Do you mean there's already sign and traffic light recognition in V9 (which would be interesting news) - or that it's another significant area that robust FSD has to cover?
That's the area where we don't have a visual confirmation yet that V9 is able to handle it.
Sometimes I see speed limits shown on the screen, but don't know if these are recognized or come from some DB.
I think the ICE manufacturing industry will collapse a lot faster than there's going to be a reliably full coverage of traffic light database, and even when implemented it's probably not robust enough to rely on in any meaningful fashion:
- the database could be out of date
I meant real time pulls. Tesla has LTE in cars, how difficult/expensive can it be in the future to mandate all cars to have it to stay current on road conditions?
There can be significant safety benefits to come from this, like it will allow authorities to react very quickly to changing road/weather conditions:
- bridge is frozen: plug in 25 mph speed limit in front of it;
- earthquake created cracks, downed bridges: mark the road closed;
- maintenance costs can be reduced and changes happen more quickly if you need to update speed limit from 55mph to 65mph.
I'm thinking maybe more into the future than the next couple of decades...
- changes to traffic light patterns are difficult to get 100% right
- the local clock of the traffic light could be mis-calibrated so the timings could be off by a few seconds ...
- the local traffic control has authority to do things unexpectedly: for example in many countries there's overrides for high priority traffic, such as a high level politician's convoy driving through, or emergency services, etc. These priority overrides will almost certainly not be published via a central database.
Yeah, timing issues could be better handled by local recognition until the data connections speed is up and synchronization issues can be solved, I'm sure the day will come when hardware capacity is many times that of today and cheaper.
- local traffic control hardware could also be outright buggy:
This is an edge case that Tesla has to be able to handle in FSD - if they are checking to see if multiple lights are on, then should not be very hard to handle appropriately.
In fact I'd pay for my car to not rely on any such databases, I'd consider that a safety feature ...
Today yes. I think 50 years from today it may not be so obvious. Automated driving could be many times safer. Maybe it can be financed from the funds that are taken from insurance companies and body shops, b/c there's no longer a need to repair cars if accidents don't happen anymore...
I mean, what is needed? Fast data connections, cars talking to each other like passenger airplanes to avoid collisions and standardized database of road rules that can be accessed real time by all cars.
Scenarios w/ polititians and emergency services having priority can probably be handled one way or another, maybe they can drop their route onto the map having this override access and then other cars yield to them automatically.
