I like the modern world and its safety features. Things (cars, planes, food, etc.) are generally safer but I just do not really trust any of the people that would be writing these rules. I fear the regulatory capture aspect of it and what it might mean to me trying to get to the grocery store. I only drive a three or four times a week (most of that is short duration rural driving).
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.
It's worth noting that this is 100% about providing more information to vehicles rather than requiring vehicles to use the feature.
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.
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.
Rear cameras are required now, or will be in a few years. Dunno if this is a California thing or national, but just like the third brake light, this is already happening.
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.
> It'll almost certainly never be mandatory to be road legal but it'll probably be a standard feature on most new vehicles.
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.
We already have safety rules, but those are ignored!
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!
> 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
People do get kidnapped at traffic lights. Here's an incident of it happening in Florida a few months ago.
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.
But the comparison we are making is different - do people create a fake traffic light, because that is really easy; and I have never heard of it happening.
Ofcourse there are places where vehicles have to stop naturally, you can’t avoid that.
A convincing set of fake traffic lights requires a meaningful amount of time and equipment, as well as a plausible set of crossroads or roadworks.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
Are you familiar with V2X? The concept is actually specifically to help pedestrians and bicyclists. It's essentially just a LTE or WLAN link (which most modern cars already have and that costs less than 100usd) that would allow intersection cameras, etc to report useful information back to vehicles.
i.e. the city can have infrastructure watch for pedestrians on crossings (or even just know the crossings are active or the light is red) and report it to vehicles approaching. This makes assisted driving tech safer for everyone involved.
It also generally just adds a lot of opportunities for QOL improvements. An example is parking. The city infra can tell the vehicle (or your phone) where the closest open parking space is relative to your destination and handle scheduling spaces so that you get the space the first time around.
And importantly the cities that have been pioneering this tech have been pushing it while also pushing separated bike lanes, improved transit, more distinct street vs road distinctions, etc.
This tech is something that has been in development since the 90s and it's now reaching maturity to the point where modern cars could adopt it today, older semi-modern cars could be trivially upgraded, and it can see widespread use in 10-20 years.
Also it's not the first line of defense for pedestrians but rather one of many that can be rolled out now while also pushing other material benefits.
There is a gigantic difference between 'this technology has some useful applications' and 'this is fundamental to improving road safety'. And there is even a more gigantic difference between cost and useful how useful it is.
Again, we know how to make gigantic gains in road safety. Its not difficult, its proven technology, its cheap, it can literally be done quickly. The only question is will of politicans. That's it.
First of all, its already incredibly absurldy expensive how the US currently does traffic. There are far, far to many traffic lights and traffic lights are expensive. Far to many lanes and far to wide, incredibly expensive. That again makes traffic signaling more expensive. Now in addition to traffic lights you need cameras everywhere, often covering 8 lane stroads, and then you need comptuers to process all that data. And do so correctly under difficult conditions. Installations of these system will be hugely expensive.
You can already compare your avg traffic intersection between the Netherlands and the US. The US often only has 1 sensor while the Dutch have many more. US intersections still operate based on completely outdated signaling orders for the most part (not to mention completly unsave and unfriendly for anything but cars). So when in the US most towns can't even configure their basic signaling orders in an efficent way, but you want them to do complex video image analysis and messaging? How does that make sense?
Again, we know how to make things cheaper and much, much safer. And it doesn't need fancy technology. We don't need people with PhD in data science to implement this.
If you want to make an argument that some of this has some uses, sure, whatever. I honestly don't think anything you mentioned is really all that complelling but I guess its possible.
> The city infra can tell the vehicle (or your phone) where the closest open parking space is
This is great, if your goal as a city is maximum utilisation of parking space, but that shouldn't be the goal in the first place.
If cities actually listen to experts on how to actually manage parking correctly, finding a parking spot wouldn't be hard in the first place.
> And importantly the cities that have been pioneering this tech have been pushing it while also pushing separated bike lanes, improved transit, more distinct street vs road distinctions, etc.
That just means that the lobbies pushing this stuff have successfully done their job despite far more important things. No city in the US has even begun to fully implement modern traffic practices. Playing around with this V2X thing and investing money into it is foolish.
In the actual countries where they take safety seriously, you know where they actually successfully have reduced traffic accidents and death. In those countries you hear very little about V2X and the almost universal thing you hear from all the actually successful experts is that road infrastructure needs to be changed according to the newer standards. Most nations did gignatic damage to themselves in last 50 years and all of it needs to be undone.
I'm sure those governments have V2X somewhere, but its simply not what most actual traffic engineers in those countries talk about. This V2X stuff is something car companies and lobbiest are primarly pushing. Its mostly popular with tech people. Most actually existing organisation for traffic safity are pushing what we know actually works.
> It's essentially just a LTE or WLAN link
Most vehicles can barley even software updates at all. And most old cars simply wont be updated with everything need to fully support this stuff. And even then most people on motorcycles and bikes don't have a great way of receiving that information. And there tons of old cars who want have it, so you can not realy on this for the next decades anyway.
> This tech is something that has been in development since the 90s
And designing streets without killing unbelievable amounts of people has ...
> Now in addition to traffic lights you need cameras everywhere, often covering 8 lane stroads, and then you need comptuers to process all that data. And do so correctly under difficult conditions. Installations of these system will be hugely expensive.
I don't know where you live but I don't think I've been anywhere where 8 lanes is anything remotely close to standard. The busiest parts of most interstates may have 5 or 6 lanes and they don't have intersections but otherwise I don't think I've seen an intersection with more than 2, maybe 3 lanes (and an additional turning lane on each side). The only place I could think of like that is Texas but even then they are massively pushing changes to decrease car usage in general to the point they are investing billions in comprehensive high speed rail networks.
And you don't need lots of compute power to do what these systems are doing. They are doing basic shape checks across a narrow column and you can do that at the crosswalk on a five dollar DSP.
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> If cities actually listen to experts on how to actually manage parking correctly, finding a parking spot wouldn't be hard in the first place.
> That just means that the lobbies pushing this stuff have successfully done their job despite far more important things. No city in the US has even begun to fully implement modern traffic practices. Playing around with this V2X thing and investing money into it is foolish.
The cities that are implementing this are listening to experts and they are solving the problem with infrastructure redesigns but again, that takes literal decades. Planning for changing an intersection to a roundabout or separating out a bike lane may take 5+ years before it even breaks ground and there's not the capacity to do that construction all at once anyways so you have to stagger it out.
So you are at the point we are now. The ball is in motion but the "real fix" still has decades before it actually comes to fruition.
This V2X system however is a decent bandaid while the actual fix rolls out and its full rollout window is 10-15 years rather than 50-75 years. So you can push this today and see some level of harm reduction while you wait for the actual fix to come around hopefully before you die.
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> In the actual countries where they take safety seriously, you know where they actually successfully have reduced traffic accidents and death. In those countries you hear very little about V2X and the almost universal thing you hear from all the actually successful experts is that road infrastructure needs to be changed according to the newer standards. Most nations did gignatic damage to themselves in last 50 years and all of it needs to be undone.
Yes. And the cities that have been pushing for this tech have been trying to make those exact same changes as well. The issue is that most of the changes that would ideally solve this problem won't be comprehensively rolled out for over 50 years. You can change construction standards and push for pedestrian first designs (which many of these cities are doing) however actually pushing those changes out to the streets takes decades of gradual construction and redesigning parts of the city.
The difference is that this doesn't have to be a comprehensive solution. You can add it here and there in problem areas as you slowly roll it out but this tech is cheap. Probably 1000 USD per intersection. And you can add it without redesigning the entire intersection or the entire road.
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> Most vehicles can barley even software updates at all. And most old cars simply wont be updated with everything need to fully support this stuff. And even then most people on motorcycles and bikes don't have a great way of receiving that information. And there tons of old cars who want have it, so you can not realy on this for the next decades anyway.
Sure bikes and motorcycles will have limited exposure to this but they can use their phones as beacons in this ...
You keep saying that. But a bandaid is easy to install and helpful. Putting lidar stuff around every intersection and all the other equipment needed is not a banded.
Its a fundamental reinforcement of currently existing patterns.
Changing infrastructure doesn't take 50 years if you are actually serious about.
> Is your proposal "We should do absolutely nothing else ever until THE ONE TRUE FIX is complete and we are long since in retirement?" because that makes absolutely no sense.
No my proposal is 'use the already incredibly limited fund as efficiently as possible'. Not sure why you are so determined to argue about this.
> quality of life feature relatively easily and cheaply
I believe it when I see it.
You know what is for sure easier? Dropping 10 concrete blocks in an intersection and turning it into a roundabout.
> It is by no means the only thing the DOT is doing.
The DOT and especially state DoT have been the biggest offenders in road safety and most of them have not even acknowledged the problem. But I guess they have you to shill for their 'efforts'.
> So far this project has paid out less than 100 million USD and there's no chance it'll get anywhere close to 1 billion USD in funds spent.
With all cities all over the US implementing this plus all the changes to all the cars? You got to be joking.
> Considering the actual fix to this problem will cost hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars invested over decades
False. The actual fix saves you money compared to the status quo. The sooner and the more aggressive you do it the more money you save.
While this technology re-enforces the status quo and provides further excesses for not doing the right things. Instead of actually fixing the problem you put hopes on the tech-solution instead.
If you want to use cameras for something useful, use it to give everybody a speeding ticket. That far more appropriate use of that kind of technology.
Funny how when it comes to re-enforcing the status quo high tech solution are all the rage, when it comes to actually solving the problem of speeding, high tech solution aren't welcome.
> You keep saying that. But a bandaid is easy to install and helpful. Putting lidar stuff around every intersection and all the other equipment needed is not a banded.
Not every intersection. The plan is for 85% of the signalised intersections in the top 75 metro areas. There are around 400k signalised intersections in the US out of the 15 million intersections total. That's around 2.5% of intersections if you assume every signalised intersection will be included. Realistically the number affected by this plan is closer to 2% (~320k). And that is over the course of 12 years.
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> Changing infrastructure doesn't take 50 years if you are actually serious about.
It actually does if you are trying to do it at the scale of a continent. And I don't mean this as a "oh but the US is different" kind of thing. You can do things at scale and all but things take time. The Netherlands did it in 20-30 years but they have 10 times the density of the US and they are a unitary state that can authoritatively just change things and everyone downstream has to listen. The US DOT can set standards, pull levers, and incentivize adoption but it's ultimately up to the states to do the work (outside of federal roads which make up a small fraction of the roads in the US).
So lets say it takes twice as long. That's around 40-50 years. And that depends on whoever runs the federal government or the DOT not saying "fuck this woke commie shit" and halting all progress (which Trump did with V2X after the Obama admin started a major push for it).
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> No my proposal is 'use the already incredibly limited fund as efficiently as possible'. Not sure why you are so determined to argue about this.
The US DOT currently has more cash than they really know what to do with. Biden & Congress allocated them 660 billion USD to spend over a 5 year window ending in 2026 and currently they've spent less than half of that despite tripling their spending. The main limiter isn't funding. It's capacity and political capital. The USDOT literally has states refusing unconditional, no strings attached funds for political reasons (see FL rejecting hurricane & flood hardening funds for transportation infrastructure).
This is something that some crews and departments can do that provides benefits without being inordinately expensive. Even if it costs several billion USD (which it won't) it'd be less than 1% of the sudden flush of funds that the USDOT literally cannot spend fast enough.
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> You know what is for sure easier? Dropping 10 concrete blocks in an intersection and turning it into a roundabout.
Good luck with that. Most intersections are not large enough for that without making the roads completely inaccessible to Class 8 vehicles (heavy construction vehicles and semi trucks).
I am pro roundabout. I am also pro separation of streets and roads as well as limiting traffic on streets however you need massive infrastructure redesigns to make that viable. I've sat through the meetings for this in my own community and I have family who work on permitting for this kind of thing very regularly so I know quite a bit about the struggles in making these improvements a reality. It's frustrating to see it take forever and for projects to get cancelled or delayed for reasons I personally think are unnecessary but I understand why it's done this way and that it's not just a matter of "the people in charge don't care". The people who spend every day working on this stuff care a lot and are doing as much as they can but this is really complex and there are a lot of moving parts and legal consideration.
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> With all cities all over the US implementing this plus all the changes to all the cars? You got to be joking.
It was a bit of hyperbole yes. But if you want to do the math on it, the USDOT estimates the cost of installation after labor, planning, etc is 5000-7000USD per signalized i...
“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.”
The crosswalk pedestrian detection is using LIDAR fwiw. Provided the vehicle was equipped with V2X and the crosswalk had pedestrian detection it'd go something like this:
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.
You missed the point entirely - imagine LIDAR is broken, same outcome results - tech based excuse for dangerous behaviour.
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.
I didn't miss the point. That's an entirely separate argument.
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.
You are still at fault for hitting a pedestrian who isn't even using a crosswalk but is just walking across the road so that argument still doesn't work.
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.
My actual commercial, real car, have some ADAS, some times every let's say 1000km driven it decide I'm nearly crushing on someone else triggering not needed "phantom" breaks, while I might have some other cars/bike nearby my rear bumper, normally with automatic braking on parking it does not sense the void so if I trust the system and go back without looking I might and up downhill...
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...
And vast majority of them are due to drunk drivers, so if you used technology to detect a drunk person behind the wheel you'd cut this number in half if not more, but somehow this has less political support than mandating all cars to have expensive and complicated systems which don't do anything about the main problem of drunk driving.
If you mean the ones that are just a painted strip on the ground, then OK, but for existing traffic lights controlled ones it doesn't seem unreasonable at all. Sensors to detect pedestrian and/or car presence are already extremely common. E.g. all modern [1] pedestrian crossings in the UK have similar sensors, which can extend the crossing time if it detects someone still in the road. And of course your local drive thru can detect your car pulling up, though usually by induction coil
Not every crosswalk. This is explictly only for signaled intersections/crosswalks. i.e. those that already have a pushbutton, a walk sign, and a stoplight.
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
>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.”
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.
This is a strawman argument and you know it. Cars already have pedestrian avoidance technologies, and pedestrians are not required to do anything special to avail themselves of the benefit of those features.
I wish that the safety of the people outside of motor vehicles received at least as many resources (funding, research, legal) as the safety of motorists -- who are cause of these risks in the first place.
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.
And everything is so partisan. It does not seem to matter what is up for discussion. If party A is for it then party B is against (or vise versa). I like the notion that cars could have extra safety features but as is noted in other posts there are low hanging, lower cost, existing solutions that are not being implemented.
By all means lets look into some of the tech solutions. But politicians (policy makers and pundits) are not the ones to listen to.
The solution is one that is unpopular to a good number of consumers, it's to make cars smaller, lighter, and slower.
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.
I completely agree on all accounts. Heavy vehicles such as pickup trucks should require a CDL... and drivers should lose it when they are found driving recklessly.
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.
> Heavy vehicles such as pickup trucks should require a CDL...
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.
I grew up in rural New Zealand, on a dairy farm. I agree that the needs of suburban and rural communities are very different from the needs of urban communities, but what confuses me is why Americans (and increasingly, Kiwis) need a vehicle the size of a Dodge Ram rather than one the size of a 1990 HiLux ute [1].
The reality is that many people with a Ram are towing toys (boats, ATVs, etc) or, as you say, a travel trailer, not a work trailer. Which brings us to the question of need vs want.
Plus, if work vehicles became lighter, work trailers would be forced to as well.
> 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?
> Well depends what you need to do with, of course.
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
Let me help you with that. They don't. If 1 in 50 1500 owners ever hook the thing up to anything heavier than a utility trailer (these can cheerfully be towed by a VW golf) I'll kiss your ass. They're also bullshit for hauling materials since a big chunk of the cargo space got eaten by the now pervasive luxury full sized back seat. The following is an abridged list of tells that a truck owner would be better off with a station wagon:
- 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
- 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. =/
How frequently does your driveway need new gravel that you are justifying a vehicle for that purpose? Do you transport gravel more frequently for your driveway than your children?
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?
I went down a similar path where I considered getting a pickup for hauling the occasional project material around. I ended up with a hatchback that covers 90% of use cases. The other 10% I can just rent a truck for a few hours to cover.
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.
We have an SUV also and that does pretty well for children and shopping. We need 2 vehicles as jobs are different directions and I bought the most fuel efficient small truck (colorado) on the market at the time of purchase (which is more fuel efficient that the SUV we have, by 2-10 MPG).
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)
Back in Sacramento I saw a 1500 with a decal of mud on their shiny spotless truck. They went out of their way to announce how useless the vehicle actually was.
Who says the car has to be small? There were no SUVs when I was a kid; people drove small families around in sedans, and larger ones in station wagons - later, minivans. It worked fine, and this could all be done again.
Who's pretending I should - I'm just some schmuck on the internet! But it's a matter of plain historical fact that trucks and SUVs took over the American market as a consequence of policies established by the US federal government which made trucks more profitable for manufacturers and ordinary cars less so. Why should we not propose that the mistakes made in one session of Congress ought to be corrected by another?
> why do you get to dictate that someone should drive a minivan instead of a truck?
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.
As a southerner and an owner of a 1500 I say absolutely prioritize to cut down on pedestrian deaths. I can get a different truck and it'd piss off all the right people.
I live in the Deep South, where I've gotten around on foot, on a bicycle, and by car. It's clear that some drivers see me as a nuisance when I'm walking, but I don't really see that as my problem.
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.
> Heavy vehicles such as pickup trucks should require a CDL
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.
It's even more ridiculous than all that. We had "large" work-ready trucks as long as vehicles have been on the road that were all noticeably smaller in every dimension except payload. At some point suburban dads flipping the fuck out over their own notional masculinity drove the truck market off a damn cliff. Now 100/1500 series trucks are complete bullshit for towing and can't even fit a full sheet of plywood in the back without dropping the tailgate or propping it up on something. I swear I'm -this- close from trading my full sized truck in for one of those weird little Japanese deals with the actual full sized bed and built in dump (!!) and just hire out my towing to someone else.
It's really silly how few trucks you see with 8 foot beds anymore. Half of the stuff built now has a shorter bed than one of my S10s (6-7ft), and loading sheet lumber in a shorter bed really really sucks (you've either got to leave the tailgate open or prop it up on the tailgate, and either way you've now got a pretty serious liability that you've got to strap down real well). The trend towards unibody trucks is also strange since it means you can't pitch the pickup bed for a more useful flatbed or a Reading bed. I used to wonder why trucks didn't come off the lot with at least a tommy gate and a ladder rack, but I've since come to realize the vast majority of people (especially people purchasing half ton trucks) would never use or even know what to do this those.
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 owned two separate small sized Nissan trucks and they were great for hauling. When I needed to haul full 4'x8' sheets of stuff I used a little box frame I made from 2"x6" lumber that I put near the tailgate so that sheets rested on that and the wheel wells.
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.
I keep 2 8 foot 2x4s in the back of my truck at all times for hauling sheet materials. Having hard skids in place makes loading and unloading easier and ensures stuff like drywall and doorskin doesn't get taco'd up. This is a deeply stupid problem to have and I often wish I had a 70's era Ranger or F100 with a new-ish power train shoehorned in.
Yup. I'm from a farming community and basically all the farmers keep around circa 90s trucks because those had sensible beds and weren't 20ft off the ground.
Pretty sure the tiny bed on my grandfather's 1970 Datsun is larger than the beds on some of these behemoths.
> suburban dads flipping the fuck out over their own notional masculinity drove the truck market off a damn cliff.
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)
It has to do with wheel base and fuel consumption. Trucks are exempt from many parts of the fuel guidelines. Yet there is a segment of our population that need/want trucks. However, try buying a small truck in the US. It is pretty tough to do so, because of those regulations. The regulations need to be revisited to make more sense, but for some reason they are set in stone.
The what now? Tacomas are still a thing are they not? And both Ford and Chevy revamped and reintroduced their mid-sized truck offerings in the last 5 years.
Where I am in Europe almost all the 'trucks' used by construction and road repair crews are Mercedes Sprinter or similar with a bed at the back and fold down sides. Usually they have a higher load rating which requires a C license (equivalent of CDL), but some can be driven on a standard car license (max gross weight 3.5t).
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 bicyclist, Dodge Rams are easily the hardest (un-raised) vehicles on me for visibility, short of full sized tractor-trailers. I cannot see over the hood while on my bicycle, so presumably neither can anyone on the other side see me. Despite being sold as light-duty, the engine compartment appears to me to be much larger than even a medium-duty box truck (many, but not all of these are cab-forward designs which complicates comparison).
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.
Someone with 2 previous DUIs on their record hit a car while extremely drunk, fled the scene, and ended up in a fight with a police officer who tracked them down. They still have their driver's license. There's a lot of space between where we are now and the death penalty for damaging a few plants.
Rubicon III was a planet in Star Trek with draconian capitol punishment laws, what does that have to do with revoking driver licenses from DUI convicts?
Did you not watch the episode? In addition to the ethics of whether to honor what you view as an unjust law simply because it's the law it also explores a society where all crimes are unforgivable and there is no notion of "paying your debt to society." It being capital punishment is the least interesting thing about it.
Taking away someone's driver's license forever is the milder version of the situation. Does it feel just for someone in their 40s to not be allowed to drive because they got a DUI in their 20s? Can someone who has a DUI really never regain full status and privilege in society? If you knew they would never drive drunk again does society still benefit from this indefinite punishment? If they are forever corrupted by their crime would it be okay to kill them if that's what we decided the punishment was?
> Can someone who has a DUI really never regain full status and privilege in society?
So you recognize that your neighborhoods are planned so poorly that lacking a driving license relegates you to a lesser status and privilege? Why not address that car dependency, rather than letting drunks continue to drive? Because, believe it or not, there are people out there living without a driving license through no fault of their own.
Because the justice system will
be waiting until long after I'm dead for that to happen. My city is this year removing large swaths of our public transportation. If you want to work a job in the department of transportation they don't allow you to rely on public transportation to get to work. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
Jesus, we're talking about taking away someone's *privilege* to drive a dangerous object around their fellow people after they've shown multiple times they aren't responsible enough.
Which can be the equivalent of preventing you from getting or maintaining a job in many places in the US. Yes, we need to fix that sad situation. No, the judges who need to decide on punishment can't change that situation.
If a sex offender gets an order to stay away from schools then that also might prevent them from getting or maintaining a job in many places in the US but that's just the result of their own actions.
> there seems to be an arms race between pickup manufacturers to place the headlights as high as possible.
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.
I believe the regulations are still in force. But I have a hunch that the regulations have not kept up with progress in the technology of light sources, and may be based on the assumption that the source is an incandescent filament.
> may be based on the assumption that the source is an incandescent filament.
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.)
First off, your night vision is 'destroyed' by light coming back from the road etc from your own headlights. It takes minutes to develop, and even very low levels of light 'destroy' night vision.
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 h...
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)?
All of that notwithstanding, I'm still blinded much more by the oncoming headlights (ultra bright white LED pinpoints) of new cars and trucks than I am by older cars.
To add on to this: We need to regulate the use of PWM modulation in external LEDs on vehicles. Too many manufacturers are using 120Hz - 200Hz modulation frequency which are easily detectable by the human eye when motion is involved. You'll know when you're looking at a car with PWM headlights when at night they look like they are blurring.
So a diode is a constant-voltage device. If you put a resistor in series and run a line voltage above the diode's voltage than the current will be limited by ohms law.
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.
According to [1] the maximum height since 1968 is 54" which is almost undoubtedly too high for passenger vehicles. [2] Shows a huge jump in following-glare discomfort going from 870mm (34.25") to 1120mm (44").
Most recent light duty pickups drive like ass too. I've rented a Ram and a Silverado recently and between them sitting absurdly high stock, having a ludicrously high belt line, and both too much sound deadening in the cab and the most distant dead feeling pedals and steering, it's sort of surprising people don't hit more stuff with these. Sitting in those trucks feels like I'm in a bigger class 5 truck, for no good reason. The beds sit stupidly high too. It's way easier to be attentive and connected in older trucks (mid-2000s and older Chevys for me), and they don't drive like total ass.
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.
There are trucks and there are truck shaped cars. The law should differentiate between them. You want a truck exemption from fuel mileage - then it better be a truck.
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 came of age to drive in the 90s, and the first two pickups I drove were a 1984 ford ranger and a 1990 Toyota Pickup. Those were both what I would call "value" pickup trucks. They weren't fancy, but they moved shit around well.
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.
I don't completely disagree with you, but the main factor is really speed. Golf carts top out at 15mph and at that speed pedestrians don't die when they are hit by trucks either.
Speed, tall and blunt hoods, and the piss poor visibility all affect how dangerous a vehicle is. That is why I singled out pickup trucks; not that they are the only problematic motor vehicle on the roads nowadays.
Giant trucks are entirely unnecessary. Most work is done with a work van not truck now. Trucks can’t even carry sheet goods sensibly even more. Even if they can the beds are so high as to be impractical loading and unloading.
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.
The other, equally unpopular, solution is more stringent standards for getting a license and mandatory periodic re-tests to confirm you still know how to drive. It's way too easy to get a license in North America and many people forget everything they needed to learn to get one in short order.
Within city limits, certain types of large vehicles should always be allowed, like public transit, emergency response, and commercial delivery trucks. Those drivers already get special training and/or special licensing.
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?
What is a behemoth in your opinion? I drive a Camry and if I have my step daughter I am short a seat. If I have an adult friend and all my kids I am short 2 seats. If I travel and don’t even take my step daughter or another adult it is extremely cramped with any sort of baggage. The next sized up vehicle like an suv or minivan still is not that big for me. So I am just curious do you have an example of a car that you would consider a behemoth?
> What is a behemoth in your opinion? I drive a Camry
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.
Fuel savings are not erased, but they are eroded. With the technology we have small, lightweight gas cars could be incredibly efficient. Consumer preferences as well as safety regulations have kept fuel economy down.
Weight wouldn't improve fuel efficiency as much as some people might think, especially at highway speeds, drag is a big factor. The huge reduction in most EV range when towing arises not really from the towed mass but mainly the increased drag, as one example of this. There are loads of other good reasons cars should be lighter though.
But it would help some. Less than the weight, you would simply just need a much less powerful engine. So the model is not: "imagine a 3,500 lbs sedan if it only weight 3,200 lbs." -- the model is "imagine an 86 horsepower engine which is sufficient because the car weighs 1,500 lbs." That would be significantly more efficient.
Cars are built for drivers, any inconvenience they cause for others is a problem for someone else to solve /s
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.
Imagine all these money being invested in building and refining public transportations and improving the zoning laws so the city don’t spread out but “spread up”.
This is exactly why I, a blind pedestrian, are getting more and more weary of the future. AV freaks always tell me I am not supposed to be afraid. That doesnt help at all. We are a small minority that gets forgotten about regularily. I would be surprised if the same didn't apply to AVs.
Why would motorists care? About 1/4th of killed car occupants didn't care about their own life when they decided not to put on the seat belt before the last car trip.
I'm not pro Cybertruck. But people collectively losing their mind over it is ridiclous. Other trucks are more common and more unsafe.
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.
> I have heard 100x more people making Cybertruck jokes but almost never about actually improving safety in any signifcant way.
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.
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).
I'm totally in support for reserving RF spectrum for this and can imagine many scenarios where low-cost, low-power RF transmissions would improve road safety (I've just braked really hard; I've just crashed; I'm an emergency vehicle stopped in the road; etc).
But yeah, lidar at every intersection is just plain bonkers.
Could you elaborate? Communication is itself a connection. The complaint isn't that the cars are connected to the internet, it's that they're connected and communicating with each other.
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).
Maybe I missed the meaning, but with all of the other threads about connected cars, it's all about connected to the internet.
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.
They need to communicate somehow. That is a large a attack surface and bad actors could inflict a whole lot of damage. I'd say we take it slowly before we jump headfirst into this.
Thing is, there's absolutely no way to make this safe, ever. Not going to happen. No software of even the tiniest complexity has ever been secure, and pre-zero days are used for years often prior to discovery.
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.
How do you do remote assistance without networking? Is your idea for data offload and system updates that someone walks over and plugs an Ethernet cable into the side every night?
"My idea"?! I am not espousing an idea, simply stating actual fact. Software is not secure, never has been, never will be, and its use should be considered with the logical concept that "this will be hacked".
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. ...
It's clear from that wall of text that you're not super familiar with autonomous vehicles. That's fine, no one knows everything. I'll try to clear up a few of the more glaring misconceptions.
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.
First, the idea that you rarely need to update maps is wrong.
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:
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').
Sorry but it'll happen regardless since the incentives are too strong. Imagine highway lanes in the future that only allow cars that support communication protocols – say goodbye traffic.
Yes it will be called the grandma protocol. “Unfortunately you are not driving to the standards of this road and will now be pulled off the road to wait for others who can actually drive to get home. If you are experiencing an emergency please say emergency and assistance will be sent to your location. Would you like to watch some ads while you wait?”
Holy shit I’d support this. Far too many incompetents on the road, and yes they should be required to wait for better drivers.
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.
it's never gonna happen. teslas and waymos can't even implement this, as if 100 different companies are going to agree to comply. not to mention the privacy nightmare! pure nerd fantasy that ignores reality.
that is wrong, there are communication protocol standards already. a quick google search could tell you that.
https://medium.com/@wiprodigital/talking-cars-a-survey-of-pr...
perhaps you haven't seen the xkcd about standards? i can google it for you if you need.
my point was, teslas could communicate with other teslas (and waymos with other waymos) by using any proprietary technology or method they choose. and yet they don’t. they honk at each other at 4am instead.
The link is broken, but I can see that article is from 6 years ago. It needs to be a protocol that is developed with the purpose driving in sync with each other – perhaps it needs some sort of oracle or centralized entity that maintains the state.
Teslas communicating with each other isn't using an open standard that can be used by other car companies, nor is Waymo's.
Will they ban older cars that do not support the latest protocols? Will we be forced into a 5-year upgrade cycle like we are with phones, because the manufactures stop supporting their older products?
I would gladly give up my ability to drive (under normal circumstances) on the freeway if it ended the reign of terror that rubberneckers and people that don't keep right except to pass (the law in at least WA state if not where you are too).
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.
It's like the memes about how 'Americans' will use any insane representation to avoid metric. It applies equally well to avoiding rail infrastructure. Instead of putting two metal sticks down and getting a big metal box for it, we are leaning into AGI and quadratic complexity infrastructure to stop a problem in a space we absolutely refuse to constrain because reasons.
A train that takes you directly from the inside of your garage to the front door of your destination, in a private cabin, with no transfers or unnecessary stops at locations you aren't traveling to. So... still more a car than a train.
I imagine that the manufacturers' fleets will be driving 24/7--a parked car is an investment that's not paying off at this moment. If they last 5 years, that'll be doing pretty good.
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.
I don't understand what you mean when you say incentives? Politicians are strongly incentivized to avoid enraging their constituency. HOV lanes have ended more than one politician's career and that's as close as we've ever gotten to the kind of lane discrimination you're describing.
As long as there's soul-sucking traffic, the public will demand solutions. Traffic has been getting worse in LA and they've already gone beyond HOV lanes. Now there's toll lanes on most of the major freeways where you can pay to bypass traffic. The next step after that will be congestion pricing just to enter the city (Metro is already studying it).
The solution to traffic is to build better, more efficient transit infrastructure that doesn't involve everyone driving their own giant metal boxes everywhere when for most trips they just don't need to.
Sure but you are still going to have people want to drive in their own metal boxes, like those who prefer to have their own space. And for a sprawling city like LA, it's not possible to build efficient public transit connections between each point. It's not realistic for everyone to take the train or bus.
But most people who drive metal boxes would actually take long fast metal tubes that don't have issues with traffic if they were given the opportunity to. This means all the people who really want to drive metal boxes or have to drive metal boxes don't have as much traffic.
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.
> But most people who drive metal boxes would actually take long fast metal tubes that don't have issues with traffic if they were given the opportunity to. This means all the people who really want to drive metal boxes or have to drive metal boxes don't have as much traffic.
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.
Most makers are trying to implement some form of self driving, even if it's just self parking while the owner is outside.
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.
The number of negative comments here seems odd to me.
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.
We don’t even instrument all the train tracks, a small portion of the network relies on the conductors. I think it’s unlikely that the people commenting today will live to see a sizable portion of the road network instrumented for self driving.
As the article and the linked PDF quickly mention, cybersecurity is a concern, a really big problem difficult to solve.
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.
> If you actually want practical and safe self driving cars widely deployed
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.
> If you actually want practical and safe self driving cars widely deployed
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.
Thing is, those who like cars and driving don't want autonomous cars; those who only see cars as a way to transport humans and goods should stop pretending they want cars and simply use Uber or Rent-a-Van. Self-driving cars are a solution to a non-existent problem.
Depends on your location. As the global population relocates to cities the cost-benefit maths work out in favour of not owning. New residential developments in Europe are planned and built without enough space to park at least one vehicle per apartment. Insurance, parking, and extra "emissions" charges (that EVs have to pay too), are all killing car ownership. There are places in London where you will not get a parking permit for your vehicle unless you meet certain criteria. The US was built for life where cars are an essential part of daily routine, Europe wasn't.
> If you actually want practical and safe self driving cars widely deployed
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.
I agree with that. But almost every cool convenience-enhancing or safety-enhancing "connected" technology has been implemented in a way that makes it easier to track individuals.
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.
> The number of negative comments here seems odd to me.
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.
Self-driving cars able to communicate intent and negotiate could be extremely efficient by reducing collisions and traffic.
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.
The 'tech bros reinventing trains' refrain fails to take into account that the same people would love 1/100th of the coverage of the global road network for rail.
Not necessarily? This depends on how the system is set up.
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.
Why, could integrate the beacons into signal pedestrian crossings forcing the cars to stop (whereas currently an absent minded driver might go through it), also doesn't stop development of other safety systems like object detection.
If you want to avoid traffic 'waves', so all vehicles accelerate and decelerate at the same time, you must remove _everything_ that might introduce unexpected variance.
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.
I'd say it's more about reducing unnecessary stoppages where possible.
The wave is triggered by someone braking ahead for whatever reason, we're looking to prevent the unnecessary wave, not necessarily stop the initial braking event as it may have been necessary.
You need the increased space, which means you have the traffic waves.
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.
Waves are caused by starting at different times, and connected vehicles can coordinate their start time. Yes, you need more space with speed, but a fleet can handle that with different acceleration curves instead of varied starts.
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.
Also a connected vehicle could potentially tell much if the car ahead is actively accelerating. Reducing it's need to brake if it can tell there's sufficient distance to negate braking (a bit more risky).
> Cars that communicate can accelerate and brake together even in unexpected situations.
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.
There won't be any. If you want to do that kind of stuff you'll take a wheelchair to the nearest "activity centre" where you'll be able to move your appendages around to simulate some kind of neolithic locomotion. It will be considered quite a niche pastime, though, as you can just take pills to remain happy and in shape.
I've been advocating for railside cameras so that the driver can see things further down the track. The accidents happen at crossings of which there are relatively few.
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.
all grade separated highways eventually exit onto not-grade separated roads, and often tailbacks are the result of delays happening off the highway system.
> often tailbacks are the result of delays happening off the highway system.
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
City centers are often places with intense demand aimed only at one or two exits off of a highway. Other cases are airports, sufficiently large shopping centers, large events, etc.
You mean the trains that go by once every 15+ minutes, and are confined to a track with no way for the operator to do anything but brake or speed up, compared to every few seconds with the ability for the driver to take control at any moment?
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.
> You mean the trains that go by once every 15+ minutes, and are confined to a track with no way for the operator to do anything but brake or speed up, compared to every few seconds with the ability for the driver to take control at any moment?
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.
how many pedestrians and bikes are directly crossing busy train tracks at grade? traffic lights signal cycle every minute or so.
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.
> how many pedestrians and bikes are directly crossing busy train tracks at grade?
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.
You say it would not make things any worse and I disagree.
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.
If traffic clears the intersection faster, you can have more efficient cycles without changing the cycle time. The effect would be larger, not smaller, gaps.
That would assume that transportation departments in the US would step away from trying to boost car throughput at all costs. That’s their current MO; car travel is like a gas that expands to fit all available space.
No, because they're confined to completely separate tracks, which they don't share with pedestrians or bikes at all. In fact, when the two meet, we call it a "train crossing" and have special "cross guards" to keep pedestrians, bikes, and other vehicles well away from the train. Otherwise, we generally try to keep the tracks away from other modes of transit, by either putting them in tunnels ("subways") or elevating the tracks, or just not putting them near roads to begin with and giving them special right-of-way.
None of this resembles the way we treat cars at all.
I guess different countries have different rules, but my country have classes of roads which are not shared with pedestrians or bikes. There are generally not that many traffic lights, but there are exceptions.
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.
As both a driver and a pedestrian I would love that engineering solution.
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.
Crosswalks. The "car crossings" for pedestrians and bikes are called crosswalks. They're dedicated sections of road, typically selected for high visibility, specially demarcated and often even specifically signaled. High-speed traffic is generally kept away from other modes of transit by means of elevated highway sections (in high-density areas).
My dude, this is literally exactly what I had in mind.
Good. Go to any society on earth with excellent transit (Singapore, Korea, Japan, etc). They all HATE using it and love cars so much it makes American car enthusiasts look mass transit lobbyists.
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.
sounds great in the US where cars are first class citizens in cities, but it feels like a loss for pedestrians in more mixed cities.
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
Not all roads are in cities, though. I'd be fine with "manual" driving in a city if I could turn on smart-cruise-control on the motorway and let it do its thing at 40/60/70 knowing that I can relax just a little bit more. Doubly so if in an EV world, the cars can talk to each other and a central network to say "I'm going to need to charge in X km, so I can use charger A, B, or C" and they communicate to minimise wait times across the board.
Unless someone, for instance from remote, crack some cars to send false signals, let's say a police mandating stop when an armored bank van pass by, signaling to also open doors meanwhile another armored semi-autonomous car from a very active activist suddenly accelerate crashing onto an elementary school group on a trip stating was the activist driving, and the smart-blood test state he/she is on drugs and alcohol while he/she was effectively not and wasn't driving at all or controls was not operational being by wires... etc etc etc...
You can't design the world as anyone is a good actor. Most are indeed good actors, but most and all are different quantities.
It turns the whole world into a computer science problem. A distributed database of state with some malicious data. With various asynchronous processes that have different versions of the data. All needing to make decisions with incomplete data.
The point is that the holistic approach can't work because there no "single complex system" but "many individual actors" under our control: we can't program the world, we can only program some specific actor between semi-independent others. Yes, we have States, rules in them, agreements, standards etc but we can't still program the whole not considering the program a valid model of the reality.
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...
I can almost squint at this and see 'self driving cars over a long enough period of time in reality are just .... trains with cars connected by wifi instead of physical beams'.
Not arguing for this, just thinking it though from a purely technical approach.
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.
The system will not be used for efficiency in the wider sense, merely in the car centric sense of increased throughput.
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).
>From a standstill, all vehicles waiting could accelerate simultaneously rather than create pressure waves due to human reaction times.
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 assume the cars automatic braking and collision detection will just override whatever would cause an accident. Or a person's foot.
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.
The article doesn't make it clear to me when the DOT talks about "V2X being deployed", what the full scope of that is – does it refer to just the physical technologies, or the lowest layers of the OSI model? Or does "V2X deployment" here mean more application-level stuff, i.e. a series of minimum requirements about what information classes of devices will broadcast to other classes of devices, with what limitations?
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.
Makes sense to me. Even if it’s just a “hint” that could massively alter outcomes. eg braking a second earlier could be the difference between crash and no crash
Is it just me or does this seem like it could be abused?
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.
Like other networks, dumb pipes (roads) and smart endpoints (self-driving cars) will serve us best in transportation. Vehicle to vehicle communication makes almost no difference to the remaining hard problems Waymo is working on. E.g. Vehicle to vehicle doesn't help a Waymo car identify and properly handle downed power lines during a snowstorm.
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.
This would work if we had the ability to deny licenses to people, which would require us to have a real alternative to driving in more cities :(
> 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.
Go watch a cop show on youtube, they are always pulling over unregistered cars with drivers that have a suspended license. My point being that people will commit crimes no matter how many alternate transportations you make.
How about Google and Apple teaming up, taking all the data they receive from Google Maps/Apple Maps telemetry, including the destination waypoints, using it to calculate globally optimal routing for every car on the road, and then making the cars execute it? Like, sure, this may sound like a central planning caricature but we do actually have enough computing power to pull it off in this case! It will be glorious! And pedestrians can be easily taken into account since they all carry small GPS/radio-trackers on them anyhow.
The main issue I see is one of privacy and government control. Kill switches, speed governors, cars communicating with other cars … soon we’re on the doorstep of the same ability the CCP has to restrict transit.
I don't mind governors, you can set all US cars around 80 MPH without putting any cars on the Internet.
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
The other problems with capturing peoples freedom of movement, is the liability it creates in insurance and or legal accountability.
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."
>The timeline for the DoT's plan extends to 2036, by which time it hopes to have fully deployed V2X across the National Highway System, for the top 75 metro areas to have the tech enabled at 85 percent of signalized intersections and to have 20 vehicle models that are V2X capable. In the shorter term, the agency aims to have V2X tech installed across 20 percent of the National Highway System and 25 percent of signalized intersections in major metro areas by 2028.
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.
Americans will do anything but build alternative transportation options to cars, build more efficient cities to allow for biking/walking to be more viable (car independence), or replacing useless parking garages, parking lots with scalable housing and living.
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.
About time.
I like to drive and wish to keep my liberty on the road as much as anyone else but I think it would be easy to send basic just-in-time telemetry to the other neighboring cars to improve cruise control, emergency braking and heavy traffic situations.
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.
Might be a perception bias, but I DO notice that many, at least not infrequently, drivers near me either do not use their turn signals, or activate them _way_ too late.
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.
I'm far more worried about pedestrians with these larger cars than most vehicle/vehicle interactions. I'd much rather move away from cars than lean into them.
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[ 896 ms ] story [ 735 ms ] threadIt 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...
i.e. the city can have infrastructure watch for pedestrians on crossings (or even just know the crossings are active or the light is red) and report it to vehicles approaching. This makes assisted driving tech safer for everyone involved.
It also generally just adds a lot of opportunities for QOL improvements. An example is parking. The city infra can tell the vehicle (or your phone) where the closest open parking space is relative to your destination and handle scheduling spaces so that you get the space the first time around.
And importantly the cities that have been pioneering this tech have been pushing it while also pushing separated bike lanes, improved transit, more distinct street vs road distinctions, etc.
This tech is something that has been in development since the 90s and it's now reaching maturity to the point where modern cars could adopt it today, older semi-modern cars could be trivially upgraded, and it can see widespread use in 10-20 years.
Also it's not the first line of defense for pedestrians but rather one of many that can be rolled out now while also pushing other material benefits.
Again, we know how to make gigantic gains in road safety. Its not difficult, its proven technology, its cheap, it can literally be done quickly. The only question is will of politicans. That's it.
First of all, its already incredibly absurldy expensive how the US currently does traffic. There are far, far to many traffic lights and traffic lights are expensive. Far to many lanes and far to wide, incredibly expensive. That again makes traffic signaling more expensive. Now in addition to traffic lights you need cameras everywhere, often covering 8 lane stroads, and then you need comptuers to process all that data. And do so correctly under difficult conditions. Installations of these system will be hugely expensive.
You can already compare your avg traffic intersection between the Netherlands and the US. The US often only has 1 sensor while the Dutch have many more. US intersections still operate based on completely outdated signaling orders for the most part (not to mention completly unsave and unfriendly for anything but cars). So when in the US most towns can't even configure their basic signaling orders in an efficent way, but you want them to do complex video image analysis and messaging? How does that make sense?
Again, we know how to make things cheaper and much, much safer. And it doesn't need fancy technology. We don't need people with PhD in data science to implement this.
If you want to make an argument that some of this has some uses, sure, whatever. I honestly don't think anything you mentioned is really all that complelling but I guess its possible.
> The city infra can tell the vehicle (or your phone) where the closest open parking space is
This is great, if your goal as a city is maximum utilisation of parking space, but that shouldn't be the goal in the first place.
If cities actually listen to experts on how to actually manage parking correctly, finding a parking spot wouldn't be hard in the first place.
> And importantly the cities that have been pioneering this tech have been pushing it while also pushing separated bike lanes, improved transit, more distinct street vs road distinctions, etc.
That just means that the lobbies pushing this stuff have successfully done their job despite far more important things. No city in the US has even begun to fully implement modern traffic practices. Playing around with this V2X thing and investing money into it is foolish.
In the actual countries where they take safety seriously, you know where they actually successfully have reduced traffic accidents and death. In those countries you hear very little about V2X and the almost universal thing you hear from all the actually successful experts is that road infrastructure needs to be changed according to the newer standards. Most nations did gignatic damage to themselves in last 50 years and all of it needs to be undone.
I'm sure those governments have V2X somewhere, but its simply not what most actual traffic engineers in those countries talk about. This V2X stuff is something car companies and lobbiest are primarly pushing. Its mostly popular with tech people. Most actually existing organisation for traffic safity are pushing what we know actually works.
> It's essentially just a LTE or WLAN link
Most vehicles can barley even software updates at all. And most old cars simply wont be updated with everything need to fully support this stuff. And even then most people on motorcycles and bikes don't have a great way of receiving that information. And there tons of old cars who want have it, so you can not realy on this for the next decades anyway.
> This tech is something that has been in development since the 90s
And designing streets without killing unbelievable amounts of people has ...
I don't know where you live but I don't think I've been anywhere where 8 lanes is anything remotely close to standard. The busiest parts of most interstates may have 5 or 6 lanes and they don't have intersections but otherwise I don't think I've seen an intersection with more than 2, maybe 3 lanes (and an additional turning lane on each side). The only place I could think of like that is Texas but even then they are massively pushing changes to decrease car usage in general to the point they are investing billions in comprehensive high speed rail networks.
And you don't need lots of compute power to do what these systems are doing. They are doing basic shape checks across a narrow column and you can do that at the crosswalk on a five dollar DSP.
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> If cities actually listen to experts on how to actually manage parking correctly, finding a parking spot wouldn't be hard in the first place.
> That just means that the lobbies pushing this stuff have successfully done their job despite far more important things. No city in the US has even begun to fully implement modern traffic practices. Playing around with this V2X thing and investing money into it is foolish.
The cities that are implementing this are listening to experts and they are solving the problem with infrastructure redesigns but again, that takes literal decades. Planning for changing an intersection to a roundabout or separating out a bike lane may take 5+ years before it even breaks ground and there's not the capacity to do that construction all at once anyways so you have to stagger it out.
So you are at the point we are now. The ball is in motion but the "real fix" still has decades before it actually comes to fruition.
This V2X system however is a decent bandaid while the actual fix rolls out and its full rollout window is 10-15 years rather than 50-75 years. So you can push this today and see some level of harm reduction while you wait for the actual fix to come around hopefully before you die.
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> In the actual countries where they take safety seriously, you know where they actually successfully have reduced traffic accidents and death. In those countries you hear very little about V2X and the almost universal thing you hear from all the actually successful experts is that road infrastructure needs to be changed according to the newer standards. Most nations did gignatic damage to themselves in last 50 years and all of it needs to be undone.
Yes. And the cities that have been pushing for this tech have been trying to make those exact same changes as well. The issue is that most of the changes that would ideally solve this problem won't be comprehensively rolled out for over 50 years. You can change construction standards and push for pedestrian first designs (which many of these cities are doing) however actually pushing those changes out to the streets takes decades of gradual construction and redesigning parts of the city.
The difference is that this doesn't have to be a comprehensive solution. You can add it here and there in problem areas as you slowly roll it out but this tech is cheap. Probably 1000 USD per intersection. And you can add it without redesigning the entire intersection or the entire road.
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> Most vehicles can barley even software updates at all. And most old cars simply wont be updated with everything need to fully support this stuff. And even then most people on motorcycles and bikes don't have a great way of receiving that information. And there tons of old cars who want have it, so you can not realy on this for the next decades anyway.
Sure bikes and motorcycles will have limited exposure to this but they can use their phones as beacons in this ...
You keep saying that. But a bandaid is easy to install and helpful. Putting lidar stuff around every intersection and all the other equipment needed is not a banded.
Its a fundamental reinforcement of currently existing patterns.
Changing infrastructure doesn't take 50 years if you are actually serious about.
> Is your proposal "We should do absolutely nothing else ever until THE ONE TRUE FIX is complete and we are long since in retirement?" because that makes absolutely no sense.
No my proposal is 'use the already incredibly limited fund as efficiently as possible'. Not sure why you are so determined to argue about this.
> quality of life feature relatively easily and cheaply
I believe it when I see it.
You know what is for sure easier? Dropping 10 concrete blocks in an intersection and turning it into a roundabout.
> It is by no means the only thing the DOT is doing.
The DOT and especially state DoT have been the biggest offenders in road safety and most of them have not even acknowledged the problem. But I guess they have you to shill for their 'efforts'.
> So far this project has paid out less than 100 million USD and there's no chance it'll get anywhere close to 1 billion USD in funds spent.
With all cities all over the US implementing this plus all the changes to all the cars? You got to be joking.
> Considering the actual fix to this problem will cost hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars invested over decades
False. The actual fix saves you money compared to the status quo. The sooner and the more aggressive you do it the more money you save.
While this technology re-enforces the status quo and provides further excesses for not doing the right things. Instead of actually fixing the problem you put hopes on the tech-solution instead.
If you want to use cameras for something useful, use it to give everybody a speeding ticket. That far more appropriate use of that kind of technology.
Funny how when it comes to re-enforcing the status quo high tech solution are all the rage, when it comes to actually solving the problem of speeding, high tech solution aren't welcome.
Not every intersection. The plan is for 85% of the signalised intersections in the top 75 metro areas. There are around 400k signalised intersections in the US out of the 15 million intersections total. That's around 2.5% of intersections if you assume every signalised intersection will be included. Realistically the number affected by this plan is closer to 2% (~320k). And that is over the course of 12 years.
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> Changing infrastructure doesn't take 50 years if you are actually serious about.
It actually does if you are trying to do it at the scale of a continent. And I don't mean this as a "oh but the US is different" kind of thing. You can do things at scale and all but things take time. The Netherlands did it in 20-30 years but they have 10 times the density of the US and they are a unitary state that can authoritatively just change things and everyone downstream has to listen. The US DOT can set standards, pull levers, and incentivize adoption but it's ultimately up to the states to do the work (outside of federal roads which make up a small fraction of the roads in the US).
So lets say it takes twice as long. That's around 40-50 years. And that depends on whoever runs the federal government or the DOT not saying "fuck this woke commie shit" and halting all progress (which Trump did with V2X after the Obama admin started a major push for it).
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> No my proposal is 'use the already incredibly limited fund as efficiently as possible'. Not sure why you are so determined to argue about this.
The US DOT currently has more cash than they really know what to do with. Biden & Congress allocated them 660 billion USD to spend over a 5 year window ending in 2026 and currently they've spent less than half of that despite tripling their spending. The main limiter isn't funding. It's capacity and political capital. The USDOT literally has states refusing unconditional, no strings attached funds for political reasons (see FL rejecting hurricane & flood hardening funds for transportation infrastructure).
This is something that some crews and departments can do that provides benefits without being inordinately expensive. Even if it costs several billion USD (which it won't) it'd be less than 1% of the sudden flush of funds that the USDOT literally cannot spend fast enough.
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> You know what is for sure easier? Dropping 10 concrete blocks in an intersection and turning it into a roundabout.
Good luck with that. Most intersections are not large enough for that without making the roads completely inaccessible to Class 8 vehicles (heavy construction vehicles and semi trucks).
I am pro roundabout. I am also pro separation of streets and roads as well as limiting traffic on streets however you need massive infrastructure redesigns to make that viable. I've sat through the meetings for this in my own community and I have family who work on permitting for this kind of thing very regularly so I know quite a bit about the struggles in making these improvements a reality. It's frustrating to see it take forever and for projects to get cancelled or delayed for reasons I personally think are unnecessary but I understand why it's done this way and that it's not just a matter of "the people in charge don't care". The people who spend every day working on this stuff care a lot and are doing as much as they can but this is really complex and there are a lot of moving parts and legal consideration.
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> With all cities all over the US implementing this plus all the changes to all the cars? You got to be joking.
It was a bit of hyperbole yes. But if you want to do the math on it, the USDOT estimates the cost of installation after labor, planning, etc is 5000-7000USD per signalized i...
“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.
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.
That’s an order of magnitude higher than I would’ve guessed. Unbelievable!
Taking away someone's driver's license forever is the milder version of the situation. Does it feel just for someone in their 40s to not be allowed to drive because they got a DUI in their 20s? Can someone who has a DUI really never regain full status and privilege in society? If you knew they would never drive drunk again does society still benefit from this indefinite punishment? If they are forever corrupted by their crime would it be okay to kill them if that's what we decided the punishment was?
So you recognize that your neighborhoods are planned so poorly that lacking a driving license relegates you to a lesser status and privilege? Why not address that car dependency, rather than letting drunks continue to drive? Because, believe it or not, there are people out there living without a driving license through no fault of their own.
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 h...
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)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5JzxjWtFaY
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...
2: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/810-947.pdf
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.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azI3nqrHEXM
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.
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.
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.
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. ...
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.
--
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 wit...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/68128
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
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
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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.