3 ms·
Honest question: is there harm in competing self-driving schemes? I really don't want to shop "safety." By that I mean, paying more for stopping in the rain wel
by drzaiusapelord 13y ago
Honest question: is there harm in competing self-driving schemes? I really don't want to shop "safety." By that I mean, paying more for stopping in the rain well or having one competitor hold the patent for driving in the snow properly. I imagine it will be properly regulated, but I'd love it to be an industry-wide initiative where everyone shares and maybe even uses the same codebase.
- w_t_payne 13y agoAlas, that is a bit of a pipe-dream. It would be nice if there were an open-source codebase for this, with a consortium of companies contributing, as it would mean better systems overall and lower cost to the consumer; but the senior management of the companies that are involved get too big an ego boost from owning the IP on all that cleverness. Plus, the tragedy of the commons applies: everybody wants a piece of what is going to be an astronomically huge market. (Not just passenger cars -- a big chunk of the road transportation & logistics business will be up for grabs too).
- jlgreco 13y agoWhat you are looking for is basically what happened with 3-point safety belts: "The three point belt was developed by Nils Bohlin who had earlier also worked on ejection seats at Saab.[15] Volvo then made the new seat belt design patent open in the interest of safety and made it available to other car manufacturers for free.[16][17]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#Three-point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#Three-point
- dm2 13y agoThese sort of minor patents should either be invalid or only valid for a couple of years at the most. It's the same as saying one phones corners can't be perfectly round or icons can be on a certain side of the screen.