Human beings can not drive in all conditions in India.

Just to get our car out of the garage, I had to plead and negotiate with N vegetable vendors with makeshift stores on the road.

Also: bicycles, motorbikes, rickshaws(in human pulled, CNG and electric varieties!)and pedestrians mixed in traffic everywhere.

Yep, I have a feeling that for driving in India/Iran/Pakistan/Bangladesh you're going to need a strong AI to negotiate with the street vendors. In Iran I even had a particularly... enthusiastic flower seller actually maneuver himself to make it even harder to drive away.

Not to take away from anyone's work in this area, but I have no idea how long it'll take to go from "works in America" to "works in India". In many countries the safest option (to evade disaster) can occasionally be "floor it and break the speed limit" to get away from x dangerous thing. I'm not sure if that's something that Google is willing to write into an AI.

This will require something like Rick's (from Rick and Morty) car/spaceship.

>>I had to plead and negotiate with N vegetable vendors with makeshift stores on the road.

This is a very practical test case for a car on a road. Not just in India but anywhere in the world.

Instead of N vegetable vendors you could have N traffic cops. How do you manage the human interaction part in the self driving car?

Well, most non-Indian drivers also can't make it in "all conditions in India" so that's a moot point.

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.

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.

>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.

>>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.

Because that's where the (easy) money is

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.

>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.

I wouldn't drive in India. And I'm human.

You are only human. Its super human who can drive there.

I imagine a self driving car will drive there similarly to a human; slowly, because of the extreme risk. Potentially humans tend to take more risks than they should, so a self driving car in India might seem to drive differently than a human would. But the algorithm stays the same; drive at a speed matching the obstacle risk, and avoid hitting things. Perhaps the parking aspect would be the most different.

IMO, India has the simplest driving algorithm: Keep going where you're going and don't hit anything. Also, honk if you think you might be in someone's blindspot.