[bjpirt]

Made me laugh but it's a very true statement. When I was driving whilst holidaying in India I realised that the main rule of the road was "largest vehicle wins"! This actually made for quite an easy to understand system with few questions of whose right of way it was.

bike < car < van < truck

which makes sense because if you're the one who's going to come off worse in an impact then you really want to give way - especially if you have a massive painted tipper truck hurtling towards you!

It will be very interesting to see how self driving systems can cope with these local unwritten bylaws.

[danielbln]

It will most definitely be interesting, but it's silly to say that self-driving cars can't be taken seriously, if they don't master these conditions (yet). Hell, I couldn't master those conditions myself, nor do I need to, because I live in the the inner city of a Western-European metropolis, so what I need my self-driving car to do varies massively from what people in other regions of the globe may need it to do, but that doesn't make it any less useful for me.

[coldtea]

>This actually made for quite an easy to understand system with few questions of whose right of way it was. bike < car < van < truck

That doesn't make much sense, because the main (and most common) question would still be between vehicles of the same class: car vs car, and this doesn't solve it.

[kamaal]

>>It will be very interesting to see how self driving systems can cope with these local unwritten bylaws.

This is why self driving AI will require Hard AI.

India is a perfect test bed for these people to test their algorithms. And for heaven's sake why would you test it in some place like the US. Cars in US are pretty much trains on road any way.

[jamespo]

Because that's where the (easy) money is

[kamaal]

I get it. They would want to release their cars in US or Europe as their primary markets.

But even in those cases it makes sense to test in India. Why? Sooner or later you will have some situation in the US which may resemble daily traffic conditions in India. Imagine a law and order situation where people are running around without regards to traffic laws. Or some other situation where traffic is being rerouted through a wrong way, In US may be as an exception traffic is being routed through the left lane(being a right lane drive country) etc etc.

For all these situations you will very soon need a test environment that provides you with all situations to test.

[coldtea]

>For all these situations you will very soon need a test environment that provides you with all situations to test.

Which won't be India.

Because you obviously don't want to be testing unprecedented conditions with live subjects in actual traffic.

If anything, that will only happen after tons of simulations of such conditions in fake environments.