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Tesla's Sales Increase - But Next Will We Need Smart Roads? (backchannel.com)
Elon Musk says Tesla's autopilot has now driven over 222 million miles, and the company is now selling twice as many electric cars as it did in 2015. (Despite complaints from a coal-mining CEO that Tesla "is a fraud" because it receives tax-payer subsidies.)
But Slashdot reader mirandakatz writes, "It's not enough to build self-driving cars: we have to build the roads to accompany them. Roadside sensors might have once seemed a pipe dream, but with the advent of 5G internet infrastructure, they're not out of reach at all. And their implications span far beyond road safety, GMU researcher Brent Skorup explains at Backchannel: Cities could use sensor data for conducting traffic studies, pushing out real-time public bus alerts, increasing parking space occupancy, metering commercial loading times to prevent congestion, and enhancing pedestrian safety. There are also commercial applications for sensor data: How many cars drive by a billboard? How many people walk by a storefront per day? How many of those people have dogs? These are all questions we could easily answer with roadside sensors.
But Slashdot reader mirandakatz writes, "It's not enough to build self-driving cars: we have to build the roads to accompany them. Roadside sensors might have once seemed a pipe dream, but with the advent of 5G internet infrastructure, they're not out of reach at all. And their implications span far beyond road safety, GMU researcher Brent Skorup explains at Backchannel: Cities could use sensor data for conducting traffic studies, pushing out real-time public bus alerts, increasing parking space occupancy, metering commercial loading times to prevent congestion, and enhancing pedestrian safety. There are also commercial applications for sensor data: How many cars drive by a billboard? How many people walk by a storefront per day? How many of those people have dogs? These are all questions we could easily answer with roadside sensors.
There are also commercial applications for sensor data: How many cars drive by a billboard? How many people walk by a storefront per day? How many of those people have dogs? These are all questions we could easily answer with roadside sensors.
How about you fuck off and die. Not everything needs to be used to deliver more ads to me.
Time to offend someone
How are we going to afford smart roads when we can't even consistently fix the potholes we've already got?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Uh, what? What magic ground breaking technology is specifically in 5G that enables it versus 4G (or even 4G)?
Guess what, NOTHING. It's just, you know, if you want to instrument a huge chunk of a road, then you pretty much need to be the government. A single sensor attached to a billboard does nothing (and no one would opt int). You basically need to instrument a huge chunk of it, and the owner of that land is the government.
Those "smart roads" don't sound expensive at all!
More seriously - the bits which don't involve monetizing me can pretty much already be accomplished through existing crowd-sourced data collection techniques. Heck, most of the bits that *do* involve monetizing me can also pretty much already be accomplished via those same techniques. But then, somebody wouldn't stand to make millions from the patent portfolio they've built based on their publicly-funded research.
#DeleteChrome
Its practice in the coal industry to close a plant by making it go bankrupt. The parent company still is doing well, but with this trick it can avoid having to pay for the destruction and the cleanup. Who pays it then? The taxpayer does. This is just one form of subsidy the public is giving the coal plants.
Smart roads are neither necessary nor sufficient to realize driverless cars. They are unnecessary, because imaging technology is increasing at a nice clip, obviating their need. All of the applications addressed in the article could be realized with smart cars communicating with each other, rather than smart roadside sensors communicating from the street.
Further, road sensors won't be sufficient, because even assuming the cost of these smart sensors becomes relatively inexpensive, there are simply too many less traveled roads to install them on. There are many millions of miles of unpaved dirt roads, newly constructed roads, and roads that are damaged by nature. Cars will need to drive effectively without roadside sensors.
The one application I can see of roadside sensors is possibly to increase accuracy on major highways, thus increasing the max speed of the driverless cars on the road.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
"There are also commercial applications for sensor data: How many cars drive by a billboard? How many people walk by a storefront per day? How many of those people have dogs? These are all questions we could easily answer with roadside sensors."
First of all, the last thing we need is more effective advertising. Second we don't need any new information gathering devices created and installed in our current political climate. If installed today these sensors wouldn't just track anonymous data, they would also track WHO did the walking and what car drove by. Today they'd build those capabilities in and probably lie about it. Even without building that capability into the system you could find the paths of sensors and correlate with GPS data to determine not only where my car went but whether or not I drove it.
It's only a matter of time before they say my car (which I say is lost and they fished out of the river) going to my office, combined with my gps signal and phone (which I conveniently say I lost) along with those of my wife is proof I killed her. There is a small chance any one of those could be a coincidence but the probability of all of the above being a coincidence exceeds any reasonable doubt! Little did I know I forgot my phone that day, my wife noticed and was bringing it to me when stopped at a gas station and was murdered by a mugger who disposed of the body and car in the river.
The only improbable thing there is actually my wife getting mugged and killed, the rest is actually a pretty normal occurance. No thank you. This is why the last thing you should ever want is the police to have more data.
My subject is perhaps a bit strong; there's nothing inherently wrong with smart roads. The problem is with the idea that you need them. If you need smart roads for your autonomous vehicles to function, then you haven't solved the autonomous driving problem for two critical reasons. One, what if the smart roads fail? Two, what if the smart roads are hacked? It is absolutely critical that vehicles use smart road (or indeed, V2V) data for informational purposes only. They will always have to trust their sensors above anything else they are being told for these two reasons.
Automakers will collect information from autonomous driving systems, process it, and then send it back to vehicles. At least some of them are even going to share this data with one another so they won't have to generate all of it themselves. But the vehicles will still have to make the ultimate call, because if we here at Slashdot should know anything it's that you can't trust your input. On the vehicle itself you can solve this problem by cross-checking multiple sensors. The result is always going to have to be more trusted than what the network is claiming.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, even more IoT devices to make massive DDOS attacks is exactly what we need.
Governments will want to pay for this, if it allows them to track the position of every single car on each road. Roadside sensors will pick up the unique ID of smart cars. Governments want to track the location of their citizens, and use the data to sell for commercial purposes, for tax collections, and for law enforcement. Privacy exists to protect civilians from governments. We need strong privacy controls if roadside sensors are installed.
How are we going to afford smart roads when we can't even consistently fix the potholes we've already got?
the rich people in your community have successfully brainwashed you. they have plenty of money, more than enough to fix the potholes and educate our kids. they have manipulated the mechanisms of society so that you think that it's your fault.
That we can do something does not mean that we automatically should do it & it looks to me like this is a solution in search of a problem that would propose financing to install it.
GPS/4G linked databases of road limits and mapping software already performs localization to follow traffic congestion and speeds.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
You mean to tell me that you're going to have millions of vehicles with umpteen sensors, and millions more with passengers that are cataloging every speed fluctuation and bump in the road - all of which can be used for road maintenance and optimization, but we're going to ignore all of that data so we can put into place and maintain a complete second system? All of the civic uses can pretty much be gathered using anonymized cell phone and car data. Fuck the commercial stuff.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Who's going to pay for all these smart roads? We can't pave the ones we have, let alone make them compliant to smart autonomous vehicles. What about the many thousands of miles of unmarked, gravel, and unpaved roads in America? If you implement a tax on EV vehicles that could help, since they avoid paying fuel tax and get federal tax credits. How will this help pay for anything? Does anyone realize as we have increased the MPG on cars we have also reduced to some extent the fuel taxes collected? Another incredible clueless green initiative that has not thought anything through.
I read five lines before giving up.
Written by someone who's never dealt with the requirements of NCTIP, dealing with the law enforcement requirements, USDOT and all 50 other State DOT, plus local regulations and municipal requirements.
In other words? We'll have warp drive first.
Rural areas cant handle self driving cars. Rural counties cant afford paved roads, they cant afford to plow or grade dirt and gravel roads. Everyone keeps talking about self driving cars, but that doesnt work I cant see self driving cars for a long time, the practical, the cost, legal areas, and when people drive trucks for decades, its going to be awhile. In the cities, sure, why not. Outside the city, we dont even have Internet except dialup in many places.
Because there's no way in hell autonomous cars will be able to operate nearly flawlessly on our existing crumbling infrastructure. (in all parts of the country, in all types of weather)
The writer of the summary makes it sound like a utopia, I'd wager that it will more closely resemble the seventh circle of hell. Imagine if you will a city that decides to "solve" its congestion problem by charging people to drive during certain parts of the day (see London), an advanced smart road system would make that changeover implementable overnight. Or if you run across the wrong politician/police officer who decides to go through your vehicle tracking logs to dig up dirt/write tickets. Certain parts of a smart road system definitely make sense (traffic congestion monitoring, parking space location, etc), but only if they are accompanied by hardware based safeguards to protect privacy and physically prevent spying/tracking.
Are we developing autonomous cars or not? If a car needs a smart road or even a network connection it is not autonomous. I can tell you there is no way in hell my city would ever be able to afford smart roads. They can't even keep the lines painted!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Everyone's busy with phones and backseat video players
We cant get "SAFE" or well maintained roads.... trying to get smart roads in place is an impossibility unless a federal mandate is passed requiring the amount of money spent on roadways is doubled at least.
Most states cant keep the lines painted on the roads in decent shape, there is zero chance that any smart road tech will be maintained.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Roadside sensors are a natural for a mesh network. Each sensor can use something akin to WiFi to talk to the next one in each direction along the road. Data can pass from each sensor to it's neighbor in two directions, providing a measure of fault tolerance and detection.
However, cars are gradually becoming connected - it might be easier for them just to talk to each other and back to the net using the sensors and radio gear that they already have. That way you don't have to monitor sections of road where nobody's driving.
www.sjbaker.org
"It's not enough to build self-driving cars: we have to build the roads to accompany them."
If that's true, then we're not getting self-driving cars.
I'm tired of living in the freakin dark ages over here. I want my smart roads, driverless cars, "internet of things" smart house and toilet paper with sensors onboard.
These sensors really wont be that expensive. They will be built over the 5G network and we aren't talking expensive optotronic heres but very basic radio wave antennas. Each sensor will probably run about $1-3. Even if you need a couple billion of them -- that is not a lot of money.
As so many have pointed out, almost none of the reasons listed in support of smart roads are desirable.
If an autonomous car can't drive itself everywhere, even on gravel and dirt, it isn't autonomous yet. We don't all live in the city! So, the autonomous problem has to be solved.
Given a choice of foci beyond that, I'd rather have universal vehicle-to-vehicle communication that is robust and mandatory. That would allow us to run bumper-to-bumper, eliminate stop lights and signs, etc. We could dramatically reduce the number of lanes on highways and still get places faster.
I'm sure road sensors can be helpful, but they can never tell the whole story about the road. If an autonomous car can't detect potholes, flooding, or other unexpected road conditions, then it's not truly autonomous. And I'm not sure what a car with advanced-enough sensors to detect these things would gain from roadside sensors. Yes, it's important to know where the road's location, but knowing the road's condition is at least as important.
But don't you see? Advertisers will fund them!
Yep, I see your point.
Still I agree with the parent: extensive research (from Google and others) agrees that the most usefull place to put the sensors into is the car.
(The logic goes :
- automated cars needs very fine details.
- we don't have such highly detailed maps already
- we should makes some, but it's going to be very cumbersome and time-and-ressource-consuming to detail all the raods in every excruciatingly tiny detail (nearly down to the position of every orange street cone)
- hey! why don't we crowdsource the data? let's have our cars equipped with good enough sensors and stream their data to us and so we can continuously update the maps.
- hey! if the cars' sensors are good enough to see every last orange street cone, why the hell do we need to upload the data and update the maps ? Let the car maps itself what it sees in its vicinity.
- So basically, you need plain fucking simple street maps to have a vague idea in which general direction you want to go, and let's have highly sensitive/detailed sensors on the car to continuously see and analyse what's in the imediate vicinity of the car and react accordingly ?)
From that point of view, trying to trick the advertisers into funding more smart streets is nearly useless. Better find a way to monetise the car it self and put more sensors on it.
Hey! Maybe advertisers will pay us to drive!!
Now that's more interesting to me. :-D
Specially if I can manage to find a Google Car/Telsa/whatever port of uBlock Origin !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Also, as an addendum :
Smart Streets !
- the abysmal security practices of the wonderful world of "Internet-of-Things"
coupled together with
- the extremely new and still in its infancy technology of self-driving cars (and still very contested. See comments threads each time Google announce having totalled N million miles).
"What could possibly go wront ?" (tm)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Your business needs to go away.
The question should be if anyone will have the decency to lend a hand to the people in the communities affected.
If robot cars need sensor roads, wouldn't a fair, free market approach say that the people using/buying/selling/building those robot cars should be the ones paying for it?
If history is any guide, this is just step one in a large scheme to transfer public money (in the form of specialized infrastructure spending) from the public at large, to robot car builders (in the form of increased sales from more useful products made possible by those specialized infrastructure spending)
We already saw this play out once in recent history, as the federal government took trillions of dollars and millions of people's homes & businesses to make daily long distance car travel first possible, then required, to line the pockets of contractors, the car companies and the oil companies.
Welcome to motordom 2.0
I will enjoy driving my antique car around (while not being tracked by the government) while all the fools in the autodriving crap are stuck in the traffic jam created by my radar/lidar chaff air cannon that I've installed on the back of the car. Aggressive driving will get me there even twice as fast once super polite to a fault cars yield to every one of my dick moves with no retaliation ever!
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
WTF i don't need no steenkin maps when travelling, I can remember the route or find another with my own carbon based BRANE. I can see the road, the potholes the trucks crossing in front of me without no high tech shit. Hell a horse could get me home while drunk.
lanes that don't fucking turn for no fucking reason... stop merging 10 fucking lanes into 1 ... especially during rush hour ... stop treating roads as a fucking jobs program... mcdonalds is not hiring the people leaning on a shovel for no reason.... anyone driving in LA , atlanta , NYC knows what I mean
Why don't drivers pay for public charging stations?
The owner of the power line has to pay for those kilowatts with someone's money. How is this sustainable? Who is paying for it?
Kriston
whatever happened to the idea of transponders; where every smart car would talk to the cars immediately around it about its current speed and direction so that they won't hit each other and share sensor data about objects including people so they won't hit those.
I'm proud, proud I tell you that my freedoms prevent so much of the USA from working properly.
Smart cars would drive on stupid roads.
Otherwise you'd call them slot cars.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I don't know what you're talking about. While I'm personally no fan, Iceland was Assange's base of operations for quite some time. And our next government is fairly likely to grant Snowden citizenship, something I'm cautiously supportive of.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
So, the roads around my house all have sensors in them... surface streets have sensors at each stoplight and highways have them scattered along the road side to measure congestion... it's where google gets their traffic data...
So now that we have this elaborate web of sensors and anyone willing to pay and ink a deal with the DOT in various locations can get access to that data.... now what? Seems like we've taken this data a good distance already, it's already being used to prioritize construction projects, and while it doesn't track how many people walk past a store (in the road, with or without a dog) I suspect to really measure that you'll want to get SIDEWALK sensors, since that's where most pedestrians walk.
So since we already have "smart roads" maybe we should focus a bit on V2V communication.... seems like that's going to be a real winner where as smart roads while they are great for high level overview of traffic situations aren't really relevant for an individual car other than for route finding around congestion, which we are already doing with google maps/navigation.
Autonomous means no smart roads or networked cars. The only sensors people need to drive is eyes and all cars need is cameras.
Like my mother always said, whomever designed obviously didn't drive a car.
So, yes, let's get smarter roads . . . . just, you know, ones that work better with all cars.
You know why? The mafia and unions.
You know who owns the asphalt business? You know who makes sure that roads in America need to be repaved regularly and funnels huge tax dollars to the scam?
Yep. Ain't gonna happen. Tesla execs will get a nice visit from a very nice man explaining why what they're doing isn't a good idea.
Beside that, honestly? Have you met union workers? there's no way they're qualified to install technology like this, and trying to get people into the union who can do this reliably? And getting cities to repave their roads (it takes YEARS right now)? hooboy. I wish Tesla, google, etc the best of luck, but I have a hard time believing headway can be made on this.
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The best smart road is a rail road. A rail. Makes a 2-dimensional problem into a 1-dimensional problem. Can be used to supply power, mooting battery range. Needn't facilitate surveillance or advertising. Does not make you fat.