They can, but they often don’t. I’m glad you did.
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That’s my point…no matter how many miles of driving the AI has in its database…the cpu cycles and memory limits in whatever is in the car become an issue. All those miles in waymo’s AI development database still have to be downsampled into software that fits in the car at the price point the car needs for the parts.
Adam’s mileage obviously varies…and that’s just fine.
Which is why there is a lot of research into “connected cars” and “connected roadways”, where the car can offload the heavy-duty computing onto cloud services.
Of course, typical Internet latency (100s of ms) is too slow for this to work, so the industry is focusing a lot of R&D effort in “edge computing”, where cloud servers are colocated at cell towers (ideally near the roads), along with “network slicing” to provide guaranteed 5G bandwidth, in order to minimize the communication delay between the servers and the cars.
There’s also work on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, where cars (both autonomous and manual) share data with each other in order to optimize algorithms for avoiding collisions and reducing congestion.
Of course, this is a really difficult problem. It requires critical cloud data to roam from server to server as the car moves from cell to cell. But it’s an active field of research for telecommunications.
The future here is really bright, but it’s certainly not here now, and I wouldn’t place any bets on when it will arrive.
See also:
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And cell phone connectivity is soooo reliable that it always works brilliantly…not.
Offloading the computing power…and admittedly servers in every cell tower is technically but maybe not economically feasible…but that’s still doesn’t solve the problem of signal dropout…and again, more cell sites can help that…but Murphy says the signal will drop just as the unknown situation presents itself.
I could see self driving being ok on freeways with enough tech tossed at it…but blanketing the US isn’t happening and even blanketing an entire city with sufficient guaranteed, always works cell network seems problematic. The tech has to be all in the car…and while that is probably technically feasible…it isn’t going to be cheap and few buyers will spring for the expensive option…and without a user base the cell c9mpanies aren’t going to wholesale upgrade their systems for it.
Just like putting 100,0 solar panels and windmills in Kansas and building a new grid with sufficient capability to move ll that power to CA and NY is technically feasible…it is many, many billions of dollars to build and years before the infrastructure upgrade is complete enough to actually solve the problem.
Waymo has now started driving on freeways and has significantly expanded its footprint in the Bay Area.