The problem is time. Waze only needs to communicate that data to other cars within minutes. Seconds is showing off. And a few dozen bytes are all that’s needed.
What he’s talking about is having the 50 cars on one small area - each bouncing RADAR and LIDAR beams off the same objects several times a second in heavy traffic - all coordinate turning their beams on and off one at a time so that they don’t jam each other. And sharing that 3D object data.
Now you need a massive amount of data, and it needs to be shared in milliseconds at most. Between all the cars and their cloud servers probably on different cellular networks interconnected somewhere half-way across the continent.
Waze simply doesn’t do anything remotely like that. Again, it’s technically possible, but not realistic.
Not onlt that but they are in stop and go traffic, imagine all the deaths that will happen going 5 mph. This whole story is blown way out of proportion.
I came to say this exact same thing. If I had an auto-driving tesla i’d be punking people in the same way for at least a few months until the fun wore off.
Being Law & Order, they’re going to wait for it to actually happen before it shows up on the show (and then pretend any similarity to real events is coincidental)… unless the writers see your opener, in which case they’re totally stealing that.
I hadn’t really thought about how this would show up in police procedurals (except that it would mirror how CCTV is represented in some British dramas as a reliable way to track suspects), but it’ll be interesting to see the new version of car chases. Even leaving aside the “I hacked the car so now we have control” nonsense that’s sure to come up, there’s potentially some tension to be had in being followed (and being aware of it) while in a car you can’t control.
To be fair, I suspect a self-driving car would deal with construction and other hazards better than the vast majority of human drivers. At a minimum, the car’s far less likely to decide that the vehicles ahead of it that are already going 15 mph over the posted limit in the construction zone just aren’t going fast enough. (Same for snow or other bad weather conditions.) I understand the concerns that @RogerStrong and others express and agree that the systems will need a lot more work to be widely implemented, but I’m also not exactly convinced that those humans out there are operating at the 99.9% mark, let alone 100%.
(Think of how many drivers you’ve seen tooling down the Tri-state with their vehicles covered in snow, with only a lightly swiped “port hole” from which to see the road. Gods, how I wish I was making that one up!)
So true! Also in the city, where there are lots of intersections to navigate. And let’s not forget the drivers who clear their front and back windshields, but nothing else, so as soon as they start going at medium to high speed, all the snow on their hood flies onto the front windshield and all the snow on the roof comes off in chunks onto whoever has the misfortune to be following them.
Make sleeping mandatory too by gassing the passengers. It’ll cut down on the panic attacks and screaming when the system goes to tight interleaved streams at intersections rather than stop lights.
