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Cruise Automation, GM’s Self-Driving Cars, and the Founders Behind It
- Animats 10y agoNow that explains some things. The initial Cruise Automation system was lane keeping and auto speed control, which everybody has. It was over-promoted as full automatic driving on the Cruise web site and Youtube.[1] "Just sit back and enjoy the ride", says the video. The founder was credible enough to sell GM on buying their 40-person startup for somewhere between $500M and $1BN. GM already had the Cadillac/CMU technology self-driving technology, which was better than what Cruise had. But GM bought anyway. One of the best deals made since Bill Gates sold IBM on adopting DOS. Meanwhile, Cruise now has multiple Velodyne laser units on a rack on top of the car, like everybody else. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEQqQj_zyHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEQqQj_zyHI
- pb 10y agoYou are watching a two year old youtube video and then confidently extrapolating to conclude that Cruise has no tech and that GM got duped out of a billion dollars.
- revelation 10y agoWell, all they are showing is that they have no tech. Even the photos in this article are a bunch of Chevrolet dumps charging.
- flylib 10y agothere is 15+ self driving startups at the moment, GM has prolly seen all of them and went with Cruise
- jayjay71 10y agoThat isn't sound logic. GM has a track record of making terrible managerial decisions, so assuming they know best is ignoring history. The people making the decisions haven't worked on self-driving cars and are not the best people to judge the technology, in fact these are the very people who twice (technically thrice, but that's another story) abandoned their own self-driving R&D which ultimately went to Google and Delphi (and another which was just completely thrown away). You're also assuming that all of the other companies wanted to sell, which isn't true.
- flylib 10y agoOtto sold for 680 million to Uber in August 2016, the company started in 2015, that's atleast one company that was willing to sell and I figure most of them would, they all have no end game other then being acquired for the most part http://www.recode.net/2016/8/18/12540068/uber-paid-680-million-for-self-driving-truck-company-otto-for-the-tech-not-the-trucks http://www.recode.net/2016/8/18/12540068/uber-paid-680-milli... time will tell if the Cruise acquisition pays off or not
- jayjay71 10y agoOtto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret.
- flylib 10y agowe will see a few more acquisitions play out in this space over the next year or so but I do believe Google will have a hard time acquiring the companies in the space as tons of people are jumping ship and some are even starting their own self driving startups with prolly no intention of going back to google like Otto
- Animats 10y agoAnd this DMV crash report from February of this year.[1] Cruise hit a parked car in San Francisco at 20mph. The driver tried to intervene and prevent it, but too late. When you read Google's crash reports [2], it's almost always "autonomous vehicle was rear-ended by human driver". That's happened twice at Phyllis Av. and Grant Rd. in Mountain View. It's worth a look at that location.[3] Notice the tree in the median strip on Phyllis. That's in just the right place to block Google's car-top LIDAR scanners from seeing cross traffic on Grant Rd. So the autonomous vehicle advanced at 6mph to get a better view, detected cross traffic, stopped, and was rear-ended. The same thing happened a month later, last September. The autonomous vehicle did the right thing (not seeing "hit by cross traffic" accident reports), but it wasn't what the driver behind expected. That's what the problems look like in the later stages of development. Not reports of hitting parked cars. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/bc21ef62-6e7c-4049-a552-0a7c50d92e86/Cruise_Automation_01.08.16.pdf?MOD=AJPERES https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/bc21ef62-6e7c-4049... [2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316 https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton... [3] https://goo.gl/maps/T1Q33rtB67F2 https://goo.gl/maps/T1Q33rtB67F2
- ModernMech 10y agoI saw the tech they had in their office right before acquisition. It wasn't anything drastically different from the tech used in 2007 during the DARPA Urban challenge.
- flylib 10y agothey abandoned that retrofitting hardware a while ago too, they only did that for a few months before working on a more full stack solution that is level 4 that would require a partnership with a car company to install their product which they now have
- revelation 10y agoThat YouTube video is hilarious, that steering is twitchy as fuck. It's like someone used PID control without a clue.
- Animats 10y agoTesla is really good at precise lane-keeping.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ3DV671CT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ3DV671CT8
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jayjay71 10y agoGM had the Cadillac/CMU technology, but due to...I'll call it managerial oversight, they lost their initial IP to Google in 2009 (basically everybody had left and took their knowledge with them) and then again to Delphi in 2015 with the Ottomatika acquisition. GM knew it needed self-driving technology, and Cruise was in the right place at the right time. Kudos to Cruise for pulling it off. Hopefully GM doesn't repeat themselves and effectively kill the technology for a 3rd time.
- Animats 10y agoAh. That may go down in history as one of the biggest big-company R&D management failures since Xerox couldn't figure out what to do with PARC. That would explain overpaying for Cruise - top management doesn't have to explain that failure to stockholders.
- asimuvPR 10y agoYou should learn about the history of GM. Specially from the early 70s to the late 90s. Lots of horrible management decisions. You will learn how they gave toyota and honda the US domestic market on a silver platter.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Animats 10y agoI know. I read De Lorean's "On a clear day you can see General Motors" (1979) and Lutz's "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters" (2013). Lutz makes a key point about automotive. He says that all the functional needs from automobiles have been met. You can buy just about any car from any make and get where you need to go reliably. Now it's all about the things which drive non-rational decisions about what car to buy. Self-driving changes that. It's the first big change in basic car function in decades. That's going to have a big impact on the automotive sector, but nobody knows yet how it will play out.
- pb 10y agoThis is a great quote: "Startups with no demanding customers can lose their urgency, with development cycles dragging on for years, says Rust, who worked at Google’s experimental research factory before joining Cruise. “We tried to accomplish what one of the most talented teams at Google did in two years and compress that into six months,” Vogt says." This is one of the main reasons why "internal startups" at big companies fail. They lack urgency. The same thing often happens at startups that are over-funded too -- they think they can afford to take their time and that leads to compounding slowness.
- mdorazio 10y agoYes, but in this particular case I would say that urgency is not the best thing to have. When my life is on the line, I would much rather have an autonomous driving system that was developed slowly and deliberately without time pressure instead of one that was rushed out the door to beat a competitor to market.
- jaredhansen 10y agoThis is a fair point, but don't underestimate the value of getting something to market sooner rather than later, even for something like this. Look at it this way: would you rather wait for five 9s against getting in a collision of any kind, in a car you won't be able to buy for another 25 years ... or settle for four 9s, and take delivery by christmas? I don't know enough about the odds or the effect vs speed to comment with any confidence about whether Cruise's autonomous driving system fits this pattern or not, but I too often see a knee-jerk "slower and safer is always better when LIVES are on the line!" reaction, and I think it's worth being careful about whether it actually does make for a safer world.
- nfriedly 10y agoTo add perspective, the interim solution (driving yourself) is probably closer to three 9s. So it's a choice between a big improvement soon, or an even bigger improvement later.
- mandeepj 10y ago> Cruise is working with GM to add autonomous-driving technology to the Bolt. May be GM popped out $1 billion so that they can put their own of version of Tesla's auto pilot in Bolt.
- Shivetya 10y agoI am not sure any company is going it alone, Tesla didn't create their system on their own anymore than GM did. After reading a Motortrend article where they tested most of the major systems it seemed most are very good at unsafe tailgating and work only in ideal conditions.
- tardo99 10y agoI know I'll get downvoted for this, but I'm virtually positive that Cruise was just snake oil. I expect GM to trail other automakers in this area, particularly after this acquisition. Now, to be fair, that is pretty much the null hypothesis since GM trails in a lot of areas. But, I view the Cruise acquisition as a confirmation of -- not a rebuttal to -- the notion that they are far behind and will fail.
- jfoster 10y agoOf course that would get you downvoted. You said you're positive about something a little bit controversial and provided no observations that your view could be based on. What objective evidence is your view based on?
- dang 10y ago> I know I'll get downvoted for this Please don't break the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) by going on about getting downvoted. Your assessment was also off base, because unsubstantive dismissals (which your comment unfortunately is) routinely get lots of upvotes, alas.
- tardo99 10y agoPrepare for downvotes. how dare you criticize the great accomplishments of our new startup heroes?
- dang 10y agoPlease don't do this here. Substantive criticism is fine; snarky meta comments add nothing. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567998 and marked it off-topic. Edit: it turns out you've been posting a lot of stuff like this. Please don't post any more stuff like this. Instead, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
- tardo99 10y agoI'll go with "not at all." Thanks for the feedback.
- boznz 10y ago"Statistically speaking, most of us will never build a billion-dollar company. We definitely won’t build two of them" If you mad a billion dollars from your first company then you have a hell of a lot of money to invest in your second, so statistically speaking its actually quite high.