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GM's Super Cruise: Driving a 2018 Cadillac CT6 with a Full-On Auto Pilot

33 points by edward 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago
Great, more half-baked "self-driving" that will get people killed. Use the technology where it can actually save lives, like in auto-braking systems in case of accidents, and so on -- not in "autopilot" entertainment/showing-off systems where the driver is supposed to keep an eye on the road at all times anyway.
- turk184 9y ago
  Luddites get downvoted. Nobody likes my idea of simply owning up to the fact that better driving training is an idea that has never been tried.
- noxToken 9y ago
  The argument is that we are trying to remove humans from the equation. Put fully automated systems on the road that have near-perfect reaction times. The only way to get there is by boiling the frog. Technology is scary. It is even more scary when you tell someone that you're entrusting your life to automated tech. What do you do to change that? Marketing! Start by using singular feature roll out. We've seen lots of these little systems being introduced: sensors for blind spots, auto-braking, adaptive cruise-control, lane-assist, alerts for drifting out of lane, etc. Now they're telling consumers that driving is becoming automated while auto manufacturers have been slowly automating the driving process feature-by-feature for years. They're up front that it isn't unrestricted autonomy. That is, "Hey, this will keep you safe, but just in case, keep your eyes on the road. Don't worry though; these are the same features you've been using for years. " This isn't a dumb entertainment system for showing off to your friends. It's field testing for future iterations when it is 100% automated. It's genius.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  The self-driving tech. only has to be better than humans to save lives, year over year. And it's been introduced in auto-braking, lane keeping, and other tech. slowly. It's all part of a road map toward fully autonomous. The driver "keeping their eye on the road at all times" is just a legal requirement, since the laws are a big grey area for manufacturers, at the moment.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >laws are a big grey area for manufacturers I'm not sure they're really all that grey. They're assistive driving systems and it's the responsibility of the driver to be in full control at all times. Now, as these systems get better and more comprehensive, it's reasonable to ask whether that's a realistic expectation. But it is the law.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
An aircraft carrier can't turn on a dime but when it does finally turn around it's a f-ing aircraft carrier and it means business. GM realized it should care about self driving tech, bought some self driving startups, wrote some checks, made more than a token attempt at integrating it with their products. We'll see how it works out. From how they've described the situation that the system needs to take effect it sounds well thought out. Only time will tell if it makes a habit of driving into partial lane obstructions at highway speed. >Curve Speed Control I seriously hope there's a user setting for how aggressive this is because what Caddilac considers a conservative enough setting for its customers is going to be very restricting to a lot of commuters.
- falcolas 9y ago
  > what Caddilac considers a conservative enough setting for its customers is going to be very restricting to a lot of commuters. If you're letting the computer drive for you in the first place, I doubt the intensity of G-force in a corner is of paramount concern.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    I think having it back off in a corner an then having a bunch of people cut in front of you and then very, very slowly regaining speed (because where there was space now there's people who moved in front of you) will annoy people.
aedron 9y ago
Given all the restrictions it sounds like the same old adaptive cruise control and lane assist that has been around for years. Actually less appealing, with all the face monitoring and eye tracking, not to mention that it only works on 'vetted' stretches of road. Also, I wouldn't be caught dead in a car that looked like that, but that's another matter.
- koolba 9y ago
  > Given all the restrictions it sounds like the same old adaptive cruise control and lane assist that has been around for years. Actually less appealing, with all the face monitoring and eye tracking, not to mention that it only works on 'vetted' stretches of road. Yes that sounds like quite the restrictions. The vetted road one is interesting as in theory they could expand it with post purchase updates (or even over the air). But given that these are the same companies that would charge $250+ for a DVD of new maps for a built in GPS nagivation system ... well you get the idea. > Also, I wouldn't be caught dead in a car that looked like that, but that's another matter. It's a subjective topic but I think it looks quite nice. Seems halfway between the previous Caddy body style and a more German styling.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    The road restriction is to all limited access highways in the US and Canada. It's less of a vetting and more related to the type of driving they are willing to turn the system on for.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      I think it's more limited than that as it refers to "meticulously lidar-mapped." But no idea how limited or not that restriction is.
      - maxerickson 9y ago
        They announced it at the time, they LIDAR mapped all of the limited access roads in the US and Canada. http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2017/apr/0410-supercruise.html http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.html/co...
kelvin0 9y ago
I think 'fully' automated self driving will only become a reality once 2 things happen: 1) Inter-vehicle communications is standardized. This allows for each vehicle to communicate to each other and signal important metrics (speed,direction,intent...), also allows to complement each vehicles 'knowledge' and context of what is going on on the road at any given moment. Communication only needs to happens for vehicles clustered in a given radius (depending on speed and flow of traffic). 2) A critical mass of autonomous vehicles are on the roads. Once you have these 2 conditions it will be easier for the 'swarm' behavior and flow of traffic to be automated fully. It will also remove a lot of the 'unknowns' stemming from human drivers and smoothly direct traffic.
- freerobby 9y ago
  Why? Humans drive today without any of this, and with much less sensory perception than 360-degree cameras, radar, lidar, ultrasonics, GPS anchoring, and digital maps. What's the limitation on being able to synthesize these inputs and respond to them?
  - kelvin0 9y ago
    I don't think machines currently have enough contextual information to be able to drive fully automated. Case in point: the limitations mentioned in the article. I don't think you can compare human cognition and driving abilities to current AI/Hardware, since the roads and all the information to drive are geared towards humans. This being said: I do believe fully automated cars will come, but the 2 conditions I mentioned are prerequisites (in my opinion).
  - falcolas 9y ago
    Computation power and reliability. Visual identification algorithms are not fast enough to keep up with driving, let alone distance, direction, and speed inference. Speeding them up is a largely parallel job, but cars don't have the space/power/temperature-controlled/vibration-free environment to support the necessary hardware.
- jgalt212 9y ago
  > Inter-vehicle communications is standardized That is a recipe for easy sabotage. I think any self-driving car can accept inputs from all sorts of senors and/or peer devices, but at the end of the day it should "trust no one".
kozak 9y ago
TL;DR: The innovation here is that you are officially not required to hold the steering wheel. The requirement to keep your hands on the wheel is replaced by a camera that monitors your eyes to ensure that you are paying attention to the road.
- aedron 9y ago
  capacitive sensors detect the driver’s hand(s) on the wheel, eliminating the need to wiggle it to verify control as with some lane keep assist vehicles.
  - kozak 9y ago
    Only in situations that demand manual control? I agree that the article is not crystal clear about this detail, but this is how I understand it.
james_pm 9y ago
"If none of that succeeds in returning the driver to the task of controlling the vehicle, it will slow to a stop in the lane of travel, put the hazard flashers on, and summon help via OnStar." I presume they call OnStar since once the car stops in a live lane on the Interstate, the next thing that will happen will be getting rear-ended by a truck.
- ghaff 9y ago
  That does seem a pretty dangerous action. But I guess, if the vehicle doesn't have any real context/understanding of "get off the road if possible" (after all, even lane changes are manual) and the driver is apparently unresponsive, that's pretty much the only option left.
- giarc 9y ago
  The car is likely thinking the person has already suffered a medical event, rather than pre-calling for the impending truck.
tmpnam7280557 9y ago
Note that Cruise Automation did not contribute in any meaningful way to GM Super Cruise. GM's engineers are shipping a real product. At Cruise Automation we're writing software that is so thoroughly unreliable and wrongly designed that it will never be the basis of a real product.
asah 9y ago
finally - 1000s fewer drunken fleshbots behind the wheel. (I am concerned about security/hacking)

33 points by edward 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago

Great, more half-baked "self-driving" that will get people killed. Use the technology where it can actually save lives, like in auto-braking systems in case of accidents, and so on -- not in "autopilot" entertainment/showing-off systems where the driver is supposed to keep an eye on the road at all times anyway.

turk184 9y ago
Luddites get downvoted. Nobody likes my idea of simply owning up to the fact that better driving training is an idea that has never been tried.
noxToken 9y ago
The argument is that we are trying to remove humans from the equation. Put fully automated systems on the road that have near-perfect reaction times. The only way to get there is by boiling the frog. Technology is scary. It is even more scary when you tell someone that you're entrusting your life to automated tech. What do you do to change that? Marketing! Start by using singular feature roll out. We've seen lots of these little systems being introduced: sensors for blind spots, auto-braking, adaptive cruise-control, lane-assist, alerts for drifting out of lane, etc. Now they're telling consumers that driving is becoming automated while auto manufacturers have been slowly automating the driving process feature-by-feature for years. They're up front that it isn't unrestricted autonomy. That is, "Hey, this will keep you safe, but just in case, keep your eyes on the road. Don't worry though; these are the same features you've been using for years. " This isn't a dumb entertainment system for showing off to your friends. It's field testing for future iterations when it is 100% automated. It's genius.
0xfeba 9y ago
The self-driving tech. only has to be better than humans to save lives, year over year. And it's been introduced in auto-braking, lane keeping, and other tech. slowly. It's all part of a road map toward fully autonomous. The driver "keeping their eye on the road at all times" is just a legal requirement, since the laws are a big grey area for manufacturers, at the moment.
- ghaff 9y ago
  >laws are a big grey area for manufacturers I'm not sure they're really all that grey. They're assistive driving systems and it's the responsibility of the driver to be in full control at all times. Now, as these systems get better and more comprehensive, it's reasonable to ask whether that's a realistic expectation. But it is the law.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

An aircraft carrier can't turn on a dime but when it does finally turn around it's a f-ing aircraft carrier and it means business. GM realized it should care about self driving tech, bought some self driving startups, wrote some checks, made more than a token attempt at integrating it with their products. We'll see how it works out. From how they've described the situation that the system needs to take effect it sounds well thought out. Only time will tell if it makes a habit of driving into partial lane obstructions at highway speed. >Curve Speed Control I seriously hope there's a user setting for how aggressive this is because what Caddilac considers a conservative enough setting for its customers is going to be very restricting to a lot of commuters.

falcolas 9y ago
> what Caddilac considers a conservative enough setting for its customers is going to be very restricting to a lot of commuters. If you're letting the computer drive for you in the first place, I doubt the intensity of G-force in a corner is of paramount concern.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  I think having it back off in a corner an then having a bunch of people cut in front of you and then very, very slowly regaining speed (because where there was space now there's people who moved in front of you) will annoy people.

aedron 9y ago

Given all the restrictions it sounds like the same old adaptive cruise control and lane assist that has been around for years. Actually less appealing, with all the face monitoring and eye tracking, not to mention that it only works on 'vetted' stretches of road. Also, I wouldn't be caught dead in a car that looked like that, but that's another matter.

koolba 9y ago
> Given all the restrictions it sounds like the same old adaptive cruise control and lane assist that has been around for years. Actually less appealing, with all the face monitoring and eye tracking, not to mention that it only works on 'vetted' stretches of road. Yes that sounds like quite the restrictions. The vetted road one is interesting as in theory they could expand it with post purchase updates (or even over the air). But given that these are the same companies that would charge $250+ for a DVD of new maps for a built in GPS nagivation system ... well you get the idea. > Also, I wouldn't be caught dead in a car that looked like that, but that's another matter. It's a subjective topic but I think it looks quite nice. Seems halfway between the previous Caddy body style and a more German styling.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  The road restriction is to all limited access highways in the US and Canada. It's less of a vetting and more related to the type of driving they are willing to turn the system on for.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I think it's more limited than that as it refers to "meticulously lidar-mapped." But no idea how limited or not that restriction is.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      They announced it at the time, they LIDAR mapped all of the limited access roads in the US and Canada. http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2017/apr/0410-supercruise.html http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.html/co...

kelvin0 9y ago

I think 'fully' automated self driving will only become a reality once 2 things happen: 1) Inter-vehicle communications is standardized. This allows for each vehicle to communicate to each other and signal important metrics (speed,direction,intent...), also allows to complement each vehicles 'knowledge' and context of what is going on on the road at any given moment. Communication only needs to happens for vehicles clustered in a given radius (depending on speed and flow of traffic). 2) A critical mass of autonomous vehicles are on the roads. Once you have these 2 conditions it will be easier for the 'swarm' behavior and flow of traffic to be automated fully. It will also remove a lot of the 'unknowns' stemming from human drivers and smoothly direct traffic.

freerobby 9y ago
Why? Humans drive today without any of this, and with much less sensory perception than 360-degree cameras, radar, lidar, ultrasonics, GPS anchoring, and digital maps. What's the limitation on being able to synthesize these inputs and respond to them?
- kelvin0 9y ago
  I don't think machines currently have enough contextual information to be able to drive fully automated. Case in point: the limitations mentioned in the article. I don't think you can compare human cognition and driving abilities to current AI/Hardware, since the roads and all the information to drive are geared towards humans. This being said: I do believe fully automated cars will come, but the 2 conditions I mentioned are prerequisites (in my opinion).
- falcolas 9y ago
  Computation power and reliability. Visual identification algorithms are not fast enough to keep up with driving, let alone distance, direction, and speed inference. Speeding them up is a largely parallel job, but cars don't have the space/power/temperature-controlled/vibration-free environment to support the necessary hardware.
jgalt212 9y ago
> Inter-vehicle communications is standardized That is a recipe for easy sabotage. I think any self-driving car can accept inputs from all sorts of senors and/or peer devices, but at the end of the day it should "trust no one".

kozak 9y ago

TL;DR: The innovation here is that you are officially not required to hold the steering wheel. The requirement to keep your hands on the wheel is replaced by a camera that monitors your eyes to ensure that you are paying attention to the road.

aedron 9y ago
capacitive sensors detect the driver’s hand(s) on the wheel, eliminating the need to wiggle it to verify control as with some lane keep assist vehicles.
- kozak 9y ago
  Only in situations that demand manual control? I agree that the article is not crystal clear about this detail, but this is how I understand it.

james_pm 9y ago

"If none of that succeeds in returning the driver to the task of controlling the vehicle, it will slow to a stop in the lane of travel, put the hazard flashers on, and summon help via OnStar." I presume they call OnStar since once the car stops in a live lane on the Interstate, the next thing that will happen will be getting rear-ended by a truck.

ghaff 9y ago
That does seem a pretty dangerous action. But I guess, if the vehicle doesn't have any real context/understanding of "get off the road if possible" (after all, even lane changes are manual) and the driver is apparently unresponsive, that's pretty much the only option left.
giarc 9y ago
The car is likely thinking the person has already suffered a medical event, rather than pre-calling for the impending truck.

tmpnam7280557 9y ago

Note that Cruise Automation did not contribute in any meaningful way to GM Super Cruise. GM's engineers are shipping a real product. At Cruise Automation we're writing software that is so thoroughly unreliable and wrongly designed that it will never be the basis of a real product.

asah 9y ago

finally - 1000s fewer drunken fleshbots behind the wheel. (I am concerned about security/hacking)