Yup been saying that all along.. the roads arent ready. The roads need sensors to assist the cars.

https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net...Sw&oe=6211E20F

New technologies that require wholesale infrastructure changes in order to be useful are basically doomed to never get mass adoption. You need something that can function in an incremental fashion.

That said, it's not the lack of sensors that's holding self-driving cars back, it's the idea that you can use a neural net to replace the judgement of a human driver. Real-world driving is a never-ending long tail of special cases, you're not going to solve it without "real AI" that can reason abstractly. We don't have that and we don't have any idea how to build it.

--Ian

That video proves ultrasonic sensors are shit. Stupid thing drove over painted lines and hit a fucking brightly painted pole.

There needs to be something integrated into roadways to tell the car where the fuck the lanes are without having to use optical cameras/sensors to determine them. They are writing so much code -- that's unnecessary -- just to determine the roadway itself.

At a cost of, what, $100K per mile? Plus ongoing maintenance and replacement every time someone damages one or scrapes them up with a snow plow?

That's a recipe for getting about 20 miles of road laid out as a testbed and then nobody ever finds the money to go beyond that. It's a dead end.

They tried this 25 years ago in San Diego: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...436-story.html It worked but it was too expensive.

--Ian

A: This is the random pictures thread. So at the end of this post, I'm going to post a photo.

2: People will repay private companies for the creation of infrastructure in the form of subscription fees, if they perceive it to provide them with value. This is how we have mobile data service everywhere, satellite TV, satellite internet, streaming audio / video services, etc.
2(a): Meaning that you'd only be able to auto-drive on roads that are in-network for your carrier?

iii: What is the appeal of self-driving cars? Seriously. I get it from a "public good" standpoint, but I'm mystified as to why, an individual, would want to pay a bunch of extra money for a car in order to not be in control of the driving experience. There's no incentive for me to want this.

IV: Here is a woman firmly grasping her cock:


https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...912ab266ff.png

You are on a car forum. Therefore, it is relatively safe to assume you like cars, and probably enjoy driving them. But in today's world, that is not the majority opinion.

Many (most?) people treat a car as just another appliance. They want to get from point A to point B directly, without the hassle of public transportation, which often does not go directly to either point. They would rather NOT drive, but just get to where they are going. Cab service provides this, but with built-in delays, and high cost. Rich people have this (limos), but at a very high cost unaffordable to most. A true self-driving car would be considered a godsend to such people.

Edit, picture thread. Cat tree I am building for my furry friends. Mine is made of solid oak.
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...1343046e0a.jpg

Timing belt or Timing Chain... No, Ferrari:


https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...a937d87a62.jpg

That is a handsome cat tree.

And... I'm kind of torn about the rest.

I actually really enjoyed not owning a car during the time I lived in NYC. Cycling, and later jogging to work each day made me feel more immersed in the community than simply moving through it will sitting in a comfortable chair, and at some distance.

But now I live in a place where it'd be highly inconvenient to not have a car, so I have one again.

I honestly don't particularly enjoy driving in the city. But if I have no real choice but to be in a car, then I can't really think of anything else I'd be doing other than driving it.

It's not like I'm going to use those short periods of not-distraction-free time to learn how to speak Mandarin or enjoy a good movie.


When I lived in Carlsbad, CA, I spent a lot of time flying in and out of SAN. A few times a month, on average.

Eventually, I realized that, for any trip longer than a couple of days, it was cheaper for me to hire a black car to get there and back than to park my own car at the airport. And also faster, as they dropped me off right at the curb in front of the terminal, and picked me up inside of baggage claim. (Picture the stereotypical chauffeur holding a sign that says "J. PEREZ.")

So I subsequently spent a lot of time sitting in the back of a Town Car or a Suburban being chauffeured by a Russian in a cheap, ill-fitting suit. And you wanna know what productive things I did with that time? Nothing at all. It was too distracting to read a book (plus motion sickness), and so I spent most of the time just sitting there, staring out the window. The act of "not driving this car" didn't benefit me as compared to "driving this car."



There is a new Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers movie coming out this year. As is becoming commonplace for the purpose of appealing to Gen X, it depicts the characters as having aged in the 30 years since their TV show went off the air, with one of them maturely moving on with his life, and the other still desperately clinging to past glory, including extensive cosmetic surgery (he was converted to CGI, in an attempt to keep pace with modern cartoon characters.)

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...78dabce06d.png

^ That's not fan-art. It's a still from the official trailer.

I drive. A LOT. My typical commute is about 70 miles. If i'm going to a different plant it could be an over 200 mile commute, or anywhere in-between. My daily drivers (used to be the teal NB) and now the G6 had or currently has over 200k miles on them. The company cars i drive have 208k and 275k currently. Not to mention all the travel i do across the country with the race team.
My dream is to be able to get into a self driving car enter a destination and not touch another control except for climate and radio until i got there. I don't want none of this bullshit where you gotta keep your hand on the wheel, or your eyes open. I want full on, 100% reliable autopilot. It has to work in snow and ice too.
Much like manually removing rock hard sodium hydroxide from between anodizing tanks, there just isn't enough time in the day to be manually driving a car for hours on end and not occupy yourself with other work. I'd pay a subscription fee for automated driving, but again it has to be FULLY automated, not this BS we have now.

The real question is, how do we automate driving while still having manual drivers on the roads? Because as a car person, i want both worlds and i think we should be able to have both if we choose.


New GP out of New Zealand
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...ea0c737a08.jpg

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...d92afa28fd.jpg

OMG, this is proof that NZ is planning to attack Australia!

Kiwis are a cunning lot, they got rid of their air force years ago, claiming that it was too expensive and that they didn't need one anyway because they were so remote.

In truth, they've been working on their own next-next-next-generation fighter, capable of functioning on water, air or in space.

This one has been camouflaged to look like some sort of jet-boat but note that they don't show the underside, which obviously has laser-cannons or maybe stealth coverings that house the laser-cannons, missiles and the "Kiwi-bomb" (supposedly designed to make everyone speak like a New-Zealander so that they can understand non-Kiwi accents).

Hmmm.

You know how when you use certain automated, web-based tools to do something like identify whether or not a photograph contains a duck, and it turns out that there are just some folks in India looking at photos and then saying whether or not they contain ducks (or similar)?

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mN7WYI_EA...600/duck+2.jpg


But I'm with you. Barring any major advancements in artificial intelligence (like, HAL-9000 level advancements), I don't see automated cars becoming reliable enough to deal with real-world situations such as "there are no perceptible lane markings, because this is Chicago," or "there are no perceptible lane markings, because it is snowing," or "no, dumbass, that's the trolley lane" or what have you.

GPS works poorly downtown when you're in the canyons formed by the tall buildings. And it doesn't work at all when you're on the lower-level roadways. Or driving under the elevated tracks.

And say what you will about humans (half of them are, after all, of below-average intelligence), our monkey brains have evolved to do a pretty good job of perceiving our environment, identifying things around us, and reacting accordingly.

I read an article posted not that long ago (Ford motor company and google joint) that explained how just adding a special blend of something into the road line paint would pretty much solve all these issues.
They were going to do it here, on I-94 and it was going to be for trucks and equipped vehicles.

Here is an article about the lane / highway use.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mich...ructure-2020-8

Even if it was just for highways it would be a good solution.
Now, i think the other big issue is that when an automated car gets into an accident, who is to blame? The driver, the car company, the DOT, no fault? Sounds like a lawyers paradise.


https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5568a52f61.jpg

This! People are so used to car crashes that it's just an expected part of being a road user. But a car crash caused by an autonomous car? That's something widely feared.
I have a Tesla with FSD, but it really doesn't seem to be much better than the autopilot model S I had back in 2016. The computer in that Model S is a calculator compared to the current FSD computer. I'm with Erat with my desire to have a full autopilot car... but also I run a driving school.
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...f54c96680c.png

... right up until the point where the gas company has dug up part of the road, and has a few random pylons set up, and us meat-sacks automatically recognize "Ok, this is a situation where I'm going to need to cross over the solid yellow line on the left, into what would normally be an oncoming traffic lane, and that's the safe and correct thing to do here because even though I can't see them directly, social custom tells me that the oncoming traffic has obviously also been diverted, and I know this because I'm a hella-evolved ape who knows how to figure shit out on the fly," and the autonomous car, whose sole occupant is busy masturbating while looking at photos of Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, follows the special-paint-line (which isn't covered up because the job foreman is having a bad morning, having previously gotten ripped-up drunk after discovering that his wife was actually lying when she claimed to be really into the Marvel Comic movies) right into the hole.

No.

There is precisely one self-driving car which I would ever trust, and even then only if I knew with certainty that the bad guy hadn't secretly switched the magic chip that causes it to want to kill me in order to sabotage the Knight Foundation and allow him to seize control of the tech company which his recently deceased father founded, and then left in his will to his (trustworthy) old college buddy rather than his (sociopathic and disloyal) son.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...b6a8c5465c.png

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...70b4fbbdcd.png

The previously mentioned accident would be the fault of the contracted road construction company who either didn't have the correct Society for Autonomous Transportation (SAT)-Certified traffic redirection cones or who didn't face them correctly towards oncoming traffic.
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...58aa95a1af.jpg

I call an audible.