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The Cruise Origin
- Nition 7y agoIs there a rule these days that your startup isn't allowed to clearly describe what its product is? Anyway, I guess this is an unmanned self-driving taxi service. Looks good, honestly. If it's significantly cheaper than a taxi with human driver, then maybe it really could help people not need to own a car. Especially if they can optimise routes to get more people riding at once. Having to hunt for what the thing actually is also got me to notice the small disclaimer though: > All on-road images of the Origin are renderings.
- yingw787 7y agohttps://medium.com/hackernoon/for-the-love-of-god-please-tell-me-what-your-company-does-c2f0b835ab92 https://medium.com/hackernoon/for-the-love-of-god-please-tel...
- Nition 7y agoWell at least someone else has noticed. Off-topic but I've also started seeing modern software websites with no screenshots, to the point that I can get a better idea of what a product is like from the screenshots on Google Images than I can from all the text and pretty graphics on the site itself.
- prawn 7y agoI suspect they do that because every update to your software/interface then renders your example screenshots outdated. For a startup at least and in my experience, that's a painful distraction when you want to just focus on building and getting people to your site. But I also go looking for screenshots and appreciate sites that provide them up front.
- saberdancer 7y agoQuite possible but in that case I usually treat the website with scepticism. There are plenty of "fake it till you make it" type of products out there, and no screenshots or photographs on the site is a big signal for problem in my opinion. Getting new screenshots doesn't seem very work intensive plus you can easily put screenshots of an earlier version and a disclaimer that the screenshots may not be fully up to date.
- prawn 7y agoBig companies do it as well, to the point where I can't tell if it's split tested and proven more effective, or just a stylistic thing that they think is more important than effectiveness?
- true_religion 7y agoYou can automate the taking of screenshots. Many teams already do this for visual testing of UI. Doing it for marketing pages is similarly easy.
- jessriedel 7y agoA good critique for the Nth start-up no one's ever heard of. Less useful for a $20B company owned by, and the future of, General Motors.
- threeseed 7y agoThe Verge video explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3E7p4S_1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3E7p4S_1m4
- zymhan 7y agoIf it can't be described without a video, that's not a great sign.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoOne distinct variety of company culture is one where the employees can't fathom a world where no one has ever heard of them. That's ok though, especially if you target your marketing towards early adopters who would know who you are. I doubt some of these companies could handle the hype or scale of being a household name.
- paxys 7y agoIt doesn't even have to be significantly cheaper. Being the same price as Uber & Lyft will be enough, as long as it is profitable/sustainable.
- taneq 7y ago> Is there a rule these days that your startup isn't allowed to clearly describe what its product is? 1) Release vaguely worded press release announcing your imminent thing-which-will-change-the-world. 2) Read all the guesses at what you might be about to release. 3) If any of those guesses are better than your actual idea, then they become your idea all along!
- aabhay 7y agoMy money’s betting that there’s a remote driver sitting at a desk in Asia who is commanding this. Driverless, sure, but not autonomous.
- Spivak 7y agoI mean that would actually be pretty cool! Taxi driver as a desk job with multiple offices geographically so drivers never have to work outside of 9-5.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- p1necone 7y agoIf that's really how it's working I don't see it being good enough. Latency would be too high, and the infrastructures not there for a reliable enough internet connection from (somewhere in the USA) to (somewhere in asia).
- zyang 7y ago5G is supposed to make this feasible.
- october_sky 7y ago> 5G is supposed to make this feasible. 5G does not make this feasible. 5G does not break the speed of light
- Nition 7y agoHas anyone done this successfully so far? I would have thought that the round trip time for the video feed + returning inputs would be prohibitive. I've done a similar thing with vehicles in videogames, and anything over around 150ms was pretty much undriveable.
- 7y ago
- keyle 7y agoIncredible tech from the videos through the technology page and the medium post :O Their UI looks incredibly sexy https://medium.com/cruise/the-disengagement-myth-1b5cbdf8e239 https://medium.com/cruise/the-disengagement-myth-1b5cbdf8e23... Also the quality of their simulator, I've never seen anything like this in production.
- janpaul123 7y ago> Their UI looks incredibly sexy Are you talking about the GIFs in that article? I work on that tool, and just in case you're interested, it's open source, so you can play with it yourself: https://webviz.io https://webviz.io :)
- keyle 7y agoNice work!
- thebradbain 7y agoThis is _exactly_ the use case I think self-driving cars are perfect for: a shared fleet of cars continuously picking up and dropping off passengers within cities – eliminating the need for parking and allowing cities to reclaim that ROW for other uses (bigger sidewalks, bikeways, parklets/seating, or even dedicated bus lanes and light rail for high capacity routes, maybe even housing in some spots), finally allowing vehicles to become a crucial supplement to higher capacity public transportation rather than a competitor to it, and hopefully decrease the amount of space dedicated to cars (think highways and sprawl in addition to parking) within cities. I hope they can pull this off.
- threeseed 7y agoIt is also clearly designed for airport trips given the layout of the interior cabin. Which is genius as in every city that is (a) the most lucrative taxi route and (b) the one with the newest and safest roads.
- gregoryl 7y agoIf you ever get a chance to travel to Sydney, you'll find a nice outlier for road quality near the airport.
- bronco21016 7y ago> (b) the one with the newest and safest roads. What? You should try driving the roads around DTW. Bring your off-road tires. Many airports across the rust belt and northeast of the US suffer the plague of under-maintained infrastructure. CLE and BWI are coming to mind as well. And driving any highway in ATL can hardly be considered safe.
- lflux 7y ago>(b) the one with the newest and safest roads. Yeah that doesn't describe 101 around SFO one bit.
- dehrmann 7y agoNavigating around the airport is tricky, but the roads are ok. Where it's bad is 101 after the 280 split. It's packed, the lanes are narrow, the road is windy (by freeway standards), and exits are old, awkward, and beyond their capacity.
- microdrum 7y agoAwesome product that does not exist.
- Koshkin 7y agoCome on, it’s just the first month of the new decade.
- truebosko 7y agoWhy can't we just invest in buses? This will become the luxury/premium version of "public transit"
- andys627 7y agoThis is analogous to micro transit - on demand, smaller buses or vans. One crucial difference, the most expensive cost is eliminated - the driver. Larger buses still have a significant place and will become much cheaper when the driver is gone.
- Waterluvian 7y agoI think you answered your own question. I want a door to door bus without the homeless guy and two kids yapping on their phones. I would love to never own or be responsible for a car ever again. Just summon them when needed or book them in advance.
- ronilan 7y agoYour wish will be summoned. Just make sure to never have kids and never fall on your luck.
- Waterluvian 7y agoAre you implying this replaces mass transit? I don't understand how that makes any sense. Why didn't cars replace mass transit? Why hasn't Uber killed mass transit?
- jonstewart 7y agoCars did replace mass transit in many cities. Many cities had better mass transit decades ago than they do now. And ridesharing companies have had deleterious effects on mass transit. They haven’t killed it, but studies are starting to show there’s been some harm and, at the same time, that ridesharing contributes to worsening congestion.
- 7y ago
- pgodzin 7y agoSo is this a concept car? Has it been built or launched anywhere? Unclear what this announcement actually is.
- Fricken 7y agoThese PR materials are meant to go with a press demo of some sort that Cruise will host tomorrow. It will make more sense then.
- troymc 7y agoThey say it's not a concept car; their intent is to put it in production. They need to get some approvals and exemptions first. Edit: More details in this video from The Verge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3E7p4S_1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3E7p4S_1m4
- asdf21 7y agoManufactured by Tesla®
- abeppu 7y ago> With the Origin’s ability to drive day and night and last for more than a million miles, we’ll be able to cut up to $5,000 in transportation costs per San Francisco household, per year. What counts as a transportation cost? Do average San Franciscan households have $5k of local (i.e. replaceable with a robocab) transportation costs? We're one of the US cities with the most households without vehicles [1]. But even looking at the US average, $5K would be a big promise. E.g. a quick search finds claims [2] that average US households are paying $250 in gas per month (-> 3k per year). That same source says the household average for transportation (including planes, trains, ships, vacations) is $9k. For comparison, an SF muni pass with bart within the city is $98/month. [1] https://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-vehicles-by-city-map.html https://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-... [2] https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget#transportation https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget#transp...
- ncallaway 7y ago> that average US households are paying $250 in gas per month Gas is definitely not the only expense to driving. Amortization of the vehicle value, insurance, and maintenance are all costs that you have to consider as part of vehicle ownership (or leasing). If Origin were the difference between someone owning and not owning a car, it would be pretty easy to get to $5k. As you noted, $3k per year for gas. Another $1k for vehicle insurance. Another $1-2k for the value of the vehicle.
- MandieD 7y agoCalculated cost of purchasing and operating a used Ford Focus wagon for 7 years and 124600km, minus what I sold it for when it looked like it needed a new transmission: 36k EUR, or 0.29 EUR/km. Given Germany's allowed tax deduction of 0.30 EUR/km for long commutes or charity work, this was a relatively inexpensive car to operate. I could have optimized even more by dropping my high-deductible comprehensive/collision down to liability-only after the first two years. Despite Germany's really high fuel taxes, fuel was only 27% of the cost. Details: https://mandie.net/2018/11/08/good-news-my-cars-transmission-is-failing/ https://mandie.net/2018/11/08/good-news-my-cars-transmission...
- jcims 7y agoWhat’s the ‘club’ going to be called?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- paxys 7y agoDoes anyone else just see a blank page? I'm assuming there is supposed to be a hero image?
- sp332 7y agoOn mobile the top image never loaded for me, but scrolling down worked.
- october_sky 7y agoNot a single job role open for security. Hope they've solved the adversarial attacks against ML before these hit the road. The rendered images look great though!
- ejcx 7y agoThis is probably the last thing to knock Cruise on. They've hired a lot, a lot, a lot of good people on the security front
- probablypat 7y agoThis mode of transport is very similar to how people ride Jeepney's in my country, the Philippines. I didn't see anything on how it would pick the routes, but I can tell you that it can get pretty smelly in there without windows. Jeepneys are great though, I hope this mode of transport catches on.
- quickthrower2 7y agoI thought of “tuk tuks” in the Phillipines and Thailand, Vietnam etc. when is saw this!
- r_klancer 7y agoWhich reminds me of this article - https://medium.com/swlh/self-driving-cars-should-be-tuk-tuks-2ed22edabd70 https://medium.com/swlh/self-driving-cars-should-be-tuk-tuks... Which reminds me that one concern with the Cruise vehicle is that, understandably, it looks as if it's heavy and built to US passenger car safety standards. Whereas a tuk-tuk or jeepney designed exclusively for slower speed urban travel could be built sub-500kg which would be better for pedestrian safety and energy efficiency. (Of course, especially in the US market, there are other factors that go into consideration, such as the perceived or real need to travel in 30+ mph mixed traffic, the need for large batteries that allow a high utilization factor between charges, etc.)
- tomc1985 7y agoI got to ride on one of Lyft's self-driving taxis during last year's AWS conference. If Lyft (and most of the other commentary on self-driving cars) is an accurate picture of the current state-of-the-art, then let's just say the tech has a long way to go before its ready for the kind of everyday use that we're being hyped up for.
- pb7 7y agoI didn't think Lyft was even on the radar in terms of self-driving capabilities. Cruise is one of the top players and Waymo is still years ahead.
- sp332 7y agoLyft has their own self-driving car project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20507925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20507925 but they partner with other projects as well. Currently Waymo and Aptiv have cars on the Lyft service. http://level52019.wpengine.com/partners/ http://level52019.wpengine.com/partners/
- ummonk 7y agoIs Waymo really years ahead of Cruise? Given the different environments they're testing in, I'm not sure it's clearcut to compare how well the two are doing relatively.
- pb7 7y agoHard to tell but in 2018, Google had 3x the driving miles and less than half the disengagements per mile than Cruise did.[0] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/13/18223356/california-dmv-self-driving-car-disengagement-report-2018 https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/13/18223356/california-dmv-s...
- ummonk 7y agoIt is hard to say how similar different companies are when deciding what counts as a disengagement that needs reporting, but if the headline numbers are accurate, having twice as many disengagements per mile is extremely impressive; the SF environment is far more than twice as hard to drive in as suburban / highway environments. Also, Cruise’s disengagement rates are already ahead of what Waymo averaged in 2018: https://miro.medium.com/max/1644/0*lYhqv0Bd82ocQP5T https://miro.medium.com/max/1644/0*lYhqv0Bd82ocQP5T Waymo disengagement rates were halved in 2018 though so they might be continuing to exhibit substantial improvements as well.
- smaili 7y agoMedium post that goes with this: https://medium.com/cruise/the-cruise-origin-story-b6e9ad4b47e5 https://medium.com/cruise/the-cruise-origin-story-b6e9ad4b47...
- streetcat1 7y agoThe car has a pretty easy acceptance test: 1) Board the CEO and the CTO (with their families) 2) Drive from downtown LA to Lax. Until than...
- aerovistae 7y agoNo release date or price or anything? I honestly don't even know what this is. Is it for the city or for the individual? What are its capabilities? I sure would love ANY concrete details. This is all just tech marketing speak, same old bullshit.
- sp332 7y agoThere are some indirect references to price in here: https://medium.com/cruise/the-cruise-origin-story-b6e9ad4b47e5 https://medium.com/cruise/the-cruise-origin-story-b6e9ad4b47... I don't know why they give both the manufacturing cost ("half the cost of what a conventional electric SUV costs") and the cost to the customer ("on average, see up to $5,000 back in their pocket every year").
- ec109685 7y ago“At this very moment, we’re running fleets of our third-generation vehicles on the roads of San Francisco, operating a rideshare service that any Cruise employee can use, 24/7” This is so disingenuous. Every car has a human safety driver in it that they failed to mention.
- throwawayjava 7y agoAnd the "apply" link in the top right is for jobs, not for a closed beta.
- Animats 7y agoYes. Cruise has been "fake it til you make it" since their original demo video. Now "all vehicles shown on road are renders" in fine print. Here are the CA DMV's autonomous vehicle accident reports for 2019.[1] Cruise has a lot of them. Mostly being rear-ended by a human-driven car. A surprisingly large number are with the vehicle being driven manually, or right after the human driver took over. True driverless still seems a long way off given those results. I've seen Cruise cars in SF, most recently making a left turn off Union St in manual mode. GM's first try at self-driving, Firebird III in 1958, was far cooler than this mini-bus thing. The mini-bus area seems a good place to start with self-driving. I was once thinking airport parking lot shuttles. Controlled environment, low speed - that could work. But the financial numbers don't work out. You get rid of the driver cost, but you add sizable engineering cost and vehicle cost, and you don't sell many vehicles that way. Local Motors and some other startups have been struggling quietly in that space for years now. Local Motors' Olli has three live installations, with about six vehicles total, all very recent. A college campus, a casino area, and a dedicated track at an industrial park are the public installations. Demos, basically. The thing is so slow that walking might be faster, and any bicycle or electric scooter would be much faster. Not fast enough to get people from Economy Parking to the terminal. Navya, from France, seems to be further along. They provided the self-driving shuttles for the Las Vegas strip. They have a number of live mini-bus installations in Europe. They've announced an autonomous cab, but it is not deployed yet. This is still something that can only be done if someone is willing to finance a money-loser. However, this is perhaps the best time in history for that. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316 https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton... [2] https://youtu.be/xKOdux6Gjno?t=649 https://youtu.be/xKOdux6Gjno?t=649
- retrovm 7y agoIn the marketing photo, which is obviously a composite rendering of a product that does not exist, this piece of crap is stopped picking up some jerk in an SFMTA bus stop. Let's hope, for the good of humanity, that a hero emerges to destroy all of these evil toasters.
- symplee 7y agoThe big concern is human drivers hitting it. Like the Las Vegas autonomous car that was backed into by a truck within the first hour of going live. [0] For example, does it have a side impact safety rating? I also noticed on their technology page [1] they say that they have "Deep Resources" >> We have raised $7.25 billion in committed capital from General Motors, Honda, SoftBank, T. Rowe Price, and others. These investments help shave years off of our timeline to launch all-electric, self-driving vehicles at scale. $7.25 Billion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7pV4vxD1bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7pV4vxD1bs https://www.getcruise.com/technology https://www.getcruise.com/technology
- whytheam 7y agoSo, they made a bus?
- aabhay 7y agohttps://twitter.com/joshbutler/status/847189801967132672?s=21 https://twitter.com/joshbutler/status/847189801967132672?s=2...
- jiofih 7y agoYeah, an autonomous, dynamically routed minibus that might significantly extend the reach and lower the cost of public transport. Not good enough for you?
- oldgradstudent 7y agoExcept that they don't actually have a working self driving technology to power it.
- prawn 7y agoPaul Graham: "Quote-tweets of the form "You've invented <thing that already exists>" are almost always false. That form of witticism must for some reason be especially attractive to the mistaken."
- ilaksh 7y agoDo they have an estimated launch date?
- habosa 7y agoI would love for this to exist but don't really trust Cruise to get there. I see their cars around SF every day and almost always see someone with hands on the wheel. And one time I ran into one in self driving mode in an area with construction it was driving really erratically and scared me (biking).
- habosa 7y agoI hope they sell this to cities. We would seriously regret the privatization of public transit.
- quickthrower2 7y agoWhat if multiple competing companies run fleets? Like taxi companies. No one player to rort all the riders?
- michaelt 7y agoLast time I visited a city with multiple competing bus companies, each had their own return tickets and annual passes that only work on their busses. I naively brought a return ticket for the green bus company from the train station, and when it came time to return that meant I couldn't get the black bus or the pink bus that came to the stop before the next green bus. Needless to say, if each bus company runs two busses an hour, such a system changes a one-bus-every-ten-minutes route into a one-bus-every-thirty-minutes if two thirds of the busses won't accept your ticket.
- Grue3 7y agoPeople always bring up Japan when describing how nice public transportation is, but almost all "public transport" is privatised over there. Meanwhile everyone's complaining about municipal transport in the USA.
- pottertheotter 7y agoI can't quite tell, but do the front seats face backwards? I for one would never be able to use those seats. I'd get carsick in no time.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rasengan0 7y ago$7.25 Billion - https://www.getcruise.com/leadership https://www.getcruise.com/leadership Yep, same GM, now add Honda and Son-sama and we're ready for act 2: https://youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4 https://youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4 Just in time for global warming Anecdotally, Cruise has been cruising around the city for years like they're helping rebuild Apple Maps or something. Now we know, hard to miss the big launch, getting out of the 47 Van Ness and seeing the usual special event at SVN West. How ironic it was at the old Honda dealership and less than 1/2 block away from the homeless navigation center. Seeing as homeless folk ride free in MUNI, I have to wonder will they get to cruise in Origin, too? Maybe good Breed PR gesture. Probably not. Wrong use case. If they crash and burn hopefully the IP will be worth something. Otherwise seppuku time. All the data from tooling around the city has got to be worth something.
- groodt 7y agoReminds me of Zoox https://zoox.com/ https://zoox.com/
- jxramos 7y agoHow so? What overlaps do you see? Anything significantly different?
- pgt 7y agoWhy didn't they call it The Cruise Destination? Always think past the sale.
- amelius 7y agoThe fact that it looks symmetric could be confusing to other traffic. You can't tell which side is front, and thus where it is (most probably) going.
- aembleton 7y agoJust put some lights on it. White at the front, red on the back
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chaos_emergent 7y agoIts velocity and position on the road should be enough?
- kspe 7y agoAm I the only one noticing an outstanding resemblance to cars from Detroit: Become Human game? Wonder if its design was inspired somehow by it.
- react_burger38 7y agoI guess my question is - how would I use this with 3 kids, wife and car seats? I only have 2 kids now but hoping for a third sooner or later. I guess I would go in the category of “people who couldn’t use this on the daily”.
- mcguire 7y agoSo, it's a bus?