“Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.”
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming…
I imagine power is the tricky part. Badge readers and the like that use RFID also use wireless electricity to “power” the card. The range of that is limited without massive coils. You may be able to harness power from heat in asphalt (from traffic or sunlight beating on it), but I’d think that’d also be very limiting.
Better would be low power RF beacons set up at every transformer or every N utility poles. Something like BLE, maybe a little bit beefier. Power is readily available. They don’t require data. All they need to do is broadcast their exact location and time (which they can get from GPS receivers).
Y’know GPS didn’t even enter my mind. Hell, depending on GPS 3 accuracy (isn’t it supposed to be in the centimeters?) my talk of signals is completely moot. That measured against a map of roads on a server somewhere would probably let you download an entire map of nodes toward your destination. Along the way the car just measures against its current location and does the math for obstacles. Great point. This is why I ponder shit out loud. Thanks.
It is way more experience. Has to withstand great pressure and sheer forces. Updates as road changes. Heat of building asphalt and later of summer. Horrible road maintenance. And what does it provide exactly to a car that actually helps? How long until most roads are updated with it?