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WIRED talks a lot more about the drive itself, and isn't as positive about it. https://www.wired.com/story/ride-general-motors-self-driving-car/ https://www.wi

WIRED talks a lot more about the drive itself, and isn't as positive about it. https://www.wired.com/story/ride-general-motors-self-driving-car/ https://www.wired.com/story/ride-general-motors-self-driving...

dmoy 9y ago
Thanks I was reading the nyt article looking for evidence of pack leading, but discovered that they haven't even started real world urban tests...
- Fricken 9y ago
  They've been doing real world urban tests for about 18 months now. What do mean?
  - dmoy 9y ago
    Ok I should have said "dense urban" or something, since downtown or Manhattan is a whole different ballgame from suburban & highway. The article appeared to imply that they have not done actual urban driving yet: """ The company plans to begin tests in Manhattan early next year. Mr. Vogt is keen to prove that self-driving models can navigate complex urban environments such as downtown San Francisco, rather than just highways and suburban streets. """ Curious if anyone got a different reading from the article... (or perhaps if the journalism was just sloppy? idk)
    - apendleton 9y ago
      They're heavily deployed in downtown San Francisco. That's where these test drives occurred, and they've posted tons of video over the last few months of downtown SF drives. Manhattan will be a new market, but downtown SF is indisputably dense and urban.
ISL 9y ago
“move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.” Sounds good to me!
- Shivetya 9y ago
  which brings up the question, if an AV can identify the speed limit do they always obey it or will operators of the vehicle be allowed to go faster?
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
    My guess: If the vehicle allows manual override, and legislation does not change and force manufacturers of autonomous vehicles to prevent transgressions, the human operator will be able to go faster.
  - asteli 9y ago
    I remember this being an issue with the Google cars on the highway. The cars, if software limited to the posted speed limit, were dangerously slow compared to the surrounding traffic. Some limited law breaking had to be introduced in order to operate safely.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >Sounds good to me! That's the half-lie you trot out at the beginning of a rand that ends with "think of the children" The generalized version is "don't go too much faster or slower than the majority of drivers around you" The one person doing 55 in a 60 (or ever 60) where everyone goes 80 may reduce their own legal liability if things go bad but they're also greatly increasing the likelihood that things go bad. I really hope there was an implied /s that I missed.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bullfightonmars 9y ago
    To be fair "think of the children" can work pretty well to change the way people and governments think about cars. It got the Netherlands country wide bike infrastructure. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollands-stop-murdering-children-street-safety-movement/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
DannyB2 9y ago
“We will not launch until we have safety perfect,” General Motors President Dan Ammann said So they are never going to launch?
- w0m 9y ago
  'perfect' probably ties more to being legally safer than standard cars in the public eye than anything else.
Fricken 9y ago
I've read half a dozen articles on Cruise's press event, they all tell similar stories. I guess whether you view them as positive depends on your expectations. Downtown SF is a very challenging driving environment, Cruise is doing some pretty awesome stuff realtive to the other established and well capitalized efforts.
quirkot 9y ago
This gets at something I was taught in driving school. Slow =/= safe. Sudden stopping can be just as dangerous as any other tactic.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  There was a time when my regular errands took me down El Camino in Mountain View, and at that time, NOT seeing a Google car was notable. Seeing 2 to 4 during a single outing was normal. I vividly remember when they started rolling out what I call the "jelly bean car". Sharing the road with the sensor-decorated SUV's was no problem at all. They really drove well and blended into traffic very well. The early bean cars were slow and annoying. They drove like somebody's grandparent that needs "the talk" about giving up the car keys. Very frustrating to be around. Hopefully, Waymo has addressed that by now.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Not been addressed in my experience. It's more like the other thread about rear ending - the Waymo is typically the only car going the speed limit in traffic besides some commercial vehicles and slow off the line and slowing at odd times, but I do see less of them.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  It depends what aspect of safe you are looking at. Higher speed = worse accident. https://i.imgur.com/TFBOnG1.png https://i.imgur.com/TFBOnG1.png Hopefully we can move to 100% autonomous cars, and then crank up the speed because they are safer, have better reaction times, and are predictable.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Wow, just 10km faster significantly increases fatality rates. That's crazy. Edit: oh it's for pedestrians, not drivers.
saturdaysaint 9y ago
Yet I wonder how much the ride quality will matter. If anyone can operate a ride service at scale that's significantly cheaper than Uber (without drivers to pay) and with a better safety record than most human drivers, I see these quirks being quickly overlooked. Like many bleeding edge innovations, early adopters and young adults will lead the way as it will make sense for many of them to go without owning a car. Also, when such a service launches more widely, most of the miles will probably be driven on highways, which will probably be far less prone to surprises like jaywalking pedestrians.
- bduerst 9y ago
  Only if there isn't competition. Odds are that they won't be competing with Uber, but some other self driving service that would likely have a higher quality ride. Perception is important - just look at how people have switched from Uber to Lyft where they can.
dmix 9y ago
> But this chaos—this unpremeditated waltz of oops, no, you go and nope, buster, me first—is reality. It’s how cities work. Which means that if a car is going to drive itself, no humans drivers involved, it must get really good at interpreting and anticipating the behavior of human non-drivers. I'm not sure why it's always pushed as a near unattainable problem to have cars react in a human-ish way in situations as these. All it needs is machine learning of thousands of situations of purely human drivers or watching other cars around driverless ones, and adapting the models to be able to apply them in particular situations. Such as a 4-way stop or someone rolling through a stop-sign. It seems this obsession with defaulting to what the idealistic but unrealistic safety-first situation is (as say, designed by idealistic traffic engineering and law enforcement) vs focusing on learning to drive like humans with the least amount of errors, where rules are more flexible and risk is evaluated without much loss of safety. We live in a very tightly controlled rules based society on paper, which seems like a major roadblock these systems have to confront, as they seem to pretend real safety is following these existing rules exactly. Yet it sounds like it would be far better if it broke the rules about 10-20% of the time... like most humans do for the sake of efficiency and merely adapting to the situation rationally. We should be giving the machines as much, or more, leway as humans, much like how we hardly give jay-walking or going 10km/hr over the speed limit a second thought - but applied to a much larger group of compromises. This may be a bit of my own libertarian bias that I have, a worldview where chaos is okay, and encouraged, as long as no one gets hurt (to a reasonable degree). But the actual problem sounds to me that the traffic rules aren't well adapted to machines yet, which tend to take them far more literally than humans, rather this idea being pushed that the machines are navigating the rules poorly.

dmoy 9y ago

Thanks I was reading the nyt article looking for evidence of pack leading, but discovered that they haven't even started real world urban tests...

Fricken 9y ago
They've been doing real world urban tests for about 18 months now. What do mean?
- dmoy 9y ago
  Ok I should have said "dense urban" or something, since downtown or Manhattan is a whole different ballgame from suburban & highway. The article appeared to imply that they have not done actual urban driving yet: """ The company plans to begin tests in Manhattan early next year. Mr. Vogt is keen to prove that self-driving models can navigate complex urban environments such as downtown San Francisco, rather than just highways and suburban streets. """ Curious if anyone got a different reading from the article... (or perhaps if the journalism was just sloppy? idk)
  - apendleton 9y ago
    They're heavily deployed in downtown San Francisco. That's where these test drives occurred, and they've posted tons of video over the last few months of downtown SF drives. Manhattan will be a new market, but downtown SF is indisputably dense and urban.

ISL 9y ago

“move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.” Sounds good to me!

Shivetya 9y ago
which brings up the question, if an AV can identify the speed limit do they always obey it or will operators of the vehicle be allowed to go faster?
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  My guess: If the vehicle allows manual override, and legislation does not change and force manufacturers of autonomous vehicles to prevent transgressions, the human operator will be able to go faster.
- asteli 9y ago
  I remember this being an issue with the Google cars on the highway. The cars, if software limited to the posted speed limit, were dangerously slow compared to the surrounding traffic. Some limited law breaking had to be introduced in order to operate safely.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>Sounds good to me! That's the half-lie you trot out at the beginning of a rand that ends with "think of the children" The generalized version is "don't go too much faster or slower than the majority of drivers around you" The one person doing 55 in a 60 (or ever 60) where everyone goes 80 may reduce their own legal liability if things go bad but they're also greatly increasing the likelihood that things go bad. I really hope there was an implied /s that I missed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bullfightonmars 9y ago
  To be fair "think of the children" can work pretty well to change the way people and governments think about cars. It got the Netherlands country wide bike infrastructure. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollands-stop-murdering-children-street-safety-movement/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...

DannyB2 9y ago

“We will not launch until we have safety perfect,” General Motors President Dan Ammann said So they are never going to launch?

w0m 9y ago
'perfect' probably ties more to being legally safer than standard cars in the public eye than anything else.

Fricken 9y ago

I've read half a dozen articles on Cruise's press event, they all tell similar stories. I guess whether you view them as positive depends on your expectations. Downtown SF is a very challenging driving environment, Cruise is doing some pretty awesome stuff realtive to the other established and well capitalized efforts.

quirkot 9y ago

This gets at something I was taught in driving school. Slow =/= safe. Sudden stopping can be just as dangerous as any other tactic.

dbcurtis 9y ago
There was a time when my regular errands took me down El Camino in Mountain View, and at that time, NOT seeing a Google car was notable. Seeing 2 to 4 during a single outing was normal. I vividly remember when they started rolling out what I call the "jelly bean car". Sharing the road with the sensor-decorated SUV's was no problem at all. They really drove well and blended into traffic very well. The early bean cars were slow and annoying. They drove like somebody's grandparent that needs "the talk" about giving up the car keys. Very frustrating to be around. Hopefully, Waymo has addressed that by now.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Not been addressed in my experience. It's more like the other thread about rear ending - the Waymo is typically the only car going the speed limit in traffic besides some commercial vehicles and slow off the line and slowing at odd times, but I do see less of them.
WillPostForFood 9y ago
It depends what aspect of safe you are looking at. Higher speed = worse accident. https://i.imgur.com/TFBOnG1.png https://i.imgur.com/TFBOnG1.png Hopefully we can move to 100% autonomous cars, and then crank up the speed because they are safer, have better reaction times, and are predictable.
- dmix 9y ago
  Wow, just 10km faster significantly increases fatality rates. That's crazy. Edit: oh it's for pedestrians, not drivers.

saturdaysaint 9y ago

Yet I wonder how much the ride quality will matter. If anyone can operate a ride service at scale that's significantly cheaper than Uber (without drivers to pay) and with a better safety record than most human drivers, I see these quirks being quickly overlooked. Like many bleeding edge innovations, early adopters and young adults will lead the way as it will make sense for many of them to go without owning a car. Also, when such a service launches more widely, most of the miles will probably be driven on highways, which will probably be far less prone to surprises like jaywalking pedestrians.

bduerst 9y ago
Only if there isn't competition. Odds are that they won't be competing with Uber, but some other self driving service that would likely have a higher quality ride. Perception is important - just look at how people have switched from Uber to Lyft where they can.

dmix 9y ago

> But this chaos—this unpremeditated waltz of oops, no, you go and nope, buster, me first—is reality. It’s how cities work. Which means that if a car is going to drive itself, no humans drivers involved, it must get really good at interpreting and anticipating the behavior of human non-drivers. I'm not sure why it's always pushed as a near unattainable problem to have cars react in a human-ish way in situations as these. All it needs is machine learning of thousands of situations of purely human drivers or watching other cars around driverless ones, and adapting the models to be able to apply them in particular situations. Such as a 4-way stop or someone rolling through a stop-sign. It seems this obsession with defaulting to what the idealistic but unrealistic safety-first situation is (as say, designed by idealistic traffic engineering and law enforcement) vs focusing on learning to drive like humans with the least amount of errors, where rules are more flexible and risk is evaluated without much loss of safety. We live in a very tightly controlled rules based society on paper, which seems like a major roadblock these systems have to confront, as they seem to pretend real safety is following these existing rules exactly. Yet it sounds like it would be far better if it broke the rules about 10-20% of the time... like most humans do for the sake of efficiency and merely adapting to the situation rationally. We should be giving the machines as much, or more, leway as humans, much like how we hardly give jay-walking or going 10km/hr over the speed limit a second thought - but applied to a much larger group of compromises. This may be a bit of my own libertarian bias that I have, a worldview where chaos is okay, and encouraged, as long as no one gets hurt (to a reasonable degree). But the actual problem sounds to me that the traffic rules aren't well adapted to machines yet, which tend to take them far more literally than humans, rather this idea being pushed that the machines are navigating the rules poorly.