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It's really not a hard technical problem at this point. It's mostly social and political. Think about the typical car out there: - You need a piece of plastic

by diego 12y ago

It's really not a hard technical problem at this point. It's mostly social and political. Think about the typical car out there: - You need a piece of plastic and metal to unlock it. Losing that object is a serious inconvenience, especially if you're on a road trip. Compare that to unlocking your cellphone or your bank account. - It doesn't have a "settings" functionality. For example, you can't configure a car to refuse to move if a seatbelt is unbuckled. Such a feature (perhaps a default that you can disable if you really want to) would save many lives. - It would be easy to write an app to help you optimize your driving for safety / fuel efficiency if you could download data that most cars have, but you can't. - Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. These are just a few examples of ways in which most cars in the market are archaic and inefficient. This is mostly because of two reasons: the incumbents have no incentive to make changes that don't increase sales, and governments don't pressure car manufacturers to include state-of-the-art life saving technology until it has existed for a LONG time and everyone knows about it: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislation-makes-airbags-mandatory http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislati... The difficulty in making self-driven cars the norm is mostly about the politics of the transition.

sjtrny 12y ago
> Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. It's definitely not trivial.
- mikeash 12y ago
  It's not trivial from first principles, but traffic sign recognition is more or less a solved problem at this point (production Teslas read speed limit signs as you drive by them, for example) so it would be trivial to implement given what's available now.
  - gamblor956 12y ago
    Teslas being able to read a single format of signs is absolutely not indicative of their ability to read and recognize the hundreds of traffic signs in the US, many of which are located in non-standard positions. If traffic sign recognition really was a solved problem, every car manufacturer would have implemented it by now. If implementation really was trivial, we'd all be talking about which self-driving car we're going to buy this year, not when the first self-driving car might become available.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I've seen it in action in other contexts on all sorts of different signs. And for alerting a driver who's failing to stop at a stop sign, all you have to look for is one kind of sign that's even easier to recognize than speed limit signs: just look for a red octagon, and no need to OCR the text.

by diego 12y ago

sjtrny 12y ago

> Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. It's definitely not trivial.

mikeash 12y ago
It's not trivial from first principles, but traffic sign recognition is more or less a solved problem at this point (production Teslas read speed limit signs as you drive by them, for example) so it would be trivial to implement given what's available now.
- gamblor956 12y ago
  Teslas being able to read a single format of signs is absolutely not indicative of their ability to read and recognize the hundreds of traffic signs in the US, many of which are located in non-standard positions. If traffic sign recognition really was a solved problem, every car manufacturer would have implemented it by now. If implementation really was trivial, we'd all be talking about which self-driving car we're going to buy this year, not when the first self-driving car might become available.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I've seen it in action in other contexts on all sorts of different signs. And for alerting a driver who's failing to stop at a stop sign, all you have to look for is one kind of sign that's even easier to recognize than speed limit signs: just look for a red octagon, and no need to OCR the text.