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"Miles driven per needed human intervention ..." Driving in an urban environment is almost nothing like driving in the suburbs. These numbers not comparable f
by tintor 8y ago
"Miles driven per needed human intervention ..."
Driving in an urban environment is almost nothing like driving in the suburbs.
These numbers not comparable for many reasons:
- GM Cruise drives in high density San Francisco (city roads), while Waymo drives in low density Mountain View / Phoenix (incl. highways). [1]
- GM Cruise is not optimizing to reduce driver interventions, as that can actually decrease safety (ie. drivers delaying the intervention)
I work at GM Cruise.
[1] https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in-sf-is-challenging-but-necessary-77dbe8345927 https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...
- cromwellian 8y agoIF you rely on drivers being aware and able to intervene at any time, then you are creating a dangerous situation. Human beings can’t re engage and obtain situational awareness in emergencies.
- dasil003 8y agoYeah, one key question is whether there a loud alarm triggered for human intervention a few seconds before it's necessary or is it relying on the constant awareness of the human. I am skeptical that an acceptable answer is anywhere near being possible.
- Fricken 8y agoYeah, humans shouldn't be driving at all, but to get there, well, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoThat's an expression I know as a former military wife that explains the need to accept training deaths. I have enormous difficulty with the idea that we really need to accept training deaths in self driving cars.
- Fricken 8y agoCars kill and injure more Americans than wars. Cruise and Waymo have been as cautious as they can reasonably expect to be. They both have months long training courses for their safety drivers, and camera in the vehicle that monitor driver attention. While the vehicles are still challenged by complex scenarios, basic object detection and emergency braking are pretty good. Neither has had an at-fault accident, excluding an ambiguous but non-injurious incident between a Cruise car and a lane splitting motorcyclist.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoHaving a highly trained, standing army is part of what keeps us out of war. Without it, we would soon be invaded and taken over. Historically, every time America shrinks its military, it winds up dragged into a war and having to ramp back up rapidly. There is no similar need for driverless cars. I'm American. I've lived without a car for over a decade. I don't see why we can't do more testing before putting lives at stake. I don't see why driverless cars killing people as part of their development is a thing we need to accept. Your assertion in no way clears up for me why we should shrug at the idea of people dying for this thing.
- Fricken 8y agoHaving highly trained autonomous vehicles will keep us out of car crashes, currently we just sort of lie down and take it. As though we had 10 9/11 scale tragedies every year and just kind of threw our arms up and said "whatever, nuthin' we can do" And for the record I don't drive either, haven't since I was a young man.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI don't personally see that as justification for accepting training deaths here. I'm not talking about stopping the development of driverless vehicles. I'm just telling you that your argument seems like a non sequitur to me. There are training deaths in the military precisely because humans are being trained to do dangerous things. Why can't driverless vehicles be trained without killing people? That's the thing you aren't actually answering.
- msiyer 8y ago"breaking a few eggs": We can surely afford to lose a few cars. I hope that is what you meant.
- stuckinarut 8y agoDo you feel good about having such a cavalier attitude towards human lives?
- trhway 8y agothat seems to be the situation with Uber killing that woman. If i remember correctly they said that the emergency braking was disabled and they hoped on the driver taking over (and the driver was probably asleep or something like this as the woman had been for several seconds crossing those 2 lanes while being highlighted by the car's headlights - the video that Uber published and which let them off so easy obviously comes from a low sensitivity configured camera and doesn't correctly reflect the normal sensitivity of human eyes and what humans see in car headlight's field)
- charleslmunger 8y agoThe driver was actually watching "The Voice" on their phone.
- xvf22 8y agoYup, the video they first released was pretty misleading considering what the subsequent investigation has revealed.
- apeace 8y agoThe part of your post about following hand signals of construction workers is interesting. Could anyone jump out in front of a Cruise car and direct it? Would you have to be wearing something like an orange vest?
- foota 8y agoThis comment made me think of black hat from xkcd. (e.g., https://xkcd.com/496/ https://xkcd.com/496/ or https://xkcd.com/1243/ https://xkcd.com/1243/)
- phyller 8y agoDo be fair, anyone could jump in front of any car with a regular driver and direct it with hand signals. If someone was standing on the road in front of me directing me into another lane I would do it, with or without an orange vest.
- stephengillie 8y agoMost human drivers have an ACL to only accept these inputs from LEOs working in an official capacity. How would we add a visual ACL to a self-driving car?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- memory_grep 8y ago> low density Mounatin View I wish
- electricslpnsld 8y ago> high density San Francisco (city roads) Please, San Francisco is hardly a city.
- KKKKkkkk1 8y agoI don't buy the argument about minimizing driver interventions. Regardless of what metric Cruise is optimizing, there is some metric, and hence there is an incentive to cut corners at the expense of safety. It's the responsibility of every engineer and every manager to prevent this. Given that the incentive will exist no matter what, miles driven between interventions is a pretty good metric to optimize.
- fipple 8y agoBut most driving in America is suburban. So if Waymo builds something that only works in the suburbs (and just literally pulls over and tells you to get out if it approaches a city boundary) that's still a bonkers market.