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Comment by gfunk911 | Hacker News Reader

This also seems like a good place for some 80/20 value. Doing this for all highways and major roads would be a small fraction of all roads, but likely cover a very large percentage of miles driven. Car drives 90% of the way, and you take over for the first and last couple minutes. Or trucks drive a known route, and somebody meets them at the end.

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I was thinking the same thing. Sure it'd be cool to have your car park itself and all, but I don't mind doing that myself. The value is in dealing with the monotony of commuting or taking a road trip. If I could be doing something else on middle 95% of that 150km trip I take every couple of weeks, that'd be awesome.

The US Interstate Highway system is a very small fraction of total road miles (1%), but carry 25% of traffic (vehicle miles). So yes, the old 20/80 rule applies, for small values of 20 and large values of 80.

Plus their current cars are presumably capable of performing such a "crawling" by being manually driven, perhaps a couple of times over the road. Crowd source the problem one these go on sale (though maybe future versions won't have all this lidar and jazz).

I guess the acquisition of Waze and the investment in Uber will play out really nice for them with regards to the "crawling" of streets you describe. Uber and Waze cover the most important urban areas, where the majority of all miles are driven. At one point they'll probably equip all Uber cars with the right technology to map out the most important territories. Feed in all the data from Waze and you should have a decent starting point for the main urban areas.

I have long wondered why personal cars are being tackled. Surely that's the hardest problem to solve.

Easier to automate would be trains, large container ships, tube trains, planes or buses (fixed route, designated stopping zones).

Granted planes and ships travel in more dangerous regions, but I think they should be flown 99% of the time by computer and pilots only taking over in an emergency.

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