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Re: OT: The other Apple Drive

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JF Mezei wrote:
> Savageduck wrote: 
>> once the snow is cleared, even the bikes come out to play. 
>> <http://reliableanswers.com/images/wallpaper/snow_sierra_pass.jpg> 
>
> Ahh, lucky guys with clean roads. Here, we get slush, potholes filled 
> with partly frozen water where you don't know if it is the road or a 
> pothole, and cars spraying slush all over the place which makes road 
> signs dirty and more importantly, car windows dirty. So the cameras on 
> top of the car will quickly lose ability to see if you follow a truck. 

A good point.  My current (new) ride has a rear backup camera and even it
gets grime-covered with the winter pooge ... happened to be refueling at 
one point last winter, noticed the grime, licked my thumb to wipe it off, saw
that I didt get it all cleaned, licked my thumb again....YUK!  Not doing that again.


> and when it snows, forget about seeing white lines on roads (and in many 
> places the lines are mostly erased and not maintained). 

And/or divergent ruts...seen 4 lane highways reduced to 2 lanes which
weren't anywhere close to where any lane lines were.  Those are also 
some of the days where you discover that you've gone through another 
half gallon of windshield washer fluid in a single day on your <50 mile 
commute and you're now empty.  Time to find a place to stop to pull the
spare jug from the trunk.

In any case, this is just another example of some of the technology 
challenges in trying to replace the human operator.  Another such 
challenge is also how to manage power on a presumed electric 
vehicle platform to feed all the heaters & defrosters for severe 
winter operations ... warming up the cabin's air is trivial in comparison 
to melting pounds upon pounds of ice/snowfall during a drive to
maintain basic road visibility, even before considering how to also
keep the cameras clean.

-hh

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Re: OT: The other Apple Drive -hh <recscuba_google@huntzinger.com> - 2015-09-25 02:27 -0700

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