I’m guessing that Uber’s lidar and radar sensing systems are complete shit…

No surprise really, they’re new to this autonomous vehicle game, and they have a track record for being a shitty company with poor decision-making from the top-down.

Uber thinks they can get in front of everyone else with their fleet of autonomous cars, and in order to do so, I bet they’ve cut every corner they can. I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn next week that Uber’s Lidar system is simply for looks… and it’s non-functional.

Waymo (Google) has been at this game for nearly a decade now… and they still seem cautious about their approach compared to Uber and other companies trying to get in on the action recently.

Driver A and Pedestrian 1 aren’t named and we know nothing about them. They are both fully insured with similar tiers of coverage. Which insurer pays?

There’s who we say is at fault. Not because it is true but because that choice determines how road-legal AVs can be in the future and how insurable they are.

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About five hundred years ago, Leonardo Da Vinci, the universal genius of the Italian Renaissance, drew up a plan for a city with two sets of streets at different levels, one for walking, and on for vehicles. He was presumably aware of Venice with its canals, but this was a dryland version, suitable for employment in, say, Milan.

An automobile is part of a transportation system, together with the roads it runs on, the gas stations, the drive-throughs, the parking lots, etc. Changes in one part of the system inevitably dictate changes in other parts of the system. This means that the ultimate owner of land, the government, is necessarily a key partner, in fact, the leading partner. You cannot do an electric car or a self-driving car as a tech product. You must have government sponsorship and large sums of government money to pick up the loose ends. Almost anything built under the tech-entrepreneur system tends to develop a critical shortage of physical public goods, because the greed of the tech-entrepreneur is incompatible with the spending of public money. The major limiting constraint on computers has become the internet, and Comcast has become one of the most hated companies. .I think that most Techdirt people would agree that we cannot put up with Comcast much longer, that the telecommunications system, which undergirds the internet, needs to be socialized, and placed under the control of public water authorities and the Post Office. The internet is too important to be run by businessmen who want to control everyone. However, considered as civil engineering projects, telecommunications networks are kid stuff compared to roads. There are lots of ways you can snake a cable which is only half an inch in diameter, and can easily be bent to a six-inch radius. Anything involving automobiles is much messier.

A smart car is going to require a smart road, with lots of built-in electronics. An electric car is going to require an electric road, with built-in power supply wires. These things are not particularly impossible. It’s not usually a major issue for public railroads, such as American commuter railroads or European national railroads, where everything belongs to one government entity. However, such things cannot be done with Elon Musk or Travis Kalanick as sole beneficiary and proprietor. The State of Arizona allowed just about anyone to start running self-driving cars on the public streets, without regulation, but the state was not prepared to meet the expenses of building pedestrian over-passes on a large scale, say for every road where the speed limit is at least two-thirds of that on an urban freeway. The state swallowed the tech-entrepreneur kool-aid., and abdicated its responsibility to organize transportation for the public good. You cannot build public works as private luxury goods. They have to be for everyone, because everyone has a vote, and people driving two-thousand-dollar “beaters” cannot be expected to vote for roads which require an eighty-thousand dollar car to use.

Often,, change of technological systems involves military sponsorship. The first jet airliner, the Boeing 707, was also known as the KC-135. It was an air-refueling tanker to go with the Boeing B-52 bomber. The United States Air Force acted as the general patron and sponsor of jet aircraft. The United States Army was the institutional sponsor of the Interstate Highway system.

Unlike an airplane, an automobile, or a train, does not usually have a very good field of view for the path is is traveling on. This means that sensors need to be located where they do have a good field of view. This might mean mounting cameras/radar/lidars on telephone poles or lamp poles, where they can see things in a much more unambiguous way than sensors mounted in a vehicle three or four hundred feet away. The basic means by which railroads avoid collisions at grade crossings is that a track detector located half a mile or a mile from the grade crossing identifies a train, and then a signal is transmitted, which causes gates to swing down, blocking automobile traffic. In the case of high-speed trains, various additional refinements are necessary, but the basic principle remains the same.

Smart cars work fairly well on freeways. The lanes in opposite directions are isolated by barriers, and the intersections by overpasses. It is rare for the relative speed between vehicles in the same roadway to be more than 20 mph. Freeways are already much safer than ordinary streets.

What can work, given sufficient money, is “slow-fast,” that is slow off the freeway, and fast on the freeway. Set an off-freeway speed limit of, say, 20 mph, for arterial streets; 10 mph for secondary streets; and 5 mph for paring lots, campuses, etc. . However, on a controlled interstate, let the speed limit be 80-90 mph. Extend the freeways far enough that slow speed, off the freeways, becomes acceptable. You can build a 20-mph interstate, that is a limited-access road with tighter curves, steeper ramp grades, and shorter merging zones, so that it fits within the space allocated for an arterial street. Because cars do not have to stop, the 20 mph freeway will have the same net speed as a 40 mph conventional road. Such a road would typically be dug into a trench below grade level, in much the same sprint that subways are put underground.

Alternatively, you can provide a car with an information system which permits it to “time” traffic lights, that is, to arrive at a light just when the light is turning green. A system like this would probably still require pedestrian overpasses, because people simply don’t move fast enough to clear an intersection within a couple of seconds.

The basic problem with self-driving cans is that they have been mistakenly edited into the framework of what a Silicon Valley company can do. They are forced to pretend to human-level artificial intelligence which they do not have. Even now, a computer with the power of a human brain would approximately fill a warehouse. The “brain” in a self-driving car is more on the level of a cockroach. Insects aren’t real bright. You can manipulate them with a flashlight.