I believe he claimed that they did have all of the sensors they need with hardware v2, and they had no need for LIDAR. We'll see if that's true. One thing that stood out to me is that he said they only need radar in front because you're only moving fast in that direction. Does that mean the cars will be susceptible to T-bone accidents?
I don't know, I guess it will be born out in the data, but I hope they aren't seriously planning to drive people through busy intersections where T-bones are likely to happen under the auspices that what they've got is a level 3/4 system.
Waymo's safetly critical disengagements are at 1 every 11,000 miles. Fender benders happen about once every 100,000 miles, so just on that Waymo is off by an order of magnitude, and Waymo spares no expense on compute or sensors.
>Does that mean the cars will be susceptible to T-bone accidents?
Is there much of anything a car can do to prevent being T-Boned?
And even if there is, I don't really see it being something that radar would help much with. If you and another car are approaching perpendicularly, you'll have an almost perfect situation to get positioning and speed information over a pretty short amount of time.
Of course I've never done anything even resembling any kind of work in this space, and I don't want to pretend to know the answer, but the claims of side radar not being necessary seems to pass a smoke test.
Is there much of anything a car can do to prevent being T-Boned?
Yes. Stop suddenly while entering the intersection when conflicting traffic is detected. Google cars do that, and they have been rear-ended several times because of it. You can find those events in the CA DMV accident reports. Better than being hit by the cross traffic.
