India Driving

higgums0 HN recommenders · 2010–2018
10.3M views · other · evergreen · Uploaded 2006-03-22

A short 2006 clip of chaotic traffic in India, with cars, bikes and pedestrians weaving around each other and one car going against the flow.

HN uses it as the classic example of chaotic Indian traffic, especially in threads about self-driving cars and spontaneous order on roads.

Watch on YouTube

3 comments from Hacker News

@muhfuhkuh2010 · in “Spontaneous order on the road (what happened when traffic lights were off)”

So, the future of less traffic congestion is to be like the developing countries: India: [VIDEO] Vietnam: [LINK] Hmmm... I'm not sure about this, Batman.

@justboxing2017 · in “India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs”

Forget the part about protecting jobs, how confident will the driverless cars companies be even otherwise, sending their cars out into the chaotic traffic in India, where you routinely share the road with bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, rickshaws, handcarts, buses, lorries (trucks), cows and the occasional sheep and donkeys? Related video => [2006] India Driving [VIDEO]

@YeGoblynQueenne2018 · in “Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow”

>> On the other hand, I'm sure people in India or China will be happy to build and deploy them with much higher failure rates. You might have seen this internet classic: [VIDEO] [India Driving] Driving in India is notoriously chaotic and if self-driving cars are ever deployed there in our lifetime, they will come with a safety guarantee about equal to a car driven by a blind dog with a missing paw. It would be impossible to safely navigate the streets there with anything less situationaly aware than a fully developed adult human brain. The article above makes it sound like weather is the big problem for self-driving cars and once that's solved- wooohoo, we're on our way! It's far from that. Self-driving car AI is still incapable of reasoning about its environment, neither does it have any "undersanding" of it in any way, shape or form. Consequently it only works in very limited environments, in very limited conditions - of traffic, visibility, road quality etc.