I saw an interesting comment on the blog post. Is anyone keeping tab on the project knows if Google in working on some sort of communication between vehicles on road. That will make the self driving cars much more accurate. Lot of 'sudden' circumstances will be predictable by the car.
This would also be better for optimal traffic routing. I remember reading about it previously somewhere, but it gets bad PR for privacy reasons so I think it's brought up less often.
You can do that now already, e.g. pretend to quickly step on a road while a car is approaching and watch the human drives hit their brakes. Yet I don't see that happening because the majority of people aren't jerks.
Doing so physically, that is, driving erratically or aggressively, or giving false signals, is both visible to other drivers and illegal. It can also be recorded on camera. Electronic signals are not visible, and fewer people have the ability to record and analyze the signal traffic.
I believe this shows that is a non-trivial population of people/jerks that will be interested in traffic shaping for personal gain.
Note how the defenses against those signal devices include state and federal laws and the addition of auditing techniques. The latter is possible because the transmitters and receivers are effectively controlled by the state. This is harder with cars.
Errr... wouldn't it be easier to record such 'jerks' electronically? I mean isn't it difficult to catch a number plate in dark while it would be lot easier to record someone doing it if there is a communication along with an ID for each vehicle?
In the traffic signal example, the lights can be programed, with a whitelist of all IDs which are allowed to change the signals, and where the signals can be reprogrammed, to mitigate cloning.
I presume that any sort of illegal device which modifies car-to-car communications for other than safety reasons would not be tied to an id registered to a specific car. If only because those devices may need to be replaced, making a registration headache.
I also presume that there won't be a global upload/download of the message traffic for centralized analysis, so who do you think will be doing the recording and analysis?
There is a huge difference between a kid playing a prank to a few cars on the road and a malicious hacker willing to take control of a portion of the street indefinitely.
Imagine for example some hacker programming all the cars in the proximity of a bank to grind to a halt and cause congestion so his team can go rob said bank and have the police delayed because of the inconvenience. Yes, it sounds like the plot for a Batman movie, but still the potential is there.
Today you can do this as well, just take (rent) a car or two, stop them in the middle of the road and get out. Things like this happen and will happen, it's what we have to deal with when the enemy actors are sentient beings. They will find workarounds.
Accountability is much easier with physical objects like cars.
The car has a VIN. The VIN is tied to a owner, which is the rental car company. The car company requires that renters present a license, which is tied to the renter's name, address, etc. The car company likely also requires a credit card, which has additional clues about who the enemy actors are.
These can be circumvented, but it's not easy.
I think a better example is of enemy actors who drop large cinder blocks on the road. This is much less traceable, and occurs sometimes as part of carjacking.
Still, I meant to compare with people who currently use traffic signal preemption devices. While illegal, it's harder to detect and prosecute than, say, people who run red lights.
