8 ms·

According to the article GM has decided to simply restrict the domain of their semi-autonomous offering to only work on divided highways. The author says that

by gtowey 9y ago

According to the article GM has decided to simply restrict the domain of their semi-autonomous offering to only work on divided highways. The author says that the result is innovative and brilliant. But the problems they're trying to solve are not nearly as ambitious or challenging as those Tesla has decided to tackle. While it can be argued that GM should received kudos for releasing a feature that can work reliably, I don't see it as innovative. It kind of reinforces that traditional car makers are never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market. They're going to use the work of others to incrementally add features to cars that they think will increase sales. They won't take risks with technology.

simion314 9y ago
>They won't take risks with technology. Better you say taking risks with human lives, this is not a framework or app where you risk crashes and upseting customers because they lost some work, this is about human life and expensive damages.
- gtowey 9y ago
  I think my point was that GM wouldn't have this product to sell in the first place unless someone else already took those risks. They want to sell the product that someone else made possible. Now, as others have pointed out there is a market for that, and a great many people prefer the feeling of reliability they get from GM's offering. I just wouldn't call that innovation.
  - simion314 9y ago
    Google had worked on self driving cars on a while, the problem was probably the hardware was not ready. Tesla AI takes too many risks in my opinion because it is missing important sensors(IMHO) it crashes often with big trucks or buses proving the optimization they do are not safe enough and I prefer a company that is not risking my life by selling me a driver assistant that is not that good and is badly named autopilot. I have a feeling but I can be wrong that you think Tesla innovated the AI on self driving cars and GM or others are profiting for it, self driving AI was studied and worked on before Tesla, Tesla are in the group of companies that risk the life of others where others waited for the tech to be better. Also other companies like GM already had driving assist functions, they now upgrade them with new features
twblalock 9y ago
> It kind of reinforces that traditional car makers are never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market. They're going to use the work of others to incrementally add features to cars that they think will increase sales. They won't take risks with technology. I don't really want them to. They probably wouldn't be very good at the software. What I want to see is software companies developing the software, which is their specialty. The large automakers can license that software and churn out millions of cars based on it, which is their specialty -- knowing how to consistently build millions of cars and avoid production snafus is the big advantage the big automakers have over the smaller manufacturers like Tesla. I think that turn of events would get us the best possible software and the best possible cars running that software, and it's probably the only way that enough autonomous vehicles would be built for every driver to be able to own one.
- yohann305 9y ago
  > I don't really want them to. They probably wouldn't be very good at the software. RE: Mercedes cars have 60M lines of code. Daimler CEO said it himself. "We are a software company"
  - twblalock 9y ago
    I'm sure they write lots of code. But I've heard, from people who would know, that the code quality in cars is pretty bad. That's what I meant by not being good at it.
detritus 9y ago
Or it reinforces the idea (rightly or wrongly) that traditional car manufacturers won't play unnecessary games with people's lives. Regardless of what you, I or others in 'our' sphere might think, there's a lot of traction in playing the conservative card when it comes to cars hurtling down roads. As someone in a big city who drives a bit, cycles a bit and walks a lot, I can't help but feel we're still a long way off high autonomy in cars outwith constrained environments.
- felipelemos 9y ago
  Unnecessary plays with shareholder's money. FTFY. What history told us is that people's lives really isn't a concern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
  - jeffreyrogers 9y ago
    Part of the reason more mature car manufacturers are conservative is because they've gone through lawsuits and recalls.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  Regardless of what you, I or others in 'our' sphere might think, there's a lot of traction in playing the conservative card when it comes to cars hurtling down roads. Every day that goes by without a shift to autonomous driving, we lose 70 or so people in the US alone. Why this isn't being treated as a Manhattan- or Apollo-scale project, I don't understand. A conservative approach is not what's called for here. We can afford to break a few eggs on the way. Sounds heartless... but sorry, that's what the math says.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    This is the same problem current safety tech already has. We have cars that can stop themselves in most situations already - things like that + lane detection + distracted/sleepy driver detection would do wonders if everyone had them even without full autonomy. But they also all add cost to new vehicles, and the average age of vehicles on the road reflects that. It's been climbing, looks like 11.5 years now.[0] Looks like there's about 260M cars in the US, and on average only ~18M new ones sold each year[1]. Let's go conservative, and say we just need to replace 200M cars with current-or-near-future tech ones to save 30K lives a year. Let's say a 30K car has the level of tech we want. 200M * 30K = 6 trillion. But car crashes are like 2% or fewer[2] of all deaths in the US. So that's a massive cost that might be much better spent elsewhere. It's not that we can't make cars safer - we can already do that! - it's that there are some much more appealing ways to spend the money if approaching it from a non-commercial perspective. [0] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-car-age-20150729-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-c... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Fricken 9y ago
There's GM's Supercruise, talked about in the article, and then there's Cruise Automation, a startup acquired by GM which is focusing on robotaxis, and is at once more capable and more revolutionary than anything Tesla is doing.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  > and is at once more capable and more revolutionary than anything Tesla is doing. Yes and no. Part of the reason why Tesla is behind is because they're gimping their engineers by focusing on optical-only solutions. IIRC, Cruise Automation uses LIDAR, which gives better sensory data. IMO, this is where AI really has an edge: when they start to use sensors that humans don't have. LIDAR accurately maps the distance between the LIDAR and every physical thing in a certain radius. Solving the problem with LIDAR isn't "revolutionary" per se. Its kind of the obvious way to do autonomous cars. It is a more expensive approach however. I guess the end results are all that matters however. At which point, I am more bullish on any LIDAR approach. If LIDAR makes it easier to code and more reliable for AIs to detect where they are in 3d space, it should be used (and then you try to solve the mass-production problem to bring down the cost of LIDAR units). I think we've seen the limits of the optical-only approach from Tesla: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
  - Fricken 9y ago
    >solving the problem with Lidar isn't revolutionary per se Solving the problem in any capacity would be revolutionary. Autonomous vehicles operating in a commercial capacity on public roads technically don't yet exist. There's the old saying 'it's easier to optimize a working system than it is to get an optimized system working', Outfits using Lidar (and using about an order of magnitude more compute than what's going into Tesla's HW2) are much closer to solving autonomy than Tesla, and in time these systems will get cheaper.
    - hangonhn 9y ago
      However, you can see how an optical-based system should in theory work because all our roads and signs are designed based on that assumption and has never assumed LIDAR. If a human can do it optically, one can reason, so should a machine. That said, I think Tesla is making a big assumption about human optical systems and object recognition and our current ability to replicate it. One of the things my undergraduate classes in AI taught me is that people tend to underestimate the sophistication and complexity of human neuro/cognitive systems. We are only consciously made aware of the simplified end results but are often unaware of the complexity of the underlying sub-systems.
013a 9y ago
Their decision to limit the initial problem domain is genius. When it comes to autonomous driving, safety is paramount. Limiting it to highways is a good way to ensure that you can maximize the system's safety and performance, while still getting a product to market that is ahead of the competition and which allows you to gather data and iterate to expand in the future. SpaceX wants to go to Mars. Why haven't they yet? Do you consider them uninnovative? Or maybe they're just taking their time getting the technology right, because they know (1) they're leading the industry already, and (2) if they fuck it up, it would be a highly expensive mistake they probably wouldn't recover from. If your definition of "innovation" is "irreparably risking your business and customers' lives in the pursuit of profit", I sincerely hope I never have to interact with you in any way in the future.
- ramenmeal 9y ago
  Curious though, would you buy this car over a Tesla (basing your decision on the self driving features only)? The reason I ask is because if I buy a Tesla, I have the idea that one day it will be completely self driving one day. With this Cadillac, I would expect it to only do this specific subset of self driving for the life of the car.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Probably the Cadillac. I have no expectation of a Tesla or anyone else having a 100% autonomous vehicle during the lifetime of current cars, much less one that it retrofitted to current hardware.
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    > I have the idea that one day it will be completely self driving one day Why do you think that? Can you explain how this would happen, when the car appears to lack the physical hardware (e.g. LIDARs, computing power) to do so in anything but clear conditions on highways? Moreover, why would Tesla be interested in doing so? They gain nothing, reduce a customer's desire to upgrade to the latest model, and put themselves into major extra liability if the system ever fucks up.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Yes but as far as I can tell GM SuperCruise hasn't killed anybody either. 'Move fast and break things' doesn't seem like such a great philosophy when those things are people's lives.
- dkd903 9y ago
  Even Honda has autonomous driving. The Honda Sensing on Honda's 2018 is great - just like what they showed in the video here.
- Judgmentality 9y ago
  You think Tesla will ever get sued over Autopilot?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    Given some of Tesla's past behavior, I suspect any such attempt would involve any or the following: - pulling of full vehicle logs, prior to any subpoena/ discovery, and publishing of press releases with Tesla's "findings" on the driver's record - disabling of Autopilot for that vehicle, if not - disabling of the vehicle for failure to adhere to the EULA which probably has "binding arbitration" clauses
    - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
      Not going to be effective if the plaintiff is a third party injured by a Tesla induced crash.
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        Driver-induced crash. Tesla ships a level 2 system.
jaredhansen 9y ago
>It kind of reinforces that traditional car makers are never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market Oh come on. Not having to have your hands on the wheel, while driving at 65mph for three hours down a four lane divided highway, is absolutely "revolutionary". Is it as big as full autonomy? No. But it's no slouch, either, and it's kind of silly to claim that GM (which in this case is really the acquired Cruise team anyway) "is never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market).
mannykannot 9y ago
The level of innovation is not determined by choosing an ambitious goal, but by actual progress towards it. AFAIK, Tesla and GM are working towards the same goal. The author, who has quite a bit of experience with both systems, and apparently likes both of them, writes "Tesla is vague about [deciding whether it can handle the situation], and often errs on the side of What the hell, let's give this a shot." (author's emphasis.) I would characterize GM's domain restriction as prudent rather than innovative, but that choice is not necessarily indicative of what has been achieved in R&D.
beambot 9y ago
GM bought Cruise. How is that not taking a risk with technology?!
jhatax 9y ago
I read the article, and my takeaways were very different from yours. While each of us homes in on different aspects of the same article, I am wondering how you arrived at some of your conclusions. In particular: 1. Where does it say anything about the challenges that GM is trying to solve long term? 2. What about this release indicates that GM haven't set their sights higher? If you have evidence to back your statements, please share. I don't have any insider GM knowledge, but from the outside looking in, this is a genius move by GM and the very essence of an MVP release. Rolling out with a limited set of capabilities that work as advertised is better to me (as a driver) than launching with a larger set of half-working features. If GM can figure out a way to weave learning capabilities into their platform with their production cars providing training data for this feature, that will put them on the fast path to competing strongly in this market. Edit: Minor word-smithing

by gtowey 9y ago

simion314 9y ago

>They won't take risks with technology. Better you say taking risks with human lives, this is not a framework or app where you risk crashes and upseting customers because they lost some work, this is about human life and expensive damages.

gtowey 9y ago
I think my point was that GM wouldn't have this product to sell in the first place unless someone else already took those risks. They want to sell the product that someone else made possible. Now, as others have pointed out there is a market for that, and a great many people prefer the feeling of reliability they get from GM's offering. I just wouldn't call that innovation.
- simion314 9y ago
  Google had worked on self driving cars on a while, the problem was probably the hardware was not ready. Tesla AI takes too many risks in my opinion because it is missing important sensors(IMHO) it crashes often with big trucks or buses proving the optimization they do are not safe enough and I prefer a company that is not risking my life by selling me a driver assistant that is not that good and is badly named autopilot. I have a feeling but I can be wrong that you think Tesla innovated the AI on self driving cars and GM or others are profiting for it, self driving AI was studied and worked on before Tesla, Tesla are in the group of companies that risk the life of others where others waited for the tech to be better. Also other companies like GM already had driving assist functions, they now upgrade them with new features

twblalock 9y ago

> It kind of reinforces that traditional car makers are never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market. They're going to use the work of others to incrementally add features to cars that they think will increase sales. They won't take risks with technology. I don't really want them to. They probably wouldn't be very good at the software. What I want to see is software companies developing the software, which is their specialty. The large automakers can license that software and churn out millions of cars based on it, which is their specialty -- knowing how to consistently build millions of cars and avoid production snafus is the big advantage the big automakers have over the smaller manufacturers like Tesla. I think that turn of events would get us the best possible software and the best possible cars running that software, and it's probably the only way that enough autonomous vehicles would be built for every driver to be able to own one.

yohann305 9y ago
> I don't really want them to. They probably wouldn't be very good at the software. RE: Mercedes cars have 60M lines of code. Daimler CEO said it himself. "We are a software company"
- twblalock 9y ago
  I'm sure they write lots of code. But I've heard, from people who would know, that the code quality in cars is pretty bad. That's what I meant by not being good at it.

detritus 9y ago

Or it reinforces the idea (rightly or wrongly) that traditional car manufacturers won't play unnecessary games with people's lives. Regardless of what you, I or others in 'our' sphere might think, there's a lot of traction in playing the conservative card when it comes to cars hurtling down roads. As someone in a big city who drives a bit, cycles a bit and walks a lot, I can't help but feel we're still a long way off high autonomy in cars outwith constrained environments.

felipelemos 9y ago
Unnecessary plays with shareholder's money. FTFY. What history told us is that people's lives really isn't a concern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  Part of the reason more mature car manufacturers are conservative is because they've gone through lawsuits and recalls.
CamperBob2 9y ago
Regardless of what you, I or others in 'our' sphere might think, there's a lot of traction in playing the conservative card when it comes to cars hurtling down roads. Every day that goes by without a shift to autonomous driving, we lose 70 or so people in the US alone. Why this isn't being treated as a Manhattan- or Apollo-scale project, I don't understand. A conservative approach is not what's called for here. We can afford to break a few eggs on the way. Sounds heartless... but sorry, that's what the math says.
- majormajor 9y ago
  This is the same problem current safety tech already has. We have cars that can stop themselves in most situations already - things like that + lane detection + distracted/sleepy driver detection would do wonders if everyone had them even without full autonomy. But they also all add cost to new vehicles, and the average age of vehicles on the road reflects that. It's been climbing, looks like 11.5 years now.[0] Looks like there's about 260M cars in the US, and on average only ~18M new ones sold each year[1]. Let's go conservative, and say we just need to replace 200M cars with current-or-near-future tech ones to save 30K lives a year. Let's say a 30K car has the level of tech we want. 200M * 30K = 6 trillion. But car crashes are like 2% or fewer[2] of all deaths in the US. So that's a massive cost that might be much better spent elsewhere. It's not that we can't make cars safer - we can already do that! - it's that there are some much more appealing ways to spend the money if approaching it from a non-commercial perspective. [0] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-car-age-20150729-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-c... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Fricken 9y ago

There's GM's Supercruise, talked about in the article, and then there's Cruise Automation, a startup acquired by GM which is focusing on robotaxis, and is at once more capable and more revolutionary than anything Tesla is doing.

dragontamer 9y ago
> and is at once more capable and more revolutionary than anything Tesla is doing. Yes and no. Part of the reason why Tesla is behind is because they're gimping their engineers by focusing on optical-only solutions. IIRC, Cruise Automation uses LIDAR, which gives better sensory data. IMO, this is where AI really has an edge: when they start to use sensors that humans don't have. LIDAR accurately maps the distance between the LIDAR and every physical thing in a certain radius. Solving the problem with LIDAR isn't "revolutionary" per se. Its kind of the obvious way to do autonomous cars. It is a more expensive approach however. I guess the end results are all that matters however. At which point, I am more bullish on any LIDAR approach. If LIDAR makes it easier to code and more reliable for AIs to detect where they are in 3d space, it should be used (and then you try to solve the mass-production problem to bring down the cost of LIDAR units). I think we've seen the limits of the optical-only approach from Tesla: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
- Fricken 9y ago
  >solving the problem with Lidar isn't revolutionary per se Solving the problem in any capacity would be revolutionary. Autonomous vehicles operating in a commercial capacity on public roads technically don't yet exist. There's the old saying 'it's easier to optimize a working system than it is to get an optimized system working', Outfits using Lidar (and using about an order of magnitude more compute than what's going into Tesla's HW2) are much closer to solving autonomy than Tesla, and in time these systems will get cheaper.
  - hangonhn 9y ago
    However, you can see how an optical-based system should in theory work because all our roads and signs are designed based on that assumption and has never assumed LIDAR. If a human can do it optically, one can reason, so should a machine. That said, I think Tesla is making a big assumption about human optical systems and object recognition and our current ability to replicate it. One of the things my undergraduate classes in AI taught me is that people tend to underestimate the sophistication and complexity of human neuro/cognitive systems. We are only consciously made aware of the simplified end results but are often unaware of the complexity of the underlying sub-systems.

013a 9y ago

Their decision to limit the initial problem domain is genius. When it comes to autonomous driving, safety is paramount. Limiting it to highways is a good way to ensure that you can maximize the system's safety and performance, while still getting a product to market that is ahead of the competition and which allows you to gather data and iterate to expand in the future. SpaceX wants to go to Mars. Why haven't they yet? Do you consider them uninnovative? Or maybe they're just taking their time getting the technology right, because they know (1) they're leading the industry already, and (2) if they fuck it up, it would be a highly expensive mistake they probably wouldn't recover from. If your definition of "innovation" is "irreparably risking your business and customers' lives in the pursuit of profit", I sincerely hope I never have to interact with you in any way in the future.

ramenmeal 9y ago
Curious though, would you buy this car over a Tesla (basing your decision on the self driving features only)? The reason I ask is because if I buy a Tesla, I have the idea that one day it will be completely self driving one day. With this Cadillac, I would expect it to only do this specific subset of self driving for the life of the car.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Probably the Cadillac. I have no expectation of a Tesla or anyone else having a 100% autonomous vehicle during the lifetime of current cars, much less one that it retrofitted to current hardware.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  > I have the idea that one day it will be completely self driving one day Why do you think that? Can you explain how this would happen, when the car appears to lack the physical hardware (e.g. LIDARs, computing power) to do so in anything but clear conditions on highways? Moreover, why would Tesla be interested in doing so? They gain nothing, reduce a customer's desire to upgrade to the latest model, and put themselves into major extra liability if the system ever fucks up.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

Yes but as far as I can tell GM SuperCruise hasn't killed anybody either. 'Move fast and break things' doesn't seem like such a great philosophy when those things are people's lives.

dkd903 9y ago
Even Honda has autonomous driving. The Honda Sensing on Honda's 2018 is great - just like what they showed in the video here.
Judgmentality 9y ago
You think Tesla will ever get sued over Autopilot?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  Given some of Tesla's past behavior, I suspect any such attempt would involve any or the following: - pulling of full vehicle logs, prior to any subpoena/ discovery, and publishing of press releases with Tesla's "findings" on the driver's record - disabling of Autopilot for that vehicle, if not - disabling of the vehicle for failure to adhere to the EULA which probably has "binding arbitration" clauses
  - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    Not going to be effective if the plaintiff is a third party injured by a Tesla induced crash.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Driver-induced crash. Tesla ships a level 2 system.

jaredhansen 9y ago

>It kind of reinforces that traditional car makers are never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market Oh come on. Not having to have your hands on the wheel, while driving at 65mph for three hours down a four lane divided highway, is absolutely "revolutionary". Is it as big as full autonomy? No. But it's no slouch, either, and it's kind of silly to claim that GM (which in this case is really the acquired Cruise team anyway) "is never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market).

mannykannot 9y ago

The level of innovation is not determined by choosing an ambitious goal, but by actual progress towards it. AFAIK, Tesla and GM are working towards the same goal. The author, who has quite a bit of experience with both systems, and apparently likes both of them, writes "Tesla is vague about [deciding whether it can handle the situation], and often errs on the side of What the hell, let's give this a shot." (author's emphasis.) I would characterize GM's domain restriction as prudent rather than innovative, but that choice is not necessarily indicative of what has been achieved in R&D.

beambot 9y ago

GM bought Cruise. How is that not taking a risk with technology?!

jhatax 9y ago

I read the article, and my takeaways were very different from yours. While each of us homes in on different aspects of the same article, I am wondering how you arrived at some of your conclusions. In particular: 1. Where does it say anything about the challenges that GM is trying to solve long term? 2. What about this release indicates that GM haven't set their sights higher? If you have evidence to back your statements, please share. I don't have any insider GM knowledge, but from the outside looking in, this is a genius move by GM and the very essence of an MVP release. Rolling out with a limited set of capabilities that work as advertised is better to me (as a driver) than launching with a larger set of half-working features. If GM can figure out a way to weave learning capabilities into their platform with their production cars providing training data for this feature, that will put them on the fast path to competing strongly in this market. Edit: Minor word-smithing