I am on my 3rd Tesla- been driving them since 2015- and frequently use FSD beta. I’ve watched autopilot develop into FSD.
The thing that baffles me about all current autonomous vehicle efforts is how resistant they are to having any sort of environmental feedback engineered specifically to help driverless cars.
For instance, in addition to flashing lights, what if fire trucks broadcast a “keep away” radio signal? Perhaps engineered specifically to be easy to determine distance and direction. Perhaps driverless car companies would have to pitch in to pay for the transponder refit for every fire truck. This is just an idea from a layperson and probably unworkable in this form but you should get the drift of my suggestion.
Also, reading this story, why didn’t the city place orange cones in addition to caution tape? I seriously doubt any driverless car company is training their vehicles on caution tape; as a driver for 40 years I have never encountered caution tape in a way to influence my driving. If the city is allowing driverless cars maybe they should have rudimentary training and standards for personnel to avoid unsafe situations.
Ditto for the firemen and fire hoses - ORANGE CONES are what tells me not to drive somewhere.
There are laws regarding traffic markers. Cities can’t just do arbitrarily obscure things and expect drivers to figure out what they want.
One could easily argue that the liability associated with hitting caution tape is just the cost of replacing the caution tape itself (and not additional fines for driving through whatever poorly marked area you went into).
Anything other than vision from cameras for self-driving is the wrong way to approach it. The vision capabilities of these cars has to be advanced enough to recognize and respond to the unknown and unexpected, to work even where roads have changed overnight, to work in adverse conditions where it's hard to see, etc. Recognizing emergency vehicles is very far down on the list of difficult things to do, and is not difficult at all compared to many other challenges.
Having transponders is just another thing to do fail, or to forget to turn on, or to be impacted by other things, or to give false positives, or to be abused by drivers, etc. Really nothing can be relied upon other than what you see.
The thing that baffles me about all current autonomous vehicle efforts is how resistant they are to having any sort of environmental feedback engineered specifically to help driverless cars.
For instance, in addition to flashing lights, what if fire trucks broadcast a “keep away” radio signal? Perhaps engineered specifically to be easy to determine distance and direction. Perhaps driverless car companies would have to pitch in to pay for the transponder refit for every fire truck. This is just an idea from a layperson and probably unworkable in this form but you should get the drift of my suggestion.
Also, reading this story, why didn’t the city place orange cones in addition to caution tape? I seriously doubt any driverless car company is training their vehicles on caution tape; as a driver for 40 years I have never encountered caution tape in a way to influence my driving. If the city is allowing driverless cars maybe they should have rudimentary training and standards for personnel to avoid unsafe situations.
Ditto for the firemen and fire hoses - ORANGE CONES are what tells me not to drive somewhere.