>Imagine every car manufacturer having a completely different take on what a car should be like from a safety perspective. We have standards bodies for a reason
Roads are also governed by public bodies. Road signs are standardized and public.
I think the government should take a much larger role in defining self driving cars. For example, rather than using computer vision to recognize signs, signs could be active standardized beacons; instead of having to recognize lanes, they could be repainted with rfid chips that are trivial for cars to recognize and follow.
Avoiding driving into people is also something that was somewhat regulated by crosswalks with pedestrian lights. Would it be absurd for the crosswalk to know roughly how many people are at it, then broadcast this to the car, rather than having the car have to recognize them?
There are many things the government could do with transportation infrastructure that would benefit everyone, many of which are literally impossible for companies to do separately. Can you imagine if we had to wait until IBM (or Siemens or Google or Apple) got into the business of launching satellites before we got GPS? There is a good chance that to this day cell phones wouldn't know their location or give anyone any mapping applications.
To me, self driving cars are similar. Many parts of transportation are a public good.
> Would it be absurd for the crosswalk to know roughly how many people are at it, then broadcast this to the car
Yes, completely absurd. For one, many places are too sparse, poor, or unstandardized for this to be remotely economical. Two, people often don't cross at crosswalks (jaywalking). Level 5 AV is a thing where 99% coverage isn't good enough. You need a lot of nines.
That's why many think lidar systems are a crutch. If lidar can't work in snow or heavy rain (at least 1-2% of days in the north), then you need fallback which must still be >99% as effective to avoid incidents. But then why not just use the fallback?
Generating data? Sure. But for actual use in the data pipeline? Makes you rely on an ultimately untenable solution.
In sparsely populated areas smart roads could inform the car that there hasn't been any movement whatsoever in the whole area for hours. (Along the entire road and adjacent to the roads). How the car responds (driving somewhat faster, perhaps) could mean a large measure of safety as compared to when there are a large group of people about to cross a rural road at night that the car may or may not see visually.
Anyway it's just one example. RFID or similar embedded beacons in the road paint would make roads much easier for cars to follow. They are expensive for any one company to do but cheap for the government to do if it is done everywhere at once and lasts 5-10 years. Road signs that broadcast what they are (instead of needing to be "seen" and interpreted visually instead of through radio by the car), are similar.
Finally, a government standard could coordinate cars into a caravan, avoiding pileups for example, and giving the participating cars several advantages you can find by Googling "car caravan". (Though this might be achieved by industry.)
Roads are also governed by public bodies. Road signs are standardized and public.
I think the government should take a much larger role in defining self driving cars. For example, rather than using computer vision to recognize signs, signs could be active standardized beacons; instead of having to recognize lanes, they could be repainted with rfid chips that are trivial for cars to recognize and follow.
Avoiding driving into people is also something that was somewhat regulated by crosswalks with pedestrian lights. Would it be absurd for the crosswalk to know roughly how many people are at it, then broadcast this to the car, rather than having the car have to recognize them?
There are many things the government could do with transportation infrastructure that would benefit everyone, many of which are literally impossible for companies to do separately. Can you imagine if we had to wait until IBM (or Siemens or Google or Apple) got into the business of launching satellites before we got GPS? There is a good chance that to this day cell phones wouldn't know their location or give anyone any mapping applications.
To me, self driving cars are similar. Many parts of transportation are a public good.