17 ms·

Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

224 points by edward 9y ago

woofyman 9y ago
>each also has a safety driver in place behind the wheel for testing and as required by law. Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions, with the vast majority of the driving done autonomously.
whipoodle 9y ago
Now that's a perk. Way better than free kale chips.
headmelted 9y ago
That they are dogfooding a private beta makes me think that this has leapfrogged what Google had been shooting for previously, and where Uber is now. I don't know what other options there are on the ground as I'm not based there. It does seem though that there's a real opportunity for GM to sneak past Uber and Google into a first-mover advantage with this. I'd no idea they were anywhere near this close to a working AV fleet.
- Fricken 9y ago
  Waymo had no business plan, like up until they hired Krafcik they had put no serious thought into how they would commercialize their technology. Through what appears to be arrogance they bungled a promising partnership with Ford that seriously compromised both Ford's and Waymo's chances in this race and ultimately led to the firing of Ford CEO Mark Fields. http://www.autonews.com/article/20170529/OEM/170529795/google-ford-deal-mark-fields?X-IgnoreUserAgent=1 http://www.autonews.com/article/20170529/OEM/170529795/googl... General Motors on the other hand has played their cards brilliantly, and I'm baffled as to how Cruise has managed to make such steady and thorough progress in such a short amount of time. GM is the most futuristic car company out there, and at some point in the not too distant future they won't be so easy to dismiss. It doesn't fit the narrative. Shared, electric, autonomous: there's only one company that has all 3 of these on lockdown and it isn't the company everyone talks about.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Google had a private dogfood beta in 2014; I remember being intrigued by it but I wasn't eligible because I'd just moved farther away and my commute now included highway. (It was for surface streets within 5 miles of the Googleplex only.) Not sure why it's taken so long since...my guess is that they're being super cautious on the regulatory front and also might not have an idea on go-to market strategy.
- a9a 9y ago
  Waymo is doing this with real, public customers (albeit hand-selected ones) in Phoenix[0]. Uber has been doing this for months with customers in Pittsburgh[1]. This is certainly a sign that Cruise is making good progress, but I wouldn't say it means they've leapfrogged the competition by any means. [0] https://waymo.com/apply/ https://waymo.com/apply/ [1] https://www.uber.com/blog/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-self-driving-uber/ https://www.uber.com/blog/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-self-driving...
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    The Uber car's are absolutely everywhere in Pittsburgh. See probably an average of two one way on my daily commute.
    - akgerber 9y ago
      And Pittsburgh is a far more challenging driving environment than either San Francisco or Phoenix, with far more diversity of weather and a lot messier infrastructure due to terrain and freeze-thaw cycles and reduced maintenance after population decline— think 20% grade on cobbles after a snowstorm. e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4763879,-80.0106331,3a,75y,224.22h,86.29t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srBg7L8iAtThUewPqsuCMGw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4763879,-80.0106331,3a,75y,2...
      - skywhopper 9y ago
        Does Uber's autonomous service go to such locations?
        akgerber 9y ago
        Good question— their office is at the end of a crumbling backstreet, at least: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4627591,-79.9701442,3a,75y,300.16h,86.6t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5UDRoCRGl2n7UhEWI3wqvA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4627591,-79.9701442,3a,75y,3...
- Animats 9y ago
  Volvo has a hundred self-driving cars in test in Gothenburg, Sweden. They're driven by selected Volvo customers. They're only self driving on a few freeways, but they don't have a "safety driver", and the customers are not required or expected to pay attention while in automatic mode.
guyfawkes303 9y ago
This makes me so excited. I can't wait until the interiors of cars can change completely due to the safety brought by self driving cars. If all cars were self driving and communicated with each other, the risk of crash would be almost nonexistent (obviously there would still be wildlife and other issues). Given a near 0% chance of crash however, we could remove many of the annoying 'features' of a current car, like seat belts and having all the seats in the car face forward. Maybe you can even order specific types of cars for what you want. Tired? Order a bed car. Just a door and inside is a bunch of mattresses and pillows with windows that can be blacked out. Late for work? Order a work car. Has desks with swiveling chairs etc. Just getting groceries or going shopping? Order a hauler car, etc.
- Numberwang 9y ago
  Or why not order a groceries shop car instead? https://techxplore.com/news/2017-06-convenience-mart-wheels-viewed-shanghai.html https://techxplore.com/news/2017-06-convenience-mart-wheels-...
- sloppycee 9y ago
  A public 'bed car' sounds gross.
  - guyfawkes303 9y ago
    I mean, yea. I guess I left out the details of how the car service you were renting from would clean things between uses. Didn't think that was necessary to spell out. There are public 'nap rental' places now that have that particular problem pretty well sorted out.
  - akgerber 9y ago
    Not necessarily any grosser than a hotel.
  - spikels 9y ago
    Think of hotels or airline/train sleeper seats not public transit.
chubot 9y ago
It’s available across all of the mapped area of San Francisco where the test fleet operates, and the app works like any ride-sharing experience, mapping ride requesters with available cars. What area is that? Isn't all of San Francisco "mapped" 100 times over by this point? If the "mapped area" isn't all of San Francisco, does this speak to a limitation of their tech or a regulatory/deployment issue?
- aetherson 9y ago
  Probably they need more precise maps than are available from Google Maps or the equivalent. And other autonomous car companies aren't willing to provide their maps.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  They may be creating their own highly detailed maps. In that case it would be a limitation of how much effort they have invested in generating the maps.
  - jrowley 9y ago
    Yeah, they have their own in house maps team.
  - chubot 9y ago
    I'm not an expert, but the more detailed your maps, the higher chance that they are inaccurate. Details of SF streets change regularly. If they don't have good coverage of SF now, it's not just a fixed effort to make it more detailed. It's a continuous effort. Also there is no map of detours, etc. I had thought that many self-driving algorithms were not relying as much on maps for this reason, but I could be wrong. At least Elon Musk said that humans don't need a global map to drive. They just need two cameras pointing out the front windshield. Global maps help to navigate, but they don't necessarily help you drive.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Yeah, they are all pretty tight lipped about exactly how map dependent they are. But anytime they start talking about limited operating areas it is an obvious question to ask. And it is even possible that operating in areas with detailed maps is simply more valuable (if the map improves their ability to evaluate the performance of other systems).
drawnwren 9y ago
I've seen these driving around SF, they're still using the standard engineer in the driver's seat model. One almost hit me when I did the standard SF, 'drive around the person waiting to turn left in your lane' thing on 16th.
- JshWright 9y ago
  Did you have the right of way in that situation?
  - drawnwren 9y ago
    I think so? I don't know the law, but I do know if I'm turning left and someone else is turning left in the other lane - in sf, I need to make sure the cars behind them aren't going around them in the same lane.
    - JshWright 9y ago
      I guess I'm not understanding the scenario. A car was stopped in your lane waiting to turn. Presumably you should wait until they have turned, or make a safe lane change to another lane to move around them?
      - drawnwren 9y ago
        Yeah, I don't know if you're in SF - but on the one lane roads, traffic doesn't stop for people turning left at lights. Again, I don't know the legality - but I've seen police and government workers do it as well. Because the streets are made w/ enough space for vehicles to park next to the lanes of traffic - there is enough room to pass on the right in an intersection.
        mtourne 9y ago
        I understand that part. But not the one about the cruise car almost hitting you. So: one lane street, person in front of you turning left, you pass them to the right in the space where there might be street parking which extends into the intersection. During that time, the car trying to turn left is finally able to do so and the car immediately behind it is the cruise car. Cruise-car is now able to go straight and almost hits you as you're both competing for that one lane?
miheermunjal 9y ago
Can't believe I'm saying this... but what an acquisition for GM. Masterful potential future pivot
- organsnyder 9y ago
  Automakers are likely in a precarious position that they are just beginning to realize: If car-sharing really takes off (due to automation making it cheaper to hail on demand rather than owning a vehicle), they could see sales drop off by orders of magnitude. Glad to see that some of them realize this; though as a resident of western Michigan (home to many automotive suppliers), I am concerned about the potential impact up the supply chain.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I wonder if it's a good idea to accelerate the progress towards a future that they may not be successful in. If all this is as disruptive as many people think then they may well be bringing forward their own demise.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- aphextron 9y ago
  GM is killing it right now. Bolt is the first truly great EV ever built at an "affordable" price. Model 3 is getting all the hype now, but when it's all said and done GM will have beaten them to market by a year with an equally comparable or better product at the same price point.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    >"Bolt is the first truly great EV ever built at an "affordable" price." I would curious to hear your opinion on what things specifically makes the Bolt a great EV - features, comparative specs etc.
    - aphextron 9y ago
abalone 9y ago
> Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions Not trying to pour cold water on this but.. it's all about those "few occasions". The difference between level 2 and level 4/5 autonomy is vast. Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. A small corporate shuttle service that "only had a few accidents" would not be considered a very safe service. So for a service that really only makes sense at level 4, the reporting really ought to focus on those "few occasions", the stringent safety standard that needs to be met to remove drivers, and the actual progress towards it. That's the real meat of the story.
- burke 9y ago
  I'm not sure what those "few occasions" were, but I think there's another category of problem that these could fall into other than would-be accidents: If the car over-cautiously decided it didn't know what to do, came to a safe stop, and threw on the 4-ways while it waited for human input, that's not as terrible.
  - dastbe 9y ago
    Except when that isn't a safe thing to do.
  - abalone 9y ago
    That's a fair point, although those would still constitute breakdowns in a level 4. Further reason for the reporting to focus on these incidents.
  - jorts 9y ago
    I was driving home a few months ago in the rain on Division in SF. Cars were stopped, and I immediately couldn't figure out why. When I passed the stopped vehicles I got my answer: there was seemingly a wall of water coming down from the freeway overhead and an autonomous car was stopped as it apparently didn't know how to handle the situation.
    - 9y ago
tyingq 9y ago
Sounds like the tech itself is in pretty good shape, but was surprised at the haphazard looking way it's grafted onto the car. Pretty sure I'm seeing zip ties and generic aluminum t-slot, with the front sensors sticking quite a ways out from the overall profile of the car. Pretty sure that's hitting someone's shin/knee as they exit the car at some point. Not trying to make too big a deal of that, but now that they are offering something public facing, seems like a good time to address that. It doesn't convey a strong message of ready-for-prime-time. It's certainly less polished than the competition.
- deckar01 9y ago
  They stick out about the same amount as the side mirrors, which I assume is not a coincidence. I suspect that molded body parts to hide the extra hardware won't make much of a difference to the majority of consumers. Do you want a ride in the cheap, safe, ugly car or the expensive, glitchy, sexy car?
  - tyingq 9y ago
    >Do you want a ride in the cheap, safe, ugly car or the expensive, glitchy, sexy car? Consumers tend to perceive things a certain way that's not always grounded in common sense. Also, obstacles close to the ground are easier to miss visually.
- Animats 9y ago
  Me too. They're part of GM now. They should have access to GM's design facilities. Both the 2013 GM/CMU self-driving car and the Cruise Automation prototype had better sensor integration.
delegate 9y ago
Self-driving cars will slowly (or quickly) make car ownership redundant. Why own a car (pay taxes, insurance, parking), when you can have one at your door in a couple of minutes ? When you arrive at the destination, just exit the car - no need to look for parking or anything like that, let the car figure it out. If technology can do that, then owning a car becomes more of a hobby than necessity. I hope GM's strategy is aligned with this, as the profits will not come from selling cars, but from providing the service.
- mFixman 9y ago
  You can still do that with Uber. Why own a car today?
  - sourceless 9y ago
    You have to pay a human to take you. Humans are expensive.
    - daxaxelrod 9y ago
      This is the right answer
    - rubicon33 9y ago
      and smelly, and talk too much, and the biggest one of all: suck at driving.
    - aianus 9y ago
      The human part is pretty cheap compared to the other parts at least here in Toronto: Car insurance $220 (20h at minimum wage) Car payment $780 (70h at minimum wage) Gas $200 (18h at minimum wage) Parking $250 (22h at minimum wage) If I didn't enjoy driving and having a nice car, it would already be cheaper to Uber everywhere.
      - zjaffee 9y ago
        Maybe I'm getting confused due to currency changes, but I think you could certainly divide all of those numbers by two in many American markets.
aluminussoma 9y ago
I am skeptical. It sounds way too perfect, like a story manufactured for PR. If it really is that way, then great. What is the reputation of Cruise in the self-driving community?
- lucidrains 9y ago
  The only reason I paid any attention was because of an impressive demo they put out a few months back. https://youtu.be/6tA_VvHP0-s https://youtu.be/6tA_VvHP0-s Still, who knows at this point.
  - yourapostasy 9y ago
    Neat, but I've yet to see a demo of a self-driving vehicle in rain so hard drivers slow down from 65 mph to 45 mph, the wipers at their fastest setting are struggling to keep up, and when you drive through a puddle, the splash from the water obscures the windshield for a couple seconds. Conditions with such low visibility from the rain coming down so hard that you wish you had a clear view screen (also called spin window) [1], usually found on ships and machine tools that use lots of liquid. Humans regularly drive through this kind of rain, though not well. If a self-driving platform relies exclusively upon LIDAR, my understanding is seeing through this much rain requires a lot more processing. The rain demos I've seen [2] [3] [4] are all in wet weather, but not this kind of heavy rain, where a promise of self-driving technology saving lives and property can be more assuredly realized. If anyone in the field knows of one of the contenders already working on training in such poor conditions, then please post a link to a demo if one is available. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_view_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_view_screen [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs9Gr9V2mOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs9Gr9V2mOE [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlazzsroCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlazzsroCA [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMvgtPN2IBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMvgtPN2IBU
    - bryanlarsen 9y ago
      If conditions are so bad that it's unsafe for humans or robots to drive, then refusing to drive in such conditions is the correct behaviour.
asah 9y ago
FYI I see cruise cars all the time in SF. Natural next step.
hammock 9y ago
Why does the photo show a lady getting in the back seat? There is no driver(?), and the front seat has an airbag...
- twohlix_ 9y ago
  I think they're legally required to have drivers at the moment.
- r0fl 9y ago
  Back seat behind the driver is statistically the safest. In case of a collision a driver will instinctively try to save himself and therefore crash with the passenger side. Being behind the driver therefore puts you at less risk
  - moonka 9y ago
    In an autonomous ride would this still hold true?
    - ugh123 9y ago
      I can't tell if thats a joke or if you're serious :)
- mikeash 9y ago
  The air bag is there because bashing your head on the steering wheel or dashboard is unhealthy. Not bashing your head on something hard in the first place is even better. (I'm guessing, but don't know for sure, that the front seats are sufficiently weak that they're OK to bang into.)
dude3 9y ago
Just an observation. There's this tricky corner in the Marina Fillmore/NorthPoint. It took the corner pretty fast and I was surprised (could have been under manual control). People cross there indiscriminately without looking and I have been caught in a few close situations in my car. A creeping system around corners blocked by cars could be helpful.
- jorgen123 9y ago
  Talking about creeping: I just saw a self-driving Chevy Bolt hold up traffic turning left from Franklin onto Lombard. It crawled through the turn like a panicked tourist. Granted that this is not a smooth turn, requiring a sharp adjustment at the end. I think this was a GM test or perhaps Lyft. The car was named "Wombat".
- inferiorhuman 9y ago
  Their cars have trouble with left turns as well. I was walking to Rainbow a few weeks ago and heard a bunch of honking. Turns out the car wouldn't make a left on a green light (Folsom at 13th). Fast forward a few days and the same thing happened, this time at Mission and 18th. Only at this intersection there's a no left turn restriction and the driver overrode it and made the left. If one of Cruise's autonomous cars is doing something aggressive I'd assume it's under human control. Hopefully the cars won't pick up too many bad habits.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Left hand turns are one of the tricky things (as experts like John Leonard have also pointed out). The appropriate behavior is VERY context-dependent. Ordinary prudent and conservative behavior in some circumstances is you're-never-going-to-make-a-turn and you'll cause road rage in other drivers under other circumstances.
    - inferiorhuman 9y ago
      Sure, the first time the driver intervened there was no oncoming traffic. The second time there was traffic and a "no left turn" sign.
mabbo 9y ago
For those nay-sayers pointing out the incidents where the cars had to have manual control taken, I think you're missing the forest for the trees. When there's an incident of a car needing a human to take control, what happens next? Cruise will record the incident, and add it to the training data set. Now, the system will learn what it should have done instead and that same kind of incident becomes less likely to occur. I think this isn't about beta testing the product. I think this is primarily about gathering those failure data points. More cars driving means more miles driven, more data collected, leading to a consumer ready product faster. And if it happens to give the employees a neat benefit, all the better.
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  Paraphrasing Tolstoi, every accident is different in its own way. I see that approach as unscalable as current antivirus companies. Making a blacklist of every possible accident condition is as foolish as making a blacklist of every possible harmful Turing-complete program.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    Do you have any evidence to support your claim that "every accident is different in its own way?"
  - hikarudo 9y ago
    On the contrary, there are more common types of accidents and learning from those will prevent future incidents with some probability.
  - mabbo 9y ago
    When you learned to drive, was there a big book of every accident to avoid? Or did you slowly learn the overall patterns, from experience and near-misses? I'm being facetious, but you get the idea.
jakelarkin 9y ago
my unpopular personal opinion (strictly as a casual observer): self-driving will only be commercially viable as an augmented safety technology in single-owner vehicles (collision avoidance, lane keeping etc.) for ~20 years before we come close to reaching full-autonomy. What we have currently; maybe four or five 9s of reliability in perfect conditions is not nearly good enough for autonomous car sharing. If the car breaks down or is in a collision what is the passenger going to do? drive it themselves to the shoulder and get out? How far are we from autonomous systems harmoniously and safely coexisting with the most erratic human drivers/bikers/pedestrians? How far from adverse weather conditions? How will we finance 100 million $80,000 autonomous vehicles. Automated collision mitigation is already in many new cars and the data on accident rates is just materializing. Toyota preemptively put it's radar/camera based system in ALL of their cars for 2017. Its rumored that the NHTSA will mandate it for all manufacturers in the near future. The gradual progression of these developments is that these systems will add features incrementally and gain economies-of-scale until one day in the far far future driver input will be minimal. Only then will autonomous ride sharing become viable.
- richardwhiuk 9y ago
  Human drivers are pretty terrible. I'd imagine if it breaks down, then the same breakdown cover everyone has at the moment will kick in.
  - jakelarkin 9y ago
    - autonomous vehicle could be transporting someone not qualified to drive. - hard to draft paying & passive customers in to accident mitigation or resolution role.
  - vkou 9y ago
    > Human drivers are pretty terrible. I beg to differ. The average sober human driver has 1 fatal accident in 120-300 million miles traveled, depending on where they live in North America. Given that we are bags of meat and water, have reaction times measured in hundreds of milliseconds, were never designed to operate heavy machinery, and manage to achieve all that on a mere 100 watts, that's pretty amazing.
adrianmacneil 9y ago
Hi HN, engineer at Cruise here. I just wanted to point out that most people are surprised when I tell them we're hiring a ton of backend/full stack/android engineering positions (mostly go/node/react), and you don't need prior robotics or machine learning experience to apply (although we like those too). So, if you're interested in working on AVs or the systems that support them, please take a look at our careers page: https://getcruise.com/careers https://getcruise.com/careers (or feel free to reach out to me via HN profile).
- Meegul 9y ago
  Do you know if Cruise will be looking for interns next Summer? It's a hugely interesting field to me and I'd love to get my feet wet prior to graduating.
  - adrianmacneil 9y ago
    Yes! I think we're kicking off 2018 intern hiring in the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the website :)
- denvercoder904 9y ago
  Hi, I applied on the website. I have a solid background in embedded systems and C++ but I immediately received a rejection email. I wish I could have chatted with an engineer first :-(
  - hobls 9y ago
    Sounds like there was some disqualifying factor you're not aware of. (Citizenship, willingness to relocate, whatever.) No one sends out immediate rejection emails to experienced engineers unless they really have to.
    - denvercoder904 9y ago
      I was open to all those things.
Dirlewanger 9y ago
So GM bought this, but I thought they also had their partnership with Lyft? Are GM just betting on different horses and seeing which properties turn out to be the most fruitful?
- farco 9y ago
  GM purchased Cruise for access to its self-driving technology and software engineering talent. GM invested $500 million in Lyft to leverage the ride sharing platform with its future fleet of autonomous vehicles. These two horses aren't competing against each other.
  - nharada 9y ago
    but then why build a ride sharing service for Cruise if Lyft has already done it?
keeptrying 9y ago
One big difference between Cruise and the rest is that the CEO has built a self driving car from scratch. Because of the inherent path dependency in Hybrid systems (i.e. Software written for one car will most certainly not work on other hardware configurations), I believe having technical knowledge in the leadership makes a huge difference in the long run. The Presence of "old world" tech managers is going to hurt any AV project because building ML systems is so very different because of the implicit empiricism and randomness inherent in the process and the systems.
- CardenB 9y ago
  What self driving car companies does this out cruise ahead of? (Which companies have CEOs that don't have experience building self driving cars?)
  - linkregister 9y ago
    The Waymo CEO's experience is from Hyundai and a company called True Car. Uber doesn't lack a CEO without self-driving car experience. It lacks a CEO period. The Volvo CEO's experience is in sales.
ilaksh 9y ago
I think if Cruise or Waymo want to take the next step in promotion they will take the gags out of the testers mouths and let them tell us how well it actually works.
hattie 9y ago
Is it currently free for employees? I wonder what the premium would be for the psychological anxiety of taking a self driving car. If I pay $5 for a Uber ride, I'd need a significant discount for the equivalent autonomous ride at this stage.
fiatjaf 9y ago
I thought this was about Tom Cruise. Who the hell is "Cruise"? That title is not the way to present the company.

224 points by edward 9y ago

>each also has a safety driver in place behind the wheel for testing and as required by law. Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions, with the vast majority of the driving done autonomously.

whipoodle 9y ago

Now that's a perk. Way better than free kale chips.

headmelted 9y ago

That they are dogfooding a private beta makes me think that this has leapfrogged what Google had been shooting for previously, and where Uber is now. I don't know what other options there are on the ground as I'm not based there. It does seem though that there's a real opportunity for GM to sneak past Uber and Google into a first-mover advantage with this. I'd no idea they were anywhere near this close to a working AV fleet.

Fricken 9y ago
Waymo had no business plan, like up until they hired Krafcik they had put no serious thought into how they would commercialize their technology. Through what appears to be arrogance they bungled a promising partnership with Ford that seriously compromised both Ford's and Waymo's chances in this race and ultimately led to the firing of Ford CEO Mark Fields. http://www.autonews.com/article/20170529/OEM/170529795/google-ford-deal-mark-fields?X-IgnoreUserAgent=1 http://www.autonews.com/article/20170529/OEM/170529795/googl... General Motors on the other hand has played their cards brilliantly, and I'm baffled as to how Cruise has managed to make such steady and thorough progress in such a short amount of time. GM is the most futuristic car company out there, and at some point in the not too distant future they won't be so easy to dismiss. It doesn't fit the narrative. Shared, electric, autonomous: there's only one company that has all 3 of these on lockdown and it isn't the company everyone talks about.
nostrademons 9y ago
Google had a private dogfood beta in 2014; I remember being intrigued by it but I wasn't eligible because I'd just moved farther away and my commute now included highway. (It was for surface streets within 5 miles of the Googleplex only.) Not sure why it's taken so long since...my guess is that they're being super cautious on the regulatory front and also might not have an idea on go-to market strategy.
a9a 9y ago
Waymo is doing this with real, public customers (albeit hand-selected ones) in Phoenix[0]. Uber has been doing this for months with customers in Pittsburgh[1]. This is certainly a sign that Cruise is making good progress, but I wouldn't say it means they've leapfrogged the competition by any means. [0] https://waymo.com/apply/ https://waymo.com/apply/ [1] https://www.uber.com/blog/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-self-driving-uber/ https://www.uber.com/blog/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-self-driving...
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  The Uber car's are absolutely everywhere in Pittsburgh. See probably an average of two one way on my daily commute.
  - akgerber 9y ago
    And Pittsburgh is a far more challenging driving environment than either San Francisco or Phoenix, with far more diversity of weather and a lot messier infrastructure due to terrain and freeze-thaw cycles and reduced maintenance after population decline— think 20% grade on cobbles after a snowstorm. e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4763879,-80.0106331,3a,75y,224.22h,86.29t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srBg7L8iAtThUewPqsuCMGw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4763879,-80.0106331,3a,75y,2...
    - skywhopper 9y ago
      Does Uber's autonomous service go to such locations?
      - akgerber 9y ago
        Good question— their office is at the end of a crumbling backstreet, at least: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4627591,-79.9701442,3a,75y,300.16h,86.6t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5UDRoCRGl2n7UhEWI3wqvA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4627591,-79.9701442,3a,75y,3...
Animats 9y ago
Volvo has a hundred self-driving cars in test in Gothenburg, Sweden. They're driven by selected Volvo customers. They're only self driving on a few freeways, but they don't have a "safety driver", and the customers are not required or expected to pay attention while in automatic mode.

guyfawkes303 9y ago

This makes me so excited. I can't wait until the interiors of cars can change completely due to the safety brought by self driving cars. If all cars were self driving and communicated with each other, the risk of crash would be almost nonexistent (obviously there would still be wildlife and other issues). Given a near 0% chance of crash however, we could remove many of the annoying 'features' of a current car, like seat belts and having all the seats in the car face forward. Maybe you can even order specific types of cars for what you want. Tired? Order a bed car. Just a door and inside is a bunch of mattresses and pillows with windows that can be blacked out. Late for work? Order a work car. Has desks with swiveling chairs etc. Just getting groceries or going shopping? Order a hauler car, etc.

Numberwang 9y ago
Or why not order a groceries shop car instead? https://techxplore.com/news/2017-06-convenience-mart-wheels-viewed-shanghai.html https://techxplore.com/news/2017-06-convenience-mart-wheels-...
sloppycee 9y ago
A public 'bed car' sounds gross.
- guyfawkes303 9y ago
  I mean, yea. I guess I left out the details of how the car service you were renting from would clean things between uses. Didn't think that was necessary to spell out. There are public 'nap rental' places now that have that particular problem pretty well sorted out.
- akgerber 9y ago
  Not necessarily any grosser than a hotel.
- spikels 9y ago
  Think of hotels or airline/train sleeper seats not public transit.

chubot 9y ago

It’s available across all of the mapped area of San Francisco where the test fleet operates, and the app works like any ride-sharing experience, mapping ride requesters with available cars. What area is that? Isn't all of San Francisco "mapped" 100 times over by this point? If the "mapped area" isn't all of San Francisco, does this speak to a limitation of their tech or a regulatory/deployment issue?

aetherson 9y ago
Probably they need more precise maps than are available from Google Maps or the equivalent. And other autonomous car companies aren't willing to provide their maps.
maxerickson 9y ago
They may be creating their own highly detailed maps. In that case it would be a limitation of how much effort they have invested in generating the maps.
- jrowley 9y ago
  Yeah, they have their own in house maps team.
- chubot 9y ago
  I'm not an expert, but the more detailed your maps, the higher chance that they are inaccurate. Details of SF streets change regularly. If they don't have good coverage of SF now, it's not just a fixed effort to make it more detailed. It's a continuous effort. Also there is no map of detours, etc. I had thought that many self-driving algorithms were not relying as much on maps for this reason, but I could be wrong. At least Elon Musk said that humans don't need a global map to drive. They just need two cameras pointing out the front windshield. Global maps help to navigate, but they don't necessarily help you drive.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Yeah, they are all pretty tight lipped about exactly how map dependent they are. But anytime they start talking about limited operating areas it is an obvious question to ask. And it is even possible that operating in areas with detailed maps is simply more valuable (if the map improves their ability to evaluate the performance of other systems).

drawnwren 9y ago

I've seen these driving around SF, they're still using the standard engineer in the driver's seat model. One almost hit me when I did the standard SF, 'drive around the person waiting to turn left in your lane' thing on 16th.

JshWright 9y ago
Did you have the right of way in that situation?
- drawnwren 9y ago
  I think so? I don't know the law, but I do know if I'm turning left and someone else is turning left in the other lane - in sf, I need to make sure the cars behind them aren't going around them in the same lane.
  - JshWright 9y ago
    I guess I'm not understanding the scenario. A car was stopped in your lane waiting to turn. Presumably you should wait until they have turned, or make a safe lane change to another lane to move around them?
    - drawnwren 9y ago
      Yeah, I don't know if you're in SF - but on the one lane roads, traffic doesn't stop for people turning left at lights. Again, I don't know the legality - but I've seen police and government workers do it as well. Because the streets are made w/ enough space for vehicles to park next to the lanes of traffic - there is enough room to pass on the right in an intersection.
      - mtourne 9y ago
        I understand that part. But not the one about the cruise car almost hitting you. So: one lane street, person in front of you turning left, you pass them to the right in the space where there might be street parking which extends into the intersection. During that time, the car trying to turn left is finally able to do so and the car immediately behind it is the cruise car. Cruise-car is now able to go straight and almost hits you as you're both competing for that one lane?

miheermunjal 9y ago

Can't believe I'm saying this... but what an acquisition for GM. Masterful potential future pivot

organsnyder 9y ago
Automakers are likely in a precarious position that they are just beginning to realize: If car-sharing really takes off (due to automation making it cheaper to hail on demand rather than owning a vehicle), they could see sales drop off by orders of magnitude. Glad to see that some of them realize this; though as a resident of western Michigan (home to many automotive suppliers), I am concerned about the potential impact up the supply chain.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
I wonder if it's a good idea to accelerate the progress towards a future that they may not be successful in. If all this is as disruptive as many people think then they may well be bringing forward their own demise.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aphextron 9y ago
GM is killing it right now. Bolt is the first truly great EV ever built at an "affordable" price. Model 3 is getting all the hype now, but when it's all said and done GM will have beaten them to market by a year with an equally comparable or better product at the same price point.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"Bolt is the first truly great EV ever built at an "affordable" price." I would curious to hear your opinion on what things specifically makes the Bolt a great EV - features, comparative specs etc.
  - aphextron 9y ago

abalone 9y ago

> Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions Not trying to pour cold water on this but.. it's all about those "few occasions". The difference between level 2 and level 4/5 autonomy is vast. Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. A small corporate shuttle service that "only had a few accidents" would not be considered a very safe service. So for a service that really only makes sense at level 4, the reporting really ought to focus on those "few occasions", the stringent safety standard that needs to be met to remove drivers, and the actual progress towards it. That's the real meat of the story.

burke 9y ago
I'm not sure what those "few occasions" were, but I think there's another category of problem that these could fall into other than would-be accidents: If the car over-cautiously decided it didn't know what to do, came to a safe stop, and threw on the 4-ways while it waited for human input, that's not as terrible.
- dastbe 9y ago
  Except when that isn't a safe thing to do.
- abalone 9y ago
  That's a fair point, although those would still constitute breakdowns in a level 4. Further reason for the reporting to focus on these incidents.
- jorts 9y ago
  I was driving home a few months ago in the rain on Division in SF. Cars were stopped, and I immediately couldn't figure out why. When I passed the stopped vehicles I got my answer: there was seemingly a wall of water coming down from the freeway overhead and an autonomous car was stopped as it apparently didn't know how to handle the situation.
  - 9y ago

tyingq 9y ago

Sounds like the tech itself is in pretty good shape, but was surprised at the haphazard looking way it's grafted onto the car. Pretty sure I'm seeing zip ties and generic aluminum t-slot, with the front sensors sticking quite a ways out from the overall profile of the car. Pretty sure that's hitting someone's shin/knee as they exit the car at some point. Not trying to make too big a deal of that, but now that they are offering something public facing, seems like a good time to address that. It doesn't convey a strong message of ready-for-prime-time. It's certainly less polished than the competition.

deckar01 9y ago
They stick out about the same amount as the side mirrors, which I assume is not a coincidence. I suspect that molded body parts to hide the extra hardware won't make much of a difference to the majority of consumers. Do you want a ride in the cheap, safe, ugly car or the expensive, glitchy, sexy car?
- tyingq 9y ago
  >Do you want a ride in the cheap, safe, ugly car or the expensive, glitchy, sexy car? Consumers tend to perceive things a certain way that's not always grounded in common sense. Also, obstacles close to the ground are easier to miss visually.
Animats 9y ago
Me too. They're part of GM now. They should have access to GM's design facilities. Both the 2013 GM/CMU self-driving car and the Cruise Automation prototype had better sensor integration.

delegate 9y ago

Self-driving cars will slowly (or quickly) make car ownership redundant. Why own a car (pay taxes, insurance, parking), when you can have one at your door in a couple of minutes ? When you arrive at the destination, just exit the car - no need to look for parking or anything like that, let the car figure it out. If technology can do that, then owning a car becomes more of a hobby than necessity. I hope GM's strategy is aligned with this, as the profits will not come from selling cars, but from providing the service.

mFixman 9y ago
You can still do that with Uber. Why own a car today?
- sourceless 9y ago
  You have to pay a human to take you. Humans are expensive.
  - daxaxelrod 9y ago
    This is the right answer
  - rubicon33 9y ago
    and smelly, and talk too much, and the biggest one of all: suck at driving.
  - aianus 9y ago
    The human part is pretty cheap compared to the other parts at least here in Toronto: Car insurance $220 (20h at minimum wage) Car payment $780 (70h at minimum wage) Gas $200 (18h at minimum wage) Parking $250 (22h at minimum wage) If I didn't enjoy driving and having a nice car, it would already be cheaper to Uber everywhere.
    - zjaffee 9y ago
      Maybe I'm getting confused due to currency changes, but I think you could certainly divide all of those numbers by two in many American markets.

aluminussoma 9y ago

I am skeptical. It sounds way too perfect, like a story manufactured for PR. If it really is that way, then great. What is the reputation of Cruise in the self-driving community?

lucidrains 9y ago
The only reason I paid any attention was because of an impressive demo they put out a few months back. https://youtu.be/6tA_VvHP0-s https://youtu.be/6tA_VvHP0-s Still, who knows at this point.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  Neat, but I've yet to see a demo of a self-driving vehicle in rain so hard drivers slow down from 65 mph to 45 mph, the wipers at their fastest setting are struggling to keep up, and when you drive through a puddle, the splash from the water obscures the windshield for a couple seconds. Conditions with such low visibility from the rain coming down so hard that you wish you had a clear view screen (also called spin window) [1], usually found on ships and machine tools that use lots of liquid. Humans regularly drive through this kind of rain, though not well. If a self-driving platform relies exclusively upon LIDAR, my understanding is seeing through this much rain requires a lot more processing. The rain demos I've seen [2] [3] [4] are all in wet weather, but not this kind of heavy rain, where a promise of self-driving technology saving lives and property can be more assuredly realized. If anyone in the field knows of one of the contenders already working on training in such poor conditions, then please post a link to a demo if one is available. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_view_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_view_screen [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs9Gr9V2mOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs9Gr9V2mOE [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlazzsroCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlazzsroCA [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMvgtPN2IBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMvgtPN2IBU
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    If conditions are so bad that it's unsafe for humans or robots to drive, then refusing to drive in such conditions is the correct behaviour.

asah 9y ago

FYI I see cruise cars all the time in SF. Natural next step.

hammock 9y ago

Why does the photo show a lady getting in the back seat? There is no driver(?), and the front seat has an airbag...

twohlix_ 9y ago
I think they're legally required to have drivers at the moment.
r0fl 9y ago
Back seat behind the driver is statistically the safest. In case of a collision a driver will instinctively try to save himself and therefore crash with the passenger side. Being behind the driver therefore puts you at less risk
- moonka 9y ago
  In an autonomous ride would this still hold true?
  - ugh123 9y ago
    I can't tell if thats a joke or if you're serious :)
mikeash 9y ago
The air bag is there because bashing your head on the steering wheel or dashboard is unhealthy. Not bashing your head on something hard in the first place is even better. (I'm guessing, but don't know for sure, that the front seats are sufficiently weak that they're OK to bang into.)

dude3 9y ago

Just an observation. There's this tricky corner in the Marina Fillmore/NorthPoint. It took the corner pretty fast and I was surprised (could have been under manual control). People cross there indiscriminately without looking and I have been caught in a few close situations in my car. A creeping system around corners blocked by cars could be helpful.

jorgen123 9y ago
Talking about creeping: I just saw a self-driving Chevy Bolt hold up traffic turning left from Franklin onto Lombard. It crawled through the turn like a panicked tourist. Granted that this is not a smooth turn, requiring a sharp adjustment at the end. I think this was a GM test or perhaps Lyft. The car was named "Wombat".
inferiorhuman 9y ago
Their cars have trouble with left turns as well. I was walking to Rainbow a few weeks ago and heard a bunch of honking. Turns out the car wouldn't make a left on a green light (Folsom at 13th). Fast forward a few days and the same thing happened, this time at Mission and 18th. Only at this intersection there's a no left turn restriction and the driver overrode it and made the left. If one of Cruise's autonomous cars is doing something aggressive I'd assume it's under human control. Hopefully the cars won't pick up too many bad habits.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Left hand turns are one of the tricky things (as experts like John Leonard have also pointed out). The appropriate behavior is VERY context-dependent. Ordinary prudent and conservative behavior in some circumstances is you're-never-going-to-make-a-turn and you'll cause road rage in other drivers under other circumstances.
  - inferiorhuman 9y ago
    Sure, the first time the driver intervened there was no oncoming traffic. The second time there was traffic and a "no left turn" sign.

mabbo 9y ago

For those nay-sayers pointing out the incidents where the cars had to have manual control taken, I think you're missing the forest for the trees. When there's an incident of a car needing a human to take control, what happens next? Cruise will record the incident, and add it to the training data set. Now, the system will learn what it should have done instead and that same kind of incident becomes less likely to occur. I think this isn't about beta testing the product. I think this is primarily about gathering those failure data points. More cars driving means more miles driven, more data collected, leading to a consumer ready product faster. And if it happens to give the employees a neat benefit, all the better.

JetSpiegel 9y ago
Paraphrasing Tolstoi, every accident is different in its own way. I see that approach as unscalable as current antivirus companies. Making a blacklist of every possible accident condition is as foolish as making a blacklist of every possible harmful Turing-complete program.
- gfodor 9y ago
  Do you have any evidence to support your claim that "every accident is different in its own way?"
- hikarudo 9y ago
  On the contrary, there are more common types of accidents and learning from those will prevent future incidents with some probability.
- mabbo 9y ago
  When you learned to drive, was there a big book of every accident to avoid? Or did you slowly learn the overall patterns, from experience and near-misses? I'm being facetious, but you get the idea.

jakelarkin 9y ago

my unpopular personal opinion (strictly as a casual observer): self-driving will only be commercially viable as an augmented safety technology in single-owner vehicles (collision avoidance, lane keeping etc.) for ~20 years before we come close to reaching full-autonomy. What we have currently; maybe four or five 9s of reliability in perfect conditions is not nearly good enough for autonomous car sharing. If the car breaks down or is in a collision what is the passenger going to do? drive it themselves to the shoulder and get out? How far are we from autonomous systems harmoniously and safely coexisting with the most erratic human drivers/bikers/pedestrians? How far from adverse weather conditions? How will we finance 100 million $80,000 autonomous vehicles. Automated collision mitigation is already in many new cars and the data on accident rates is just materializing. Toyota preemptively put it's radar/camera based system in ALL of their cars for 2017. Its rumored that the NHTSA will mandate it for all manufacturers in the near future. The gradual progression of these developments is that these systems will add features incrementally and gain economies-of-scale until one day in the far far future driver input will be minimal. Only then will autonomous ride sharing become viable.

richardwhiuk 9y ago
Human drivers are pretty terrible. I'd imagine if it breaks down, then the same breakdown cover everyone has at the moment will kick in.
- jakelarkin 9y ago
  - autonomous vehicle could be transporting someone not qualified to drive. - hard to draft paying & passive customers in to accident mitigation or resolution role.
- vkou 9y ago
  > Human drivers are pretty terrible. I beg to differ. The average sober human driver has 1 fatal accident in 120-300 million miles traveled, depending on where they live in North America. Given that we are bags of meat and water, have reaction times measured in hundreds of milliseconds, were never designed to operate heavy machinery, and manage to achieve all that on a mere 100 watts, that's pretty amazing.

adrianmacneil 9y ago

Hi HN, engineer at Cruise here. I just wanted to point out that most people are surprised when I tell them we're hiring a ton of backend/full stack/android engineering positions (mostly go/node/react), and you don't need prior robotics or machine learning experience to apply (although we like those too). So, if you're interested in working on AVs or the systems that support them, please take a look at our careers page: https://getcruise.com/careers https://getcruise.com/careers (or feel free to reach out to me via HN profile).

Meegul 9y ago
Do you know if Cruise will be looking for interns next Summer? It's a hugely interesting field to me and I'd love to get my feet wet prior to graduating.
- adrianmacneil 9y ago
  Yes! I think we're kicking off 2018 intern hiring in the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the website :)
denvercoder904 9y ago
Hi, I applied on the website. I have a solid background in embedded systems and C++ but I immediately received a rejection email. I wish I could have chatted with an engineer first :-(
- hobls 9y ago
  Sounds like there was some disqualifying factor you're not aware of. (Citizenship, willingness to relocate, whatever.) No one sends out immediate rejection emails to experienced engineers unless they really have to.
  - denvercoder904 9y ago
    I was open to all those things.

Dirlewanger 9y ago

So GM bought this, but I thought they also had their partnership with Lyft? Are GM just betting on different horses and seeing which properties turn out to be the most fruitful?

farco 9y ago
GM purchased Cruise for access to its self-driving technology and software engineering talent. GM invested $500 million in Lyft to leverage the ride sharing platform with its future fleet of autonomous vehicles. These two horses aren't competing against each other.
- nharada 9y ago
  but then why build a ride sharing service for Cruise if Lyft has already done it?

keeptrying 9y ago

One big difference between Cruise and the rest is that the CEO has built a self driving car from scratch. Because of the inherent path dependency in Hybrid systems (i.e. Software written for one car will most certainly not work on other hardware configurations), I believe having technical knowledge in the leadership makes a huge difference in the long run. The Presence of "old world" tech managers is going to hurt any AV project because building ML systems is so very different because of the implicit empiricism and randomness inherent in the process and the systems.

CardenB 9y ago
What self driving car companies does this out cruise ahead of? (Which companies have CEOs that don't have experience building self driving cars?)
- linkregister 9y ago
  The Waymo CEO's experience is from Hyundai and a company called True Car. Uber doesn't lack a CEO without self-driving car experience. It lacks a CEO period. The Volvo CEO's experience is in sales.

ilaksh 9y ago

I think if Cruise or Waymo want to take the next step in promotion they will take the gags out of the testers mouths and let them tell us how well it actually works.

hattie 9y ago

Is it currently free for employees? I wonder what the premium would be for the psychological anxiety of taking a self driving car. If I pay $5 for a Uber ride, I'd need a significant discount for the equivalent autonomous ride at this stage.

fiatjaf 9y ago

I thought this was about Tom Cruise. Who the hell is "Cruise"? That title is not the way to present the company.