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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

I'm still very skeptical on self driving vehicules to react correctly in non traditional events happening on the road...

Like, fraying your way in a traffic jam to reach the correct lane, which sometimes involve slow but untraditionnal paths.

Or Waiting half an hour for an accident to be cleaned, then looking at the police officer signs telling you to move on the lane coming in the other direction, because they've secured it for a while, etc.

I'm pretty sure we'll have a lot of autonomous vehicles stuck on the roads in a " wait for a human driver to unlock me" mode at the beginning.

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I'm sure the electronic equivalent of traffic cones will appear pretty quickly - the cost won't be much more and the existing ones will be easy to retrofit.

I'm sure there will be a lot of interesting consequences and side-effects of this. I'd be very interested to see the result on the natural environment in 100 years time - with great concentration of people in cities there might be need to restore former wetlands and riverine habitats to ensure sufficient retention of water throughout the year. The shutting down of a myriad of small towns would take a lot of people out of the environment leaving more space for plants and wildlife. The possibilities are endless.

So you can just put a couple of cones across a highway and stop all traffic for a few hours? Cool! I'll bet you can even camouflage the transmitter so that no one can figure out why all traffic has stopped until they come out with a really sensitive detector and realize that there's something stuck 30 feet up in the tree branches instructing all vehicles to go into emergency stop mode.

If the cars are stopping because of the device, I think you can say that they have successfully detected it, and expect that they would provide some explanation as to why they have stopped.

That doesn't solve the problem of localizing the device, but I think you would want the implementation of such a thing to have some robust distance bounding[1], so it might not be a careful, sensitive process, more of walk up to where your phone says it is thing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance-bounding_protocol

You can stop opperations at London Heathrow within 15min with one or two phone calls. Yes, it is that easy. People regularly don't do it because (1) what is good for and (2) what ever it is good for, is it worth paying the damage caused for the rest of your life?

--- In Germany, a live TV-show with 10.000 spectators in the studio (hosted by Heidi Klum) was canceled on Tuesday because of a fake bomb-threat-call. Stuff like that remains the exception.

> fraying your way in a traffic jam to reach the correct lane

That is what makes Elon Musk's branding of his technology so smart. He is not replacing you the driver by a label such as “driverless car” or even excluding you from the driving experience with a “self-driving car” label.

Mr Musk's offer, an “autopilot”, is an opt-out to driving, an aid. Great branding, same technology.

Besides, people consider autopilots to be an old and well-known technology, because it has been used on airplanes.

These scenarios can be solved by immediately triggering a remote driver to connect in and monitor the situation, or even switch to manual control.

How is the remote driver going to immediately know what to do, and immediately know what the surrounding environment is like? Exactly, they won't.

Self-driving cars will never happen.

"Self-driving cars will never happen."

In certain contexts they exist already. You're arguing against something that already exists.

What's going to happen from here is that the context is going to become broader and broader over time.

As it always has.

This is how technology works.

Cameras around the truck and hundreds of hours of Euro Truck Simulator ('cause what else are they gonna do) :-)

> Self-driving cars will never happen.

"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense." [1]

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/442305-you-would-make-a-ship...

Maybe. But is that so much different from the status quo? Agree on situations that require a human to direct traffic, but a lot of times when I'm driving on the 5 between Seattle and Tacoma I'm straight terrified of the other humans not knowing what to do in that construction zone around the Tacoma Dome.

But those are very rare occurrences. It's like asking "how will tablet screens survive a 4 foot drop on asphalt?"

They won't, but it happens so infrequently that it's not an issue.

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