Friendly reminder to European friends, all the "slef driving" programs are trained on Phoenix roads where it hardly rains and never snows. Streets four lanes wide, in most parts. Are you prepared for a bunch of shoddy computers to drive around your homes and schools and cities like the Americans they were trained against?
Also can’t run in Toronto because of the street cars. That thing no European city has. :thonk:
Even in those condition the autopilot can suck and decide to mow down a pedestrian for no reason
I know a thing or two about this technology, so for anyone curious, here's how hard it'll be to expand self-driving cards beyond the American desert.
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Narrower streets: This isn't a huge issue, it should be possible to adapt whatever they have to anything with two or more lanes. There's nothing wrong with single lane roads in and of themselves, but in practice single lane roads are either alternating flow, or tiny residential streets covered in parked cars that might hide hazards, or tiny residential streets covered in pedestrians and businesses that all have to be tracked at once. All of those are a nightmare to make an autonomous vehicle deal with.
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Poorly marked roads: Doing this well is way beyond what anyone knows how to do, even in principle. A very good team could figure out how to navigate a car across a random arrangement of unmarked pavement, but part of how traffic works is an ongoing social agreement inferred from the behavior of other vehicles, and as soon as you're dealing with that sort of thing, forget about it.
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Wet roads: This is just a control problem, and a responsible team should be able to handle it (so, not Tesla).
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Snow-covered roads. The control problem is worse than with wet roads, but more importantly this obscures road markings.
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Rain: Completely destroys the quality of any sensor they're using. Probably doable for a drizzle, possibly also in a short downpour in a dry area, but the clouds of mist that form off of wet roads are way beyond what anyone is going to be able to handle for a very long time.
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Snow: Not quite as bad as rain, but see snow-covered roads.
Let's not forget the classic to fuck with break assistant systems adjusted for US roads: cobblestone roads with steel tram tracks and a covering of wet autumn leaves.
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I have deep personal dread when driving in old cities with fucked up streets and these fucks think the world is a bunch of straight, wide roads?
What in the ACME bullshit is that?
yeah, as soon as i saw what tesla and google are using as test ranges, i knew we'd be completely fucked if that shit is ever let loose on our roads here.
These shits would immediately break down in Boston, even, forget anywhere outside the US
Bricks, street cars, snow, slush, road salt, semi-permanent road construction, marble curbs, jaywalking pedestrians with death wishes, bicycles, dipshit college kids who'd only lived in the suburbs trying to figure out how to get to the green line without getting killed, a million idling Grubhub drivers, prank intersections, inscrutable and conflicting street signs
Reminder the world could be 1000x times better basically tomorrow if we just get rid of cars.
Americans love travelling to beautiful European cities and then coming home and making sure it remains illegal to build a city even remotely worth living in
If we made liveable cities, then all the treats that Americans use to make up for not living in livable spaces wouldnt be nearly as valuable.
I never thought the robotic face-eating leopards I created would eat my face
Ok Americans, a corporation endorsed good urbanism. You are legally allowed to like non-car infrastructure now.
