This post Self-Driving Car Quiz — What Happens When You Spray Paint A Road Sign? appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
It’s late at night on a Kentucky back road…
An early-model truck bed is filled with empty beer cans and a handful of local community college dropouts.
And they’re armed, too… With a can of spray paint.
Kids will be kids, right?
Suddenly, the truck stops at a speed limit sign… One of the degenerates hops out and shakes up the spray can.
As fast as you and I can count to three, with a few strokes of graffiti paint this troublemaker changes the “30” to an “80.”
He single-handedly raised the speed limit by 50 miles per hour. His friends laugh and they drive away without a second though.
More on that story in a moment.
But first, while the degenerates of the world sleep off their cheap-beer hangover, let’s lay some more ground work for the autonomous vehicle theme we’ve been talking about lately…
Self-driving cars are closer to reality than you think. And the technology that will be required for large-scale adoption will be massive.
Vehicles will need to interact with everything from other vehicles to road signs to data centers to GPS satellites. All requiring massive amounts of data that will need to be processed faster than the blink of an eye.
Sounds difficult right?
It is. But believe it or not, the vast majority of the technology needed has already been developed, and these driverless vehicles are already on the road in some parts of the country.
Google’s Waymo has already racked up millions of miles driven with their autonomous vehicles, while Ford just recently announced that they’ve partnered with Domino’s Pizza to deliver food via autonomous cars — and they delivered the first pizza last week!
But with this rising acceptance of these driverless vehicles comes inherent risks — risks that the technology isn’t currently prepared for. More specifically, risks from troublemakers like in the story above, or more seriously, from advanced computer hackers that are all too common in today’s society…
Here’s What Keeps Autonomous Vehicle Engineers Up At Night…
I recently traveled to Detroit, Michigan where I spoke with a handful of top AV engineers who explained that data is the single most important factor in getting autonomous vehicles on the road. There are two reasons why data is so important:
Reason #1 Why Data Is So Important: vehicles need to “learn” how to drive. This requires complex procedures that are formulated over millions of miles of test driving. Think of this process as a yes/no flowchart.
Here’s an example:
Click to enlarge
But this is done for the thousands of different situations drivers experience daily — everything from squirrels to roadwork to bus stops — which will require a ton of data…
Reason #2 Why Data Is So Important: Self-driving cars will need to constantly be in communication with the outside world. Between the sensors mapping the surrounding area, GPS information from satellites, and the constant communication with other cars on the …read more
Source:: Daily Reckoning feed
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