" messages.
If anyone looks at the current state of almost all lane-keep tech, it's a joke and dangerous. Forums are repleted with "turn off this functionality" panic messages, as people are having to constantly fight their cars to keep them from doing very dumb things.
Real self-driving is at least 20 to 30 years away. Even those at the forefront (like Waymo) are not self-driving. Instead, they've super-mapped the areas that Waymo operates in, warm climates with low amounts of rain, no snow, city areas with unchanging landscapes and an immense amount of cues and markers.
Take a Waymo to an unmapped location and it's useless. That's not self-driving.
Take a Waymo to a Northern US rural area in the winter, where there are no road lines to be seen due to slush and snow on the road. It will fail completely and utterly. That's not self driving. Any local driver handles that daily without issue.
Waymo still has a phalanx of people monitoring all aspects of how its cars are performing, ready to step in at a moment's notice. They get edge-case stuck in dumb places, do weird things (like waking up entire blocks of people due to honking senselessly all night long), they are not self-driving capable.
Instead, they are "we mapped all these streets a billion times over, and with human intervention and the absolutely perfect weather in SF and the US South, can get a car to kinds sorta almost self-drive", but "It'll never work in the rest of the world".
By the time true self-driving is a real thing, it'll be hand in hand with AI that is capable of handling "I don't have that address" and "Show me the closest address" and "where do I go from here", where you say "Go down two streets and then turn left" works.
We do not need networking in our cars. The internet is a poison.
One side note.
This is an excellent business opportunity for someone such as SpaceX. They could create entirely isolated vlan, non-internet traffic for car manufacturers far more isolated than anyone. Such traffic could be isolated and never have direct connection to the internet, which would reduce the attack surface dramatically.
It would still be dangerous. Just less so than the absolutely absurd and ridiculous scenario where we have cars connect to the most hostile environment known, the internet.
To end this blathering and spewing, I'll say this. Would you want brain surgery done by a robot that is receiving instructions over the internet? Then why do you want tonnes of vehicles flying down the road at 70mph being connected to the internet?
First, the idea that you rarely need to update maps is wrong. The minimum you can really get away with is monthly. Weekly is preferable. Daily is the standard, with serious pressure from operations and government relations support up-to-the-minute updates to handle things like avoiding emergency services routes, route obstructions like downed trees, traffic updates, and unannounced construction zones detected by another vehicle.
Secondly, you missed the "data offload" part of what I said. One of the main limitations on operating time for autonomous vehicles isn't charging, it's running out of space to store collected data. This includes data that will be used to update maps, detailed logs of how the vehicle is running and what errors sensors are encountering, as well as the basic sensor outputs and analysis results (e.g. where other vehicles are in space). This is often terabytes after compression and log reduction. Good luck loading that to a USB drive in any reasonable time.
Thirdly, good luck making USB devices secure against evil maid attacks. It's a hell of a lot easier and there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth available with mutually authenticated wireless APs.
As for taking Waymo to a northern state, they've been testing in Tahoe for years and they used to test in New York. This coming winter they'll be doing heavy testing in both of those as well as Northern Michigan (including UP).
Waymo are autonomous. They're not on rails or anything else you've heard. The computers are given a destination and route themselves to it, handling all driving tasks along the way. When remote assistants step in, all they can do is augment the robot with new observations. It still has to do all of the driving in light of that new information.
No, it isn't. Many people do not use Google Maps, or any maps like technology as they drive about. They rely upon road signs, and signs saying "Maintenance from Dec to March", and so on, along with 'detour' signs. Cars can easily read road signs these days, and that can be expanded. Further, people can put in their own "bypass" route, which could even be augmented "For the next week". There is no requirement to update often, except for quite literally made up requirements, beyond the requirements humans have.
A true requirement for full self-driving, is the ability to indicate "STOP!" or "Let me off here", or for example "Take this street to bypass this mess in the future", whether verbal of via a console. Self-driving doesn't mean you don't tell the chauffeur your preferences, outside of it reading detour signs. In fact, it's a requirement to take directions from a human in the vehicle, as to destination, route, emergency stops, and so on.
And this highlights my point. Dozens of ways to have maps updated less often, very low impact, but suddenly "We need to connect to the most dangerous thing for any computing device, the Internet".
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In terms of data offload, it's not required. If it was an actual self-driving car, it could drive in areas with no mobile or cell service, and yes many such places exist. It could be owned as a self-driving car, where people live "off the grid" entirely. What would happen then? Would the vehicle cease to function due to a full disk? Crash? That's very, very poor design.
And to that end, all of that data is essentially not required for operations, but for debug and improvement. And this highlights how beta-ish this tech is. You don't need daily logs and endless updates on something stable. The core components of auto-driving vehicles should be in perm-maintenance only mode, with on additions or changes, that's where stable code ends up. No changes.
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In terms of evil maid attacks, seriously? The mega edge case, compared to the lunacy of placing a device online? Online is dumb, dumb, dumb. It's unsecure beyond comparison. If you have anything you care about online, you're doing it wrong.
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In terms of testing, yes I'm sure they are testing. Yet they're not testing anywhere near their operations in SF, and the number of Waymos on test drives around Palo Alto dwarfs anything in a snow laden environment.
Testing doesn't mean they've managed to make any headway against blizzard conditions, against snow on road, against unmapped roads with snow on them, against the car icing up, on and on and on. Testing != working.
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And in terms of your comment about remotes, I am unsure of the validity of your statement, but regardless, helping it determine landmarks (aka new observations) is indeed my point. SF is the most mapped area on the planet. And yet people still have to step in and provide guidance.
Self-driving is a joke at this point, the best is barely 4 as per J3016, and this chart is a best-describe:
https://images.synopsys.com/is/image/synopsys/levels-of-driv...
Note the 'geofencing is required' in this specific definition, which is key to how immensely limited Waymo is, and I'd take this further and say Waymo is a '3.5' at best, with 'human is required' being offloaded for emergency intervention/stops if required. (Don't try to tell me Waymo doesn't do emergency remote stops.. it happens. And 'human is required' doesn't only mean 'the one in the car').
Couple this with the fact that it's extremely easy to make something perform correctly some of the time, difficult most of the time, and an immense feat of incredible engineering for all of the time, even when all means a whole slew of 9s, not 100%.
True self-driving without all sorts of conditionals is a minimum of 10 years out, most likely closer to 20 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if 30.
People have such rose coloured glasses on this front.
We don't have cell towers everywhere so there are 'blind' spots for miles.
Germany has so much better driving norms on its highways since the lack of speed limits enables those who are fast to force those who are slow to stay in the right lane where they belong.
Teslas communicating with each other isn't using an open standard that can be used by other car companies, nor is Waymo's.
What if you could do 100mph with perfect congestion control in the e-lane?
Just imagine a world where rush hour didn't mean slowdowns. Oh and also get rid of the onramp metering; it's worse than useless when traffic can't zipper and accommodate the influx of new vehicles.
The rulemakers would allow your car to drive at a MUCH higher speed than allowed by "human" driving.
and it would maintain the speed.
The cars would perfectly merge in and out, maybe including perfect metering or buffering of cars exiting.
They would drive at a specific distance from each other and speed up and slow down synchronously.
oh, and don't charge for it.
If you want to own one for exclusive personal use, you'll be doing so in an environment that's increasingly unsympathetic to your needs as somebody with a fleet size of one and a customer base of one.
Tokyo is of comparable size to LA and they don't have these issues. LA used to have the largest streetcar network in the country but they stripped most of it out circa WWII. See also NYC, London, etc.
Even if most people would take the tube, that still leaves millions who need to drive into LA for work. Since everyone has a backyard and the population density in the suburbs doesn't come anywhere close to Tokyo's, it's neither economical nor practical to build public transportation options out there.
> Tokyo is of comparable size to LA and they don't have these issues. LA used to have the largest streetcar network in the country but they stripped most of it out circa WWII. See also NYC, London, etc.
Used to, but those days are gone and it's now 100x harder to reverse that decision. Los Angeles is currently spending the most money out of all the cities in the US on its metro system in preparation for the 2028 Olympics, and even that is still scratching the surface.
Isn't there already a significant attack vector ?
And the pressure is high for makers to bring more of these sooner than later, so having a more public and wider discussion on what this means on the security side is I think beneficial. Right now they're burying their head in the sand.
We can do that today with remote start on a hot day. And on a cold day, it remotely activates the heater.
“Your honor, it may be true that my client’s driving speed in combination with the thick fog prevented him from reacting to obstacles, and that his car then struck and violently killed this man while he used the crosswalk. However, it was not the fog or my client’s speed that caused standard crash avoidance safety mechanisms to fail, but the crash-ee’s negligent decision to go outside without a phone with a functioning and active location beacon.”
1. The crosswalk announces itself to the vehicle via a P2P 3G, LTE, or 5G connection.
2. The vehicle notifies the driver or the adaptive cruise control (if enabled) slows down while approaching the crosswalk.
3. The post with the crosswalk button on it has a LIDAR sensor that looks down the length of the crosswalk (and presumably another one facing from the opposite direction) and a relatively low power DSP digests the LIDAR input looking for approximately not-car shaped forms on the crosswalk.
4. The crosswalk announces a pedestrian on the crosswalk to the vehicles if a pedestrian presses the button on the crosswalk post or if a pedestrian form is detected on the crosswalk.
5. The vehicle alerts the driver or the adaptive cruise control comes to a complete stop, prompting the driver to resume when the route is clear (or when it no longer reports pedestrians using the crosswalk.
6. When the crosswalk timer is complete and no pedestrian forms are visible on LIDAR, the crosswalk announces an empty crosswalk to the vehicles.
So the "they didn't have their phone on them" defense wouldn't even begin to come into consideration.
We already have people trusting google maps instead of their own eyes, and driving into fields, swamps and lakes. Taking right turns when they are forbidden, ignoring road markings, etc.
The OP's argument is that you could blame the pedestrian for failing to carry technology on their person.
Your argument is that you could blame the tech.
Those are separate.
Blaming the tech in a viable defense is blaming the infrastructure for being insufficient which in some cases is legitimate (i.e. this crossing should be a signaled/puffin crossing because it's inherently unsafe).
Blaming the tech as not being responsible for them however is not and no even half reasonable judge or jury would accept it.
And if the tech is broken, it really should gracefully degrade/fail or in a sense it is to some degree at fault. And even in that case, you are almost always still at fault even if you hit a pedestrian who is crossing the street without using a crosswalk so it's not like it changes the situation at all from the legal status quo.
At best if they can prove that was the case, it opens the city up to liability for failing to maintain infrastructure or allow the infrastructure to gracefully degrade/fail.
Also a similar system to this already exists outside the US (ex: Pedestrian Crossing or Kerb detectors [1] at Puffin crossings in the UK) to extend the crosswalk time if pedestrians are still using the crosswalk.
1. https://www.agd-systems.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/326_-...
Aside the car is so safe and well done in software terms I often have my car's companion app to open, activate/deactivate A/C etc connect to another car in another country for unknown reasons and I potentially can control some function of that car, while I imaging someone else could control mine...
Do you really want to trust these systems? Do you really want to trust instructions from another peer automatically without any means of human correction? Let's image a trigger to stop an armored bank van somewhere for a robbery...
I think we need to try to use technology to improve the situation, yes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffin_crossing - standard since 2016
That only covers a very small portion of crosswalks and is generally done for crosswalks in high throughput areas or areas where risks of a pedestrian/vehicle collision are high. i.e. the places where you'd want additional augmentation to notify drivers and prevent collisions
This already happens today. Who do you think is going to get the blame if you use an at-grade railway crossing, didn't check for trains, and got run over?
"My client didn't know that motorcycles are not equipped with the traffic warning system."
And now people will see even less of them. We need systems to _enhance_ situational awareness. This is hard to do without active training on the systems. Vehicle users will never do this.
In many European countries all cars need to undergo a yearly road worthiness check. So not just the emissions checks, but also the lights, tires, brakes, seatbelts, shocks, steering, and other basic things. It seems like such a system (even every 2 or 5 years) would result in major reductions in accidents and injuries and be applicable across all cars.
Sometimes I can't even on this website with supposedly some of the smartest folks.
No, you don't
> automated cars with less human error.
The comment you replied to already noted that this has no effect on existing cars, of which many magnitudes more exist than automated cars (those do not exist on the road, not to the degree that is proposed).
> Sometimes I can't even on this website with supposedly some of the smartest folks.
Oh, the irony.
Yes, quite funny. The claim is absurd. Cars communicating with each other is feasible even for older vehicles.
This is the same thinking that got everyone chasing "Hyperloop" pixie dust instead of just putting in the work to build high speed rail.
I bet such a system's impact would be vanishingly small and the money would be better spent elsewhere. Certainly not "major reductions." I'm not sure it's a terrible idea - we're bringing cars in for emissions checks anyway so sure, check the seatbelts for some reason - but let's not pretend it's going to do much.
It would be strange but weirdly reassuring to learn that almost all auto accidents are not caused by carelessness, recklessness, drunkenness, impatience and general incompetence. That they are caused by... neglect of routine maintenance. That would be very far from the world we are living in.
The second order effect might be very strong.
That being said, this will never happen because in America without a car you (avg. american) lose nearly all your ability to contribute to the economy and navigate your surroundings. We can barely align on taking licenses away from people who kill pedestrians in direct fault accidents [1]
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/friends-identify-v...
We can't even do something as "simple" as make election day a national holiday to make sure everyone has time to participate.
From a standstill, all vehicles waiting could accelerate simultaneously rather than create pressure waves due to human reaction times.
With fully-autonomous coordination, might also be possible to do away with traffic lights and other control elements to negotiate scheduling of vehicles moving across each other so they cross intersections using precisely-allocated time slots without stopping.
For example, cars could share the positions of pedestrians and bikes with each other to ensure that even cars with no direct line of sight are aware of them, making the roads safer for everyone.
Likewise, if traffic lights are integrated into the system, the waiting times could be much shorter as cars can dynamically slow down to allow pedestrians to cross, wihtout being contrained by fixed time blocks of green/red.
They don't scale to really busy streets, and one of the failure modes would be perpetually blocked vehicles.
And this still leaves other road users that aren't autonomous cars up in the air.
Which basically removes people.
A simple fact is that faster moving traffic is necessarily less dense; the gaps between vehicles must be larger to account for small variations that matter more and more at speed.
Let's ban distracting billboards in more States, as in Maine, Vermont, Alaska, and Hawaii.
Let's expand annual vehicle inspections to more States.
More surveillance tech, automation, and regulations aren't the answer.
I'm not sure that follows. Cars that communicate can accelerate and brake together even in unexpected situations.
You need the space because of variations in cars; some have better brakes than others, some may be heavier so need more time to slow down, others may be on wetter patch of road, etc.
And one car may not even get the signal, so only slows down when it observes the vehicle ahead of it doing, an observation that needs time.
Or a car starts accelerating as the one in front just stalls.
It may all be better than human reaction times, but for robustness, which is really very necessary, you're going to get the same dynamics.
And this all assumes only good actors; somewhat optimistic in my view.
This isn't entirely true, connected vehicles would still have some delay due to radio propagation time, but it's ns per vehicle instead of hundreds of milliseconds. Additionally, you can entirely compensate for it in ways you really can't with humans.
A horde of cars where 100% of them consistently operate in a failure-free state and have comms that can't be hampered by the environment - that group could maybe do this.
If you put a cam and a computer with a crosswalk it can rigorously figure out (and transmit) someone is crossing the road. Very much more so than a vehicle approaching from around the corner.
Only if there is something seriously wrong with the road system. A highway ought to have higher throughput than any surface road. What you describe is not normal or nominal
But I guess this would work/be status quo for non-autos if we kept the signals so peds and bikes knew they could still cross and probably not get run over by someone who decided to switch back to manual control.
Yup, those trains! They'd have a shorter and more irregular schedule, but autonomous convoys would behave pretty similarly to that. Outside of emergencies like drivers assuming control to swerve into pedestrians, I guess.
Plus, like you say, no need to remove any of the infrastructure of really safety assumptions of today, just augment.
the issue is that unlike trains, roads are so numerous that they are hard to avoid, and it is financially unrealistic to bridge or tunnel for non-motorized users across every road, particularly if you want that crossing to be accessible.
Near me? A few. Not sure how busy, but I get caught on my commute about once a week.
While I totally agree with your points, I don't see how this is any worse than today. Connected convoys don't need to go at every green light (like that one robot planet from Futurama) they can wait for pedestrians. The biggest difference would be clearing intersections quicker.
If anything, it might codify how hostile parts of the US already are to pedestrians, with beg buttons that may or may not work properly. More efficient cycles with less gaps may give people even less time to dart across during a cycle where they may not have the green but there is no cross traffic.
And notably, trains don't stop for pedestrians.
Or another way:
Roads are a shared resource. Train tracks are not.
None of this resembles the way we treat cars at all.
The biggest use of simultaneously acceleration in those situations would be around road maintenance and other situation where road speed or number of lanes are reduced, with heavy congestion as a result.
PLEASE build human scaled walkways _away_ from roadways. In my climate zone, please also provide roofing over them to shade from solar and downpour events.
My dude, this is literally exactly what I had in mind.
Cars are freedom, cars are status, and the people who don’t want them are peons in relation to those who do. This is a fact of living in societies with the best transit in the world. Using it is simply admitting that you’re poor.
Though I suppose, mixed cities will ultimately push cars out, which will separate the two better and allow the car world to do whatever automated works it wants without harming anyone
You can't design the world as anyone is a good actor. Most are indeed good actors, but most and all are different quantities.
That's why the approach should be very careful in what to trust or not. Not only: there are various situation where it's not possible to avoid a crash but there are few possible crash options, the human might choose badly (for him/her, for someone else) but it's a personal choice. A machine choice it's the responsibility of the machine vendor if any. So even if today there are essentially a lack of norms on that topic being "so new essentially not existent", tomorrow we will need to state clearly it a car crash while self-driving ALL consequences, positive and negative must be on the car's OEM. As a result such ADAS will be less and less "acting" trying to protect their OEM more than anyone else, defeating the initial purpose.
The sole solution for this responsibility is that such systems are not made by a company but by an open community, so they are a product of humanity not of some vendor, and we are all partially responsible and partially in control of them. This of course can only exists in a society where universities are OPEN and FREE for all, funded by the public not some private interests, so all can participate depending on individual skills and will, not on wealth. FLOSS must be mandatory to avoid making it a business at all.
Something theoretically possible of course, but very unlikely in current societies...
If the cars could come to a consensus about the maximum common braking ability between them, they could also coordinate all of them stopping at that rate.
As another commenter has pointed out such a system makes life for other road users: cyclists, pedestrians, horses, most uncomfortable (to put it it exceedingly mildly).
How would this work? If even a single car has a malfunction it would cause a massive pile up? The amount of work people will do to avoid using trains is insane
I was at a stoplight the other day and I was about 30 cars back. I could still see when the light turned green. I counted ~30 seconds before the car in front of me moved at all. I did not make it through the light.
If the cars could talk to each other, they could all start moving together (slowly) and then accelerate and spread out, resulting in much higher throughput and preventing traffic jams.
If you actually want practical and safe self driving cars widely deployed it seems obvious that instrumenting roads and making them a better platform for self-driving vehicles is an important part of this process.
To me this work seems like a part of the process of evolving roads from a Ad-Hoc and poorly documented system involving a lot of human guess work into a more robust and reliable platform for self-driving and human driven cars.
A cracked traffic or car signal, a spoofed radio signal, or more simply a malfunctioning sensor from both, is something to watch out for. Then, at what point could the data received be trusted without a real trusted source like a visual of what is really happening?
Collapsing a city or causing an accident could be as simple as tricking vehicles into thinking they have another vehicle in front of them by receiving false data with the codes of legitimate vehicles or traffic signals for example.
IMHO vehicles should not react to data from third parties/external, but to a own -and mandatory redundant- sensoring data within the vehicle.
But even nowadays there are problems with this as owners of cars with automatic proximity braking systems could explain. There is also another problem, when the vehicle is connected to a network to receive an OTA or to modify any type of engineering parameter, it already has its own vector of attack, homologous to when one use the remote key to open and start the car, and the signal is captured and cracked by a third party; We didn't saw manufacturers solving this across all this years.
The article concludes like if the problem were political, a sabotage, but without explaining why the cybersecurity is a real problem.
I'm European, so I'm not sure what lobbies are involved there, for sure they exist, but if we ignore it and look at it from a technical point of view, IMHO the cybersecurity problem should be solved -which I'm not sure can be solved- before moving the money.
I can't speak for everyone in this thread but personally this sounds like a nightmare. If we're dreaming about possible future worlds that are better than what we have, I'd rather have less or no cars. Much cheaper to maintain, not hackable.
That's a big if ;)
Not to be a luddite, but we are many that don't enjoy our cities being designed around car usage. That they take up all space that could have been used for nicer things.
Amazingly enough, working out a cost-benefit calculation between renting on demand vs owning will in fact sometimes turn out in favor of owning.
I don't, though.
If we're going to propose a sci-fi future state of the world that will take a mind-boggling amount of investment, not to mention a giant leap of faith that we'll ever actually get there, I would prefer to reclaim all the space that's currently devoted to car infrastructure and be able to walk to everything.
> practical and safe
This isn't even enough; it would need to be cheap and universally accessible as well. I don't want to live in a society where we've agreed that cars are necessary despite a high and growing number of vehicle fatalities per year, and then provide miraculously-effective safety features [0] that only 1% (or 10% or whatever) of people can afford.
[0]
if about_to_collide()
dont();If we take aviation as an inspiration, where there are lots of great safety-enhancing uses of radio (for navigation, approach, air traffic control, giving information to autopilots, collision avoidance...), we also end up with "every vehicle can be publicly tracked in real time".
No one seems to have managed to get a "don't facilitate mass surveillance" bullet point into the requirements lists for the majority of transportation innovations. And if you don't have that requirement and you build a system using radio signals, then by default you typically do facilitate mass surveillance.
Really ? Individual cars aren't sustainable, you can add more internet of shit in them it doesn't make anything better.
At the end of the day you're still moving 70kg of meat in a 2500kg cage of metal that cost my entire yearly net salary. All we're doing is making them more expensive, more failure prone, harder to repair, &c.
> To me this work seems like a part of the process of evolving roads from a Ad-Hoc and poorly documented system
This is a code monkey take, people in real life do not give a fuck about any of this. It's a road, just be sober, keep your eyes open and drive, it's really not that complex.
That's modern tech doing the only thing it knows, solutions looking for problems nobody has.
Fix licensing, make vehicles safe for those walking/biking not just those in other clown cars.
No amount of driver training can change the fact we have the oldest average driving age in history, and with that comes poor eyesight.
As the addage goes, wanna murder someone? Use a car, it’s an accident don’t you know?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
There's two main contributing factors, weight and distraction.
Weight is easy to tell by looking around. More people than ever are driving around in huge SUVs and pickup trucks.
But the bigger issue is distracted driving. The majority of other drivers I see are on their phones while moving. Almost everybody is checking their phones at intersections. And those that aren't have another distraction, the big tablets built into their cars, the use of which is required to change trivial settings.
Adding more tech won't solve this. Only removing and limiting its use will roll back this trend.
I'm just not seeing an increasing trend overall. There was certainly a notable increase from 2013 to 2016, but that's about all you could say. You'd need 2023-2024 data to see if the recent increase was due to lockdowns.
I dread what cars are slowly turning into. Yet most people are still myopically focused on the drawbacks of touchscreens instead of hardware knobs.
Isn’t this avoided by using your turn signal?
That’s how Mazda’s works
Maybe there's a good reason the safety system of the car is fighting you on this
I also like that if I am following someone slow with ACC it starts to accelerate the very second that I turn on the blinker so I can start passing. My old car would make you wait until it could read that the lane was clear.
The only system that I objectively dont like is the 'travel assist' (lane centering) because I do not like the lane position that it prefers.
This seems like a recipe for disaster when you are in a situation in which you need to respond quickly to an unexpected circumstance.
I thought it might be annoying when I first got a car with LKA, but I've yet to have any complaints about it.
I think that's an odd behavior. As far as I'm concerned, using the signal is just as much of part of a lane change as is turning the wheel. Be in the habit of using it every time and you'll never forget it.
Especially as a pedestrian I think a lot of drivers are basically blind to your existence and then don't bother to signal turns because if they don't notice you then why would they need to warn anyone of what they're about to do with their 6000 pound metal box? And besides, are pedestrians really people anyway?
In my experience it does sometimes make errors, but it also sometimes makes very good assistance, so much so that I've come to depend on it. Have you ever noticed that the dings and chimes are much more frequent when you're looking away from the road?
Rather than being like other commenters telling you to use your turn signals, I'm going to take another approach. I'm going to ask.
Why aren't you using your turn signals?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU
Thank you Ryan from Fortnine.
Forward Collision-Avoidance systems really great.
When I first got my Tesla in 2019, there was one specific overpass that I would go under during my commute that seemed to have a ~20% chance of triggering automatic emergency braking. I got into the habit of preparing to stomp the throttle which would override AEB.
Luckily, a software update came out a few months in that seemed to fix that specific case. Now, I've done 1,300 mile road trips that didn't have a single phantom braking incident.
0: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/09/braking-bad-automatic-emerg...
1: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a26469713/iihs-testing-suv...
0: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/09/braking-bad-automatic-emerg...
Certainly right, but staying focused while driving in countries with a lot of speed traps is impossible. You put your limiter, move at a snail pace and it's truly boring (for experienced drivers - not experienced drivers will be alert and stressed and that's maybe good). As an experienced driver, you either fall asleep or you just use your smartphone or whatever
If driving the appropriate speed is difficult for you to do undistracted, then you need to find ways to improve your driving skills instead of blaming the law for saying that you're a bad driver.
It looks like this is a US-specific issue, which isn't really highlighted in your comment. In other countries, it seems like the "motor vehicle fatality rate" has decreased for the last decade, some years more than others. The three other countries I checked were Australia, Japan and Iceland, as those had comparable pages on Wikipedia as the one you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%22Motor+vehicle...
But most of the safety tech introduced in the last 10 years (or at least that is much more prevalent in the last 10 years) are things like collision avoidance systems, mandatory backup cameras, lane change warnings, etc., that have nothing to do with weight nor distracted driving.
Yes, I agree increasing vehicle weights and distracted driving are a huge problem. But then saying "Adding more tech won't solve this. Only removing and limiting its use will roll back this trend." is a completely unwarranted conclusion.
We cant ignore reckless drivers. Since COVID I noticed a large trend in people strait up not giving a damn about anyone and driving as fast and recklessly as they can. EVERY SINGLE DAY I see street racing on the highway in traffic, speeding, large SUV's bullying smaller cars, people chasing each other in either road rage incidents or racing, and yes swerving around as if they're the only one on the road while playing with phones - utterly insane behavior. I have to drive with eyes in the back of my head.
Just last week a co-worker witnessed someone driving over 100 MPH on a highway with a 50/55 MPH limit while throwing trash out the sunroof and then trying to squeeze between two cars that were in his royal highness' way. They didn't fit, side swiped one of the cars, lost control and caused a severe accident he was almost involved in.
The same week another coworker was forced off the highway by a big stupid jeep who he saw make eye contact with him but didn't care and forced him to swerve onto the grass shoulder.
What the hell is going on in these peoples heads? Why is there so much selfish bravado? Why all the bullying? Why are we forced to be victims to these clowns? Why is no one doing anything about this?
If you drive any of those brands I will treat you like a maniac, and I’m usually right.
For the SUV crowd you have jacked up jeeps with "angry eye" body kits along with a mix of pickups from the major 3 and the asshats in Escalades.
Any BMW is to be avoided.
Fatalities per mile and injuries per mile are down, and the safety/security systems are strictly net benefits. Americans are driving more than in the past and in more vehicles. The real issue is that Americans do t give a shit anymore, are distracted as hell, and in general trust in society has declined. Low trust societies have insane road cultures, and the decaying state of the average driver is a reflection on the decaying state of Anerica trust in society.
The car in front of you could easily send its exact speed, throttle/brake position. If it is following gps, it could broadcast the next turn on its route to help you predict its intentions (turn signals are often lacklusters or too complicated for some drivers)
In traffic, it could help stiffen the elastic by reducing the reaction time either by either telling the driver to get ready or accelerating for them.
The possibilities are infinite once you have a minimum of telemetry.
It's like they were never told "the turn signal is to communicate your intent, in advance" Like at least 0.5 - 1 blocks in advance (depending on speed) on normal surface streets. The whole goal is to give the driver behind you at least 5 seconds to react to that intent.
Like, could you just stand on a bridge on a freeway and send ‘I’m max braking’ signals to all the cars and then they all react to that and stop?
Bearing in mind the incredibly poor tech of most cars - like the keyless entry that you can just boost the signal while the keys are in a house and open the car - I don’t have much faith in car companies to do a good job.
I don’t mind my car reacting to real events actually happening before I know about them, but reacting to signals scares me a bit.
Is there some clever way that they’ll avoid this?
The current situation of 2 tons hunks of stupid metal flying around with only slow reacting humans to maintain safety isn’t optimal either though.
There has got to be some sort of happy medium here
Crossing the road there is a matter of slowly and clearly walking into oncoming traffic, trusting that they will stop or go around you [0]. It kinda works the same on a scooter - you slowly and clearly do the utterly illegal thing that you want to do, and everyone will stop for you or go around you. Riding the wrong way up one-way streets, or on the wrong side of the road, is common and perfectly safe as long as you take it slow and keep your eyes open.
I think this concept of clear communication works better than the conventional system of road traffic controls. IIRC there have been tests done in the UK where removing road traffic controls led to people slowing down and communicating their intentions more, with greater flowthrough and reduced collisions.
Automating this will be interesting. Yes it'll probably work, and accidents will be reduced. But it moves us further into making the act of driving illegal. If we are all safer when the robots drive, then it's reasonable for humans to be disallowed from driving. But is the world a better place if we don't drive our own cars any more?
[0] I have had to explain this to very confused German tourists a few times. "The light is green for me to walk, why are they not stopping?" cries a worldview being shattered.
We can have the same advantages in the west while still keeping the rules-based system, by making roads narrower.
My car already tries to tell me when it thinks I'm about to hit someone or someone is about to hit me. By the time I've looked at the screen to know, I'd have already hit them.
How many of these warnings will eventually cause alarm overload?
That's not to say I'm opposed to safety tech. I think it's a great idea. But there's no way to safely and effectively convey all that information to me while I'm already driving. If this gets rolled out as planned, I can't see how cars won't be constantly dinging and beeping and cause notification blindness, negating the whole effort.
It will lead to countless edge-cases that usurp normal judgement by rational drivers. Example: "The school bus stopped on the railway crossing, because some drunk in a Tesla passed out in the turning lane."
What a silly policy from naive nerd hubris. =3
https://www.cohdawireless.com/
Cohda was started in 2004 by three very smart Information Theorists (Grant, Alexander, Rasmussen), who basically solved the problem of how to get a WiFi/OFDM signal to/from a vehicle moving at speed through a built up city. The company name is Ad Hoc, as in Ad Hoc network, spelled backwards. Cohda's original version was effectively a preprocessor between the WiFi and the antenna, that tamed the multipath channel. Back then they had some impressive coverage maps of the Adelaide CBD, whereby plain WiFi struggled to get coverage in a 100m radius, whilst the Codah system had seamless coverage out to about 1km. They were (and still are?) the leaders in this space.
I have thought for many years that we need to make driving a part of both middle and highschool. Not merely the principles of motor vehicle operation, but the humanities aspect too.
For example, psychology, basic physics and sociology would be integral to the curriculum. It is important to view transportation as closely as possible for what it is. As conscientious driver, I do my best to be courteous and safe, for both selfish and altruistic reasons. I try to apply my understanding of traffic dynamics every time frustration is detected. It is impossible for me to drive without observing stupidity, inefficiencies and systemic flaws. Realizing that I am part of it and not an exception, I try to view others (drivers, bystanders, pedestrians, cyclists etc) with equal or greater importance to myself. I do not tailgate, unless it is a collective circumstance, eg slow high-density traffic. I heed speed limits, general laws, and remain cognizant of signs. I expect unexpected behavior and try to not react beyond necessary correction.
And I piss off a lot of drivers. Traveling the speed limit in the right lane in low density traffic, I will be tailgated or worse. Yet, while mostly driving well within legal parameters, I make good time and often end up ahead of erratic impatient drivers.
I believe that most collisions can be avoided through rational driving practices. But many are never exposed to the concept. A mere pulse is sufficient to receive a driver's license.
Traffic enforcement also seems to be more revenue than safety driven and lacks consistency, eg ephemeral speed traps.
An essay or book could be easily written on this subject. As such an integral, ubiquitous part of society, it is amazing that such minimal attention is placed upon it. The fact that so many lives are at stake seems enough to make a religion of it. We really should do much more, without sloughing responsibility onto technology and the lottery of enforcement. For me it is one of the most outrageously glaring contradictions of expressed values there is, with carnage universally and quietly accepted as collateral damage.
> And I piss off a lot of drivers. Traveling the speed limit in the right lane in low density traffic, I will be tailgated or worse. Yet, while mostly driving well within legal parameters, I make good time and often end up ahead of erratic impatient drivers.
The impatient drivers overtake me but curiously I've never gotten a single ticket nor been in a collision. (I was forced off the road exactly one time)
I know a bit about being forced off the road. Last time it was road rage, but typically it's unintentional.
What I know without any doubt, is that we need to take more responsibility and proactive measures. If we leave it all to technology, we'll all have regrets.
Ride safe!
So the same government department that took around 10 just years to get adaptative headlights approved thinks this will happen in 11 years. Yeah, not going to happen this century.
How would the air travel regulators evaluate this proposal? How does this compare to similar methods in air travel?
If it does involve the cellular network it will face opposition because people don't want to buy another plan and coverage will never really be satisfactory, even if the cell phone industry is able to force every driver to buy a plan for their car.
The real problem is the disregard for pedestrian and bike safety and I don't see anything in "v2x" that helps the situation. In fact, I just see things getting more expensive and a big honking security nightmare.
https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/program_areas/ops-cavet.htm
There is a link to an ongoing test in the downtown area of Tampa, FL. They’ve installed lidar near crosswalks; when a pedestrian is in a crosswalk it broadcasts a “pedestrian in crosswalk” signal that nearby compatible cars hear (they’ve installed receivers in 1000 cars).
But yeah, lidar at every intersection is just plain bonkers.
The risk to privacy isn't a government nefariously shutting down my car, it's a bunch of corporations trading my personal information, and I'm already losing the war
And poison for anyone who values or needs privacy in any way.
There are a bunch of references to "Security Credentials Management System providers" in the DOT document. So it sounds like there will be some attempt to reject self-serving incorrect data, and even a mechanism to report and exclude "misbehaving" devices. But there are lots of gray areas and value judgements in what's allowed to be sent.
The message types are interesting to read (second link below). I thought at first that the Red Light Violation Warning was a message where your own vehicle sends out "Hey, we're blowing this red light, everybody watch out!" But I think that one is intended to be sent by the traffic signal system. But still, if you aren't in control of what your vehicle sends, what's to stop it from broadcasting data you don't want it to send, like "Hey, we're exceeding the speed limit by 17 mph"? Another value judgement that seems like it would be made at some regulatory level. Even if the messages are completely anonymous as claimed, you probably (at a personal level) don't receivers to clue in traffic police to show up further along your route, or have insurance companies try to match those with private roadside license plate reader data. At a societal level I'm sure some people would favor that, and others wouldn't.
https://www.its.dot.gov/resources/scms.htm
https://www.its.dot.gov/research_areas/cybersecurity/scms/SC...
Automated vehicle transportation is a bust. Now Americans think installing a backdoor into a vehicle is going to solve the problem. Smh.
All of this while a majority of the country is suffering from intense heatwaves, increased intensity of storms due to climate change.
Road safety and traffic are solved problems. Look to Tokyo, Amsterdam, Copenhagen. TLDR: provide viable alternatives to driving to move non-essential vehicles and trips off the roads, physically segregate modes, calm traffic and speeds in urban spaces etc etc. This is cheap and easy to do and doesn't require new technology lol.
It's actually hilarious how much resources, time and energy otherwise smart engineers are willing to spend on solving the wrong problem. Optimizing intersections algorithms is a great example. Intersections are best optimized by not having intersections. If there has to be an intersection, make it a roundabout to randomize the flow vs the US style start-stop-start-stop grid of intersections which is GUARANTEED to gridlock BY DESIGN. Let alone that the no 1 thing is to do all the things mentioned above to take non-essential vehicles off the road in the first place.
I have heard 100x more people making Cybertruck jokes but almost never about actually improving safety in any signifcant way. Farming browny points by with low-hanging anti-Musk stuff seems to be more important then anything else for most people.
There is a whole cottage industry of anti-Cybertruck stuff all over the internet, if all those people put their energy into actually explain how to actually improve safty, we would be much better off.
That's a weird kind of blame shifting.
1. Many things that ought to change have already been laid out well in advance. Things like defined limits on how "sharp" the outsides can be or having a crumple-zone front instead of a pedestrian meat-tenderizer. This is especially true in jurisdiction where those recommendations are requirements, and the vehicle cannot be legally sold.
2. Many critiques have obvious solutions like "don't do the dumb thing" or "do it the normal way."
3. Improving safety is normally the job of the car manufacturing company, why would Tesla be any different?
4. If your want very detailed engineering fixes from the internet, tell Tesla to open-source their manufacturing process and pay people for time.
But I’m amazed they are thinking of this. This so awesome.
Plus the FAA will need to do this as we get more electric personal aircraft