FYI: You could make Tesla's Autopilot swerve into traffic with a few stickers on the road

Re: Glass overkill

Since when have windscreens been flat ?

Since when have windscreens been bug and debris free?

Re: lasers

If you are going to have perimeter mounted lasers then you might as well shoot down the rain drops directly and do without windscreen wipers altogether. Presumably you would need a system to harvest rainwater from some other parts of the vehicle to sustain the sharks.

Re: Glass overkill

There's a short lever on the steering column of my car that turns the wipers on and off (and adjusts their speed). When I see rain drops on the windscreen, I flick the lever. But of course that implies I'm actually looking out through the windscreen while driving - not staring at a "smart" phone. On the other hand, if I'm staring at the phone, does it mater if there's rain on the windscreen?

All this hi-tech seems to be just desperately looking for something to do. Overkill indeed.

Re: Glass overkill

> They could much more easily and reliably be able to control the windshield wipers with a low-power laser shooting edge-on ...

Completely impractical. There's just not enough room on the dash for the shark.

"Tesla’s is just too good."

They've hit a middle ground where it works well enough in many situations that people get too complacent, bored and let their mind wander until a couple of meters before they plow into the back end of a stopped fire truck. (Why do Tesla vehicles have a hard on for emergency vehicles?)

Another thing that people are much better at is seeing traffic far ahead slowing down or coming to a stop. Are auto nav systems going to recognize all of the brake lights ahead and start slowing down or think about getting off at the latest possible exit?

I recall some yobs, in the middle of the night, taking the cones, flashing lights and barriers, which were stopping traffic from entering a huge excavation in one lane, placing them in the other with inevitable consequences.

I wonder if autonomous cars will fare any better, or how they'll deal with 'invisible' IR reflective lane markers directing them straight into walls.

Even dinosaurs can do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuA5tO_c7s4

You don't even have to move cones where I live. The city will do it for you and every night they remove them. And they'll paint temporary (for some value of temporary) lines around repair work and then not remove the temporary lines when done. The cones go but not the lines.

It's unbelievable. All the talk about the importance of separating the screens from the flight controls for airlines, and Tesla can't even do it right when they're designing the thing from the ground up.

Pretty much any modern mid to high end car now has a linked electronics system with infotainment and car systems on the same display and cable.

Re: "a driver can easily override Autopilot at any time [..] and should always be prepared to do so"

But that doesn't seem very practical. If I drive and am in charge I've got stuff to do and I'm paying attention. If the car does everything a lot of the time I will not be paying attention, that's just how most humans work.

Re: "a driver can easily override Autopilot at any time [..] and should always be prepared to do so"

Given that they say it at every opportunity, mention it when you start autopilot, bong and alert if you don't at least let the car know you are there every few seconds...

When else do you think they should be saying this?

Re: Stickers?

If you read the road signs, then you're bound to fall foul. For example there's a spot on the A1 at the junction of Tollington Road and Camden Road, where the signage is perfectly OK to a rational, thinking person who understands that the people who put the signs up make mistakes, and that can process the conflicting information, but when you sit down and analyse what the signs are ACTUALLY telling you, all northbound traffic is directed left onto Camden Road by the proceed left (sign 606) on the central reservation and on the left hand kerb and some of that traffic is then directed onto the wide pavement, because they have to keep left (sign 610) of the low level bollard on the far pavement.

And rinse and repeat across hundreds of junctions nationwide where they didn't get it right. The very worst road sign of all is 611. They use that all over the place to mean "Routes pass either side of this divider", whereas it actually means, "Pass either side to REACH THE SAME DESTINATION", i.e. it should not be used on a diverging route, only on, e.g. the ends of an island between lanes of a multi-lane one-way road. The correct sign to use in that instance is a plain faced bollard, illuminated or retroreflective. Thankfully, an autopilot shouldn't be using sign 611 for route information, as the correct lane to be in is usually included in the data from another source. The issue comes where the programmed route information conflicts with the signage, as it would do on the A1 example. I expect in this case the green arrow plus the sat nav data would override the signage instruction, but green arrows don't show all the time!

Re: Stickers?

I can see this becoming much worse when the proposed speed limiters come in in 2022 - a few '20' stickers placed over selected signs that show a much higher speed is going to cause unexpected braking with all the 'fun' that could cause (especially for those behind who didn't have a limiter).

I was thinking the same. If it's fooled by a couple of small stickers, god knows what it'd make of the network of potholes, loosely linked with small bits of tarmac, that make up my local roads.

It's being worked on

"Normal Road Conditions"

I'd worry about how neural network based guidance systems respond to blowing snow, sand, trash, leaves, etc. They usually don't look like lane markers to me, but to a computer? Then there's the issue of lane markers being erased by repeated application of snow, rain, road salt, sand/grit, freeze/thaw and scrubbing by rubber tires. By spring here in New England, I sometimes have trouble recognizing lane and road center markers. And I sort of know where they used to be.

===========================

I have not heard it suggested that a neural network could be induced to implement, for example, Boston's "Vehicle with the least to lose in a collision has the right of way" driving practices. Seems well beyond the current state of the art to me. But I suppose all things are possible .. eventually

"Err, just wondering, how does a Tesla on autopilot respond to potholes in the road?"

You should really only be using Tesla cruise control on motorways or major trunk roads. Not sure about where you live, but I rarely, if ever, see potholes on those sorts of roads across most of the north of England.

(not that I could afford a Tesla anyway, even if I wanted one)

Re: A new kind of annoying

Interesting, I found it rather amusing but I may have been to HK too often. As clips go, it was quite OK.

Not really, that actually had short enough response time to allow decent control. This seems to have about a second delay between input and the car responding. Good enough to thoroughly crash a vehicle, terrible for driving it while getting shot at by angry baddies.

Re: Can you go to the pub and get shitfaced?

Well I for one have been using some self-driving car tech (not Tesla) and it is making longer journeys a lot less tiring. Especially those 50 limit motorway roadworks that go on for ever. It's a godsend.

Re: Can you go to the pub and get shitfaced?

A work friend of mine had a pony and trap and she and her husband frequently woke up in their stable having been taken 5 miles home from an absolutely cracking pub by the pony.

Re: ECU hack sound like the Jeep one a few years ago

It would be interesting to hear about a botnet that targeted cars to do Coin mining. Something like that could rob enough processing power to slow down a nav system but not so much that the infotainment system wouldn't function when Nav isn't in operation.

Re: Tesla fanbois

Tesla's role is to show other car companies "see? It can be done." Once other car companies bring in their superior ability to scale production, and higher quality control standards, Tesla will either have to transform back into a small-volume boutique make (a la Ferrari) or go under.

The Chevy Bolt is a good example; it's got similar range to a Tesla, costs less than all but the cheapest, most unobtainable version of the Model 3, and comes with a dealer service network and door handles that still work when it's cold out.

And there are many, many major highways in the US that aren't divided, or that switch back and forth between divided and undivided. This is very, very common on old "US routes" like US-2 and US-101, many of which were never completely converted to freeway outside of urban areas. Not coincidentally these are also often places where the lane markings are not repainted as frequently as one might hope.

Re: Pointless story really....

Because you don't get single bugs. You get classes of bugs, entire categories of them.

And the bugs that you're vulnerable to reveal your underlying design.

Microsoft have fixed "buffer overflows that can give you full system access" any number of times, and for decades. They still appear. Because the design of the OS allows that to happen.

As such, Tesla have shown that these systems are linked - everything from the web browser to the steering - and any bug, any bug at all, that can be found can punch a hole through from one system to the other because the design allows it to do so.

You don't ever "fix" bugs. You fix *A* bug. The next bug will be waiting for you, if not in the same damn line of code then the one next to it.

The class of bugs exposed - simple overflows giving access to the core functions of the Autopilot - is the worry. And that doesn't matter that they patched ONE such bug.