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Black08Mustang t1_iuf5s0j wrote

Reply to comment by Poltras in Ford and VW Abandon the Self-Driving Road to Nowhere. Big story that with little fanfare by newleafkratom

>Put a wireless beacon on lights that indicate lane setup, light status, directions, etc. It wouldn’t be expensive

If the beacon info is wrong, who is responsible for an accident? This is not inexpensive or straightforward.

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Vincent_LeRoux t1_iufagyz wrote

The operating agency would typically be responsible, same as with the red yellow green light liability. There are established protocols and systems but voluntary adoption is incredibly slow. The latest push only got about 10% of the very modest goal of 2,000 traffic signals broadcasting by 2020. https://transportationops.org/spatchallenge/resources/Implementation-Guide

There are many challenges both technical, funding, and end user adoption. There is no mandate for this either at the traffic signal or for equipment in new vehicles to receive it. For the cities, they need to geographically map their lanes and intersections to the lights. Like here's the 4 lanes and the left arrow is for the left 2 lanes. And keep it up to date with any changes. That isn't hard, but it takes money to hire a survey team and someone to program it each time.

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UrbanGhost114 t1_iufg7p2 wrote

My city cant keep up with the issues they have with light sensors now, and you want to add to it, and make me pay for it?

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Vincent_LeRoux t1_iufpox2 wrote

Exactly, and that's a major reason it isn't taking off. We can't even keep up with routine maintenance let alone improve the infrastructure that would help support automated driving.

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Infamous_Yogurt2858 t1_iuffdzd wrote

That's a question for the law to settle, but it raises the question of whether it's a fair or reasonable standard to assume that self-driving cars will never have accidents.

Human drivers cause a ton of accidents, but we all more or less accept that a certain amount of them is just a reality of having a large number of drivers on the road. The elephant in the room is that self-driving cars will never have an absolutely perfect operational record either.

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