8 ms·

Cruise driverless vehicles involved in 3 separate traffic incidents in SF

47 points by ra7 4y ago

ra7 4y ago
Yet another incident from last night: https://reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xmivfn/five_avs_with_blinkers_on_and_no_drivers_blocking/ https://reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xmivfn/five_avs_w...
reidjs 4y ago
How many incidents have human driven cars had in the same time period? I know the scale is different, but 3 is a pretty low number for the number of hours they’ve racked up. I just wish we could have less cars overall and more bikes, scooters, trains, buses, etc.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  I mean, how many driverless cars are there even? You can just compare absolute numbers. I can't believe I even have to bring it up on here. You mentioned yourself the number of hours. Are we comparing it to the total number of hours for ALL the cars in the same area?
  - reidjs 4y ago
    You tell me. Is 3 a significantly high number, or is this a non-story? It doesn’t sound very high to me.
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      There clearly don't seem to be too many of these cars. > UNITED STATES—A self-driving vehicle created by Cruise, a self-driving arm of General Motors Co., crashed into another car in San Francisco, leading to the recall of 80 more vehicles. One person who drove the car was arrested for suspicion of DUI. The algorithm that controls Cruise’s cars is reportedly capable of counting pedestrians and cyclists and detecting steel guardrails.[1] Just found another somewhat amusing link as I was looking for the number of cars. Here's two cruise drivers blocking the street. I guess they deadlocked[2]. [1] https://www.thesfnews.com/san-francisco-cruise-crash-leads-to-recall-of-80-self-driving-vehicles/83639 https://www.thesfnews.com/san-francisco-cruise-crash-leads-t... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xloemd/two_selfdriving_cruise_cars_blocking_traffic_on/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xloemd/two_se...
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Well if the whole fleet is 30 cars (asof this summer according to electrek - https://electrek.co/2022/06/23/gm-cruise-takes-first-fares-for-paid-driverless-taxi-in-san-francisco/ https://electrek.co/2022/06/23/gm-cruise-takes-first-fares-f...) 3 out of 30 is pretty pretty bad!
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    another article claiming 30 driverless fleet size - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/driverless-taxis-are-coming-to-san-francisco-180980202/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/driverless-taxis-a...
  - reidjs 4y ago
    Idk if it is bad. The way the article headline is worded it sounds like the cars are crashing into puppies and grandmas. In reality they just caused traffic to get backed up for about 20 minutes because a sensor broke or something. This seems like a misleading headline by kron4.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      I think techies make a lot of excuses for tech that just isn't even remotely there yet. Driverless cars is very much that category of tech. If 10% of the Toyota Camrys on the road in a given city suddenly froze in place and caused traffic jams simultaneously in a major US city, requiring roadside assistance, we'd all be laughing at those incompetent dinosaurs.
      - reidjs 4y ago
        Not remotely there? It already drives better than very old and very young drivers, as well as people who are drunk or tired. At least this tech should get our worst drivers off the road.
  - rascul 4y ago
    3 out of 30 may or may not be bad. How many miles over how many hours have these cars driven?
- syntaxing 4y ago
  If only there was some sort of math “journalist” can use to make the article less sensational that takes into account of other evidence like how many hours it drove and how many cars there are on the streets driven by humans. We can even call them priors!
- reTensor 4y ago
  Cruise is a mess internally. The product is unreliable garbage. For more details, see this recent whisteleblower account of the situation: Cruise robotaxi service under review following anonymous letter (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/cruise-robotaxi-under-review-following-anonymous-letter/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/cruise-robotaxi-under-revi...) I work directly with the employee who submitted the complaint. He is understating the problem. The letter also states that Cruise ... intentionally hides from the majority of employees the results of investigations into collisions involving Cruise vehicles and other sensitive, potentially damaging matters. Cruise has been covering up safety incidents since before the GM acquisition, including an early incident where an engineer suffered a concussion due to violent cabin motion caused by bad motion control code.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    I looked through your comment history and didn't actually see additional details. What specifically are you referring to?
    - reTensor 4y ago
      I inserted the details into my comment to save you the trouble, and accidentally didn't edit out that sentence. I have to be careful not to reveal my identity by saying too much.
      - AlotOfReading 4y ago
        Totally fair, I understand. I'm an ex-employee that might return soon, so I was curious how things changed so much since I left.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Right and I think if driverless taxis ever work (they won't outside small geo fenced localities & narrow use cases) only incentivizes oversupply. In a taxi or even perma-loss-leading Uber/Lyft, there is a labor component which disincentives between-ride transient driving. Whether they are paid employees costing company money, or independent contractors looking at hours worked vs take home pay.. In a high fixed cost, low operating cost driverless taxi this is not the case. Very easy to imagine fleets of these stupid things clogging the streets even worse than Uber ever did. Note NYC traffic + TL&C stats already show Uber/Lyft have always had much lower utilization rate per hour/mile than yellow cabs, and thus require more cars on the road to serve the same passenger miles.
- masonic 4y ago
  >3 is a pretty low number 3 complete shutdowns blocking traffic in one city on the same day.
justoreply 4y ago
This content is not available in your country/region.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
Could be that the programmers didn't think they could get an emotionally-correct element of courtesy or responsibility into their AI, and might not have even tried to tackle this type of thing at all. How does a cop give a ticket to one of these anyway? And what should be the fine? Should it scale to the size of the owner's pocketbook like some jurisdictions advocate as the only way to truly supress traffic violations? Or should there be a whole new category of inhuman violations with penalties exorbitant enough to supress cars getting out on the road while impaired with Artificial Stupidity to begin with? Maybe there needs to be a higher standard here where natural stupidity needs to be allowed for with ordinary humans which is bad enough, but any artificial stupidity can not be tolerated at all. Some would probably think you should lose your license for a long time.
- RichardCNormos 4y ago
  And who is criminally liable when there is loss of life or limb, caused by one of these cars? This looks like a way of load-balancing culpability so that no one human is actually on the hook.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    The board at Cruise should be the answer.
xutopia 4y ago
When we started with cars we had accidents all over the place. Not even close to this. It's so hard to know if this is worse than actual drivers or better without the full picture. For all I know this might actually be orders of magnitude better.
PopAlongKid 4y ago
Not the first time, here is a story about seven stopped Cruise cars from last July just a few months ago. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/01/self-driving-cars-from-gms-cruise-block-san-francisco-streets.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/01/self-driving-cars-from-gms-c...
jwr 4y ago
"This content is not available in your country/region." Seriously? In this day and age? On the internet? I believe HN should have a policy of deleting links to content that isn't accessible worldwide. Either we play the Internet game, or a "bunch of walled gardens" game.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  I assume you live in Europe? Honestly seems like a fair approach to gdpr laws. A local city news station in the US that doesn't care about European visitors can either just ignore gdpr entirely and piss off Europeans or block them from visiting and piss off Europeans.
  - jwr 4y ago
    To which "gpdr laws" do you refer, specifically? GDPR is about protecting personal information (specifically, giving people the right to access, correct and delete personal information), and I do not believe showing a web page would somehow cause the web site to come into possession of my personal information and thus fall under any of the GDPR regulations. In other words, this has nothing to do with GDPR. Also, after we've had this tangent discussion, I would submit that if a site is (deliberately) available only to a part of the Internet, it should not be HN material. Unless HN wants to be a "US-only" site.
beej71 4y ago
This seems pretty tame to me. It's exactly the sort of failure when testing this tech I'd like to see. "Cars blocked traffic for some reason" is way better than cars hitting people. I'm impressed it works as well as it already does, and I'm looking forward to more bugs getting worked out.
- joshribakoff 4y ago
  Blocking traffic isn’t something I’d like to see when I or someone else needs emergency vehicles to get to them. It is also unnecessary if the companies have a safety driver who can take over, or more robust teleoperation for a human to remotely assist
  - reidjs 4y ago
    If you’ve ever been to NYC you will see human drivers block emergency vehicles all the time on purpose, even when they are blaring sirens. I have way more confidence in one of these driverless cars to gtfo out of the way of a firetruck than your average Uber driver who’s hustling for a few extra bucks.
- nacs 4y ago
  These Cruise cars didn't have anyone in them at all. No company should be running "experiments" like this on a public road with a 5000+ lb vehicle.
  - beej71 4y ago
    At some point, if the tech were ever to be used, it would have to be on a public road. And at that point we'd certainly see some bugs that hadn't been exposed on closed course testing. (Are those cars really 5000 lbs? They seem small for that, but point taken.)
steveBK123 4y ago
Having owned a Tesla for 4 years, and watching other "self driving" American competitors perform like this, I wonder if the Germans will slowly but surely get there first. Tesla & others are trying a SV "disrupt" type approach that also requires the car to basically work for every use case. City driving is horribly difficult. I would argue that handling city driving without intervention is not far off AGI. The amount of situations you can encounter in city driving are essentially infinite. And you need a self driving car to be able to handle things the first time they see it, not just once that particular type of scenario has been tagged in training set. Germans (BMW, MB specifically) are following a more methodical, legalistic approach to driver assistance towards autonomous driving. Adaptive cruise & lane keeping, emergency braking. Then automated lane changing. Then hands-free below 35mph. Then handles on/off ramps. Etc etc, step by step. But at each step, the system actually works will for the well-define feature set they have sold you, and doesn't regress month to month with bad releases. For many people if your car could handle the highways entirely and you just hand to get yourself to/from the highway, they'd be really happy. And this is a far more achievable goal than essentially solving AGI.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  I am pretty confused about this German thing, only startups that don't have a current business like Cruise and Waymo are going for the disrupt approach. Literally every automaker that currently sell cars are doing incremental level 2/3 features, including Tesla.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    Every company has invested in l4 including ze germans. They just usually run it as spin off
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      The Germans are not charging users $15k to add these test features to their production vehicles.
socialismisok 4y ago
What if we just built infrastructure for trains and bikes? Heck, give folks subsidies to buy ebikes. Like, traffic is a solvable problem with what we have today. This obsession with the automobile is going to cause such a continued headache for us. And yeah, we probably still need a few cars and taxis around, but surely we can just have a human drive the taxi?
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yup. It's a shame SV took advantage of ZIRP to fund never-going-to-work software and perma-unprofitable businesses, subsidizing the urban upper class lifestyle.. but governments did not use the same cheap funding to build some trains.
  - prottog 4y ago
    Yes, it's a damn shame that the so-called innovators in SV didn't tackle actual problems the solutions to which would materially improve human existence. Imagine if those billions went to companies like TerraPower or NuScale instead of unprofitable food deliveries.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Human existence being miserable perpetuates demand for half-baked solutions forever. Actually solving the problem once and for all would eliminate said demand.
      - prottog 4y ago
        If that was true, we'd still be riding around horse buggies, instead of the imperfect-but-better cars. Because we live in an imperfect world populated by imperfect human beings, every solution is a half-baked solution, and misery will only be reduced at the margins, one small step at a time. There's no cabal of greedy capitalists who are purposely holding us back in order to profit off of more misery. Edit: I take that back: there is a group of greedy people who do actually benefit from misery, and that would be our dear politicians ;-)
standardUser 4y ago
All of these "incidents" sounds far less severe than what I see human drivers doing on urban streets day in and day out. And I bet that unlike half of human drivers, these robots at least have the capacity to use a fucking blinker.
- prottog 4y ago
  A lot of human drivers indeed are awful, but at least you can put a name and a face to them and punish them if they hurt you out of negligence, and maybe that makes people feel better about them than driverless cars owned by faceless corporations.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Exactly, imagine if we had food robot delivery and it worked like 99.999% of the time, but 0.001% of the time it consistently maims or murders the customer. How many 9s are enough? How do you punish and regulate the large entity behind the bulk main&murder?
- effingwewt 4y ago
  City cultures are weird af. Albuquerque NM has/had issues with older drivers (lots of retirees there and Santa Fe) who would refuse to use turn signals and would purposefully drive slow on the highways to slow the flow of traffic. Police and highway patrol had to start issuing tickets and instituted minimum highway speeds. Here in California, drivers all use their highbeams in the city. Police refuse to enforce it so it's become rampant. Blinds me and sears my retinas thanks to my astigmatism. Like staring at the sun with those damned halogen lights. When I was a young man with a new wife and child I applied with a local IT company to be a 'desktop expert' (they only knew business/IT solutions). Part of the interview was driving around talking. A person was pulling to a dog leg to turn, we were far from them and the other car had plenty of time/room to turn...since so were we. The owner- an older man, said 'I'm not going to signal because if I do, he will go first.' Blew my mind someone could do that on purpose . Moved back to California years later and it was endemic. People all over now do this and it infuriates me every time. Or they see you waiting to turn and speed up until they see you give up on going, then slow to a crawl. Contrast all of this with rural Texas and all of Washington where people wave, give right of way, always dim lights, move over for bikers, and are generally nicer, more respectful on the roads and in general.
xnx 4y ago
Everyone who isn't Waymo seems to be doing more harm than good with their self driving programs by either killing people (Uber/Tesla) or having accidents and scaring the public away from self-driving (Cruise).
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yes. But also I think it's the sort of white elephant project that can only thrive in a ZIRP environment. Once money has an actual cost, and investors require actual returns, there are 1000s of better business models than this. Hopefully there is consolidation & regulation in the space before we have too much testing in public gone wrong. In my mind the entire self driving industry is trying to apply ML/AI practices from use cases that just require ~51%-ish "right more often than wrong" precision onto driving which needs 99.999+%. If some of your phones images are mis-tagged as a cat instead of dog, or some of your cat photos are not tagged as a cat, it's not a huge issue.. In quant trading as long as your trade makes money 51+% of the time, you are going to accumulate returns in the long run. Car license plate readers for speed tickets / tolls / etc have a similar "pretty close / pretty good" requirement.

47 points by ra7 4y ago

ra7 4y ago

Yet another incident from last night: https://reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xmivfn/five_avs_with_blinkers_on_and_no_drivers_blocking/ https://reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xmivfn/five_avs_w...

reidjs 4y ago

How many incidents have human driven cars had in the same time period? I know the scale is different, but 3 is a pretty low number for the number of hours they’ve racked up. I just wish we could have less cars overall and more bikes, scooters, trains, buses, etc.

rjzzleep 4y ago
I mean, how many driverless cars are there even? You can just compare absolute numbers. I can't believe I even have to bring it up on here. You mentioned yourself the number of hours. Are we comparing it to the total number of hours for ALL the cars in the same area?
- reidjs 4y ago
  You tell me. Is 3 a significantly high number, or is this a non-story? It doesn’t sound very high to me.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    There clearly don't seem to be too many of these cars. > UNITED STATES—A self-driving vehicle created by Cruise, a self-driving arm of General Motors Co., crashed into another car in San Francisco, leading to the recall of 80 more vehicles. One person who drove the car was arrested for suspicion of DUI. The algorithm that controls Cruise’s cars is reportedly capable of counting pedestrians and cyclists and detecting steel guardrails.[1] Just found another somewhat amusing link as I was looking for the number of cars. Here's two cruise drivers blocking the street. I guess they deadlocked[2]. [1] https://www.thesfnews.com/san-francisco-cruise-crash-leads-to-recall-of-80-self-driving-vehicles/83639 https://www.thesfnews.com/san-francisco-cruise-crash-leads-t... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xloemd/two_selfdriving_cruise_cars_blocking_traffic_on/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xloemd/two_se...
steveBK123 4y ago
Well if the whole fleet is 30 cars (asof this summer according to electrek - https://electrek.co/2022/06/23/gm-cruise-takes-first-fares-for-paid-driverless-taxi-in-san-francisco/ https://electrek.co/2022/06/23/gm-cruise-takes-first-fares-f...) 3 out of 30 is pretty pretty bad!
- steveBK123 4y ago
  another article claiming 30 driverless fleet size - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/driverless-taxis-are-coming-to-san-francisco-180980202/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/driverless-taxis-a...
- reidjs 4y ago
  Idk if it is bad. The way the article headline is worded it sounds like the cars are crashing into puppies and grandmas. In reality they just caused traffic to get backed up for about 20 minutes because a sensor broke or something. This seems like a misleading headline by kron4.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    I think techies make a lot of excuses for tech that just isn't even remotely there yet. Driverless cars is very much that category of tech. If 10% of the Toyota Camrys on the road in a given city suddenly froze in place and caused traffic jams simultaneously in a major US city, requiring roadside assistance, we'd all be laughing at those incompetent dinosaurs.
    - reidjs 4y ago
      Not remotely there? It already drives better than very old and very young drivers, as well as people who are drunk or tired. At least this tech should get our worst drivers off the road.
- rascul 4y ago
  3 out of 30 may or may not be bad. How many miles over how many hours have these cars driven?
syntaxing 4y ago
If only there was some sort of math “journalist” can use to make the article less sensational that takes into account of other evidence like how many hours it drove and how many cars there are on the streets driven by humans. We can even call them priors!
reTensor 4y ago
Cruise is a mess internally. The product is unreliable garbage. For more details, see this recent whisteleblower account of the situation: Cruise robotaxi service under review following anonymous letter (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/cruise-robotaxi-under-review-following-anonymous-letter/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/cruise-robotaxi-under-revi...) I work directly with the employee who submitted the complaint. He is understating the problem. The letter also states that Cruise ... intentionally hides from the majority of employees the results of investigations into collisions involving Cruise vehicles and other sensitive, potentially damaging matters. Cruise has been covering up safety incidents since before the GM acquisition, including an early incident where an engineer suffered a concussion due to violent cabin motion caused by bad motion control code.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  I looked through your comment history and didn't actually see additional details. What specifically are you referring to?
  - reTensor 4y ago
    I inserted the details into my comment to save you the trouble, and accidentally didn't edit out that sentence. I have to be careful not to reveal my identity by saying too much.
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      Totally fair, I understand. I'm an ex-employee that might return soon, so I was curious how things changed so much since I left.
steveBK123 4y ago
Right and I think if driverless taxis ever work (they won't outside small geo fenced localities & narrow use cases) only incentivizes oversupply. In a taxi or even perma-loss-leading Uber/Lyft, there is a labor component which disincentives between-ride transient driving. Whether they are paid employees costing company money, or independent contractors looking at hours worked vs take home pay.. In a high fixed cost, low operating cost driverless taxi this is not the case. Very easy to imagine fleets of these stupid things clogging the streets even worse than Uber ever did. Note NYC traffic + TL&C stats already show Uber/Lyft have always had much lower utilization rate per hour/mile than yellow cabs, and thus require more cars on the road to serve the same passenger miles.
masonic 4y ago
>3 is a pretty low number 3 complete shutdowns blocking traffic in one city on the same day.

justoreply 4y ago

This content is not available in your country/region.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

Could be that the programmers didn't think they could get an emotionally-correct element of courtesy or responsibility into their AI, and might not have even tried to tackle this type of thing at all. How does a cop give a ticket to one of these anyway? And what should be the fine? Should it scale to the size of the owner's pocketbook like some jurisdictions advocate as the only way to truly supress traffic violations? Or should there be a whole new category of inhuman violations with penalties exorbitant enough to supress cars getting out on the road while impaired with Artificial Stupidity to begin with? Maybe there needs to be a higher standard here where natural stupidity needs to be allowed for with ordinary humans which is bad enough, but any artificial stupidity can not be tolerated at all. Some would probably think you should lose your license for a long time.

RichardCNormos 4y ago
And who is criminally liable when there is loss of life or limb, caused by one of these cars? This looks like a way of load-balancing culpability so that no one human is actually on the hook.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  The board at Cruise should be the answer.

xutopia 4y ago

When we started with cars we had accidents all over the place. Not even close to this. It's so hard to know if this is worse than actual drivers or better without the full picture. For all I know this might actually be orders of magnitude better.

PopAlongKid 4y ago

Not the first time, here is a story about seven stopped Cruise cars from last July just a few months ago. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/01/self-driving-cars-from-gms-cruise-block-san-francisco-streets.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/01/self-driving-cars-from-gms-c...

jwr 4y ago

"This content is not available in your country/region." Seriously? In this day and age? On the internet? I believe HN should have a policy of deleting links to content that isn't accessible worldwide. Either we play the Internet game, or a "bunch of walled gardens" game.

thatguy0900 4y ago
I assume you live in Europe? Honestly seems like a fair approach to gdpr laws. A local city news station in the US that doesn't care about European visitors can either just ignore gdpr entirely and piss off Europeans or block them from visiting and piss off Europeans.
- jwr 4y ago
  To which "gpdr laws" do you refer, specifically? GDPR is about protecting personal information (specifically, giving people the right to access, correct and delete personal information), and I do not believe showing a web page would somehow cause the web site to come into possession of my personal information and thus fall under any of the GDPR regulations. In other words, this has nothing to do with GDPR. Also, after we've had this tangent discussion, I would submit that if a site is (deliberately) available only to a part of the Internet, it should not be HN material. Unless HN wants to be a "US-only" site.

beej71 4y ago

This seems pretty tame to me. It's exactly the sort of failure when testing this tech I'd like to see. "Cars blocked traffic for some reason" is way better than cars hitting people. I'm impressed it works as well as it already does, and I'm looking forward to more bugs getting worked out.

joshribakoff 4y ago
Blocking traffic isn’t something I’d like to see when I or someone else needs emergency vehicles to get to them. It is also unnecessary if the companies have a safety driver who can take over, or more robust teleoperation for a human to remotely assist
- reidjs 4y ago
  If you’ve ever been to NYC you will see human drivers block emergency vehicles all the time on purpose, even when they are blaring sirens. I have way more confidence in one of these driverless cars to gtfo out of the way of a firetruck than your average Uber driver who’s hustling for a few extra bucks.
nacs 4y ago
These Cruise cars didn't have anyone in them at all. No company should be running "experiments" like this on a public road with a 5000+ lb vehicle.
- beej71 4y ago
  At some point, if the tech were ever to be used, it would have to be on a public road. And at that point we'd certainly see some bugs that hadn't been exposed on closed course testing. (Are those cars really 5000 lbs? They seem small for that, but point taken.)

steveBK123 4y ago

Having owned a Tesla for 4 years, and watching other "self driving" American competitors perform like this, I wonder if the Germans will slowly but surely get there first. Tesla & others are trying a SV "disrupt" type approach that also requires the car to basically work for every use case. City driving is horribly difficult. I would argue that handling city driving without intervention is not far off AGI. The amount of situations you can encounter in city driving are essentially infinite. And you need a self driving car to be able to handle things the first time they see it, not just once that particular type of scenario has been tagged in training set. Germans (BMW, MB specifically) are following a more methodical, legalistic approach to driver assistance towards autonomous driving. Adaptive cruise & lane keeping, emergency braking. Then automated lane changing. Then hands-free below 35mph. Then handles on/off ramps. Etc etc, step by step. But at each step, the system actually works will for the well-define feature set they have sold you, and doesn't regress month to month with bad releases. For many people if your car could handle the highways entirely and you just hand to get yourself to/from the highway, they'd be really happy. And this is a far more achievable goal than essentially solving AGI.

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
I am pretty confused about this German thing, only startups that don't have a current business like Cruise and Waymo are going for the disrupt approach. Literally every automaker that currently sell cars are doing incremental level 2/3 features, including Tesla.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Every company has invested in l4 including ze germans. They just usually run it as spin off
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    The Germans are not charging users $15k to add these test features to their production vehicles.

socialismisok 4y ago

What if we just built infrastructure for trains and bikes? Heck, give folks subsidies to buy ebikes. Like, traffic is a solvable problem with what we have today. This obsession with the automobile is going to cause such a continued headache for us. And yeah, we probably still need a few cars and taxis around, but surely we can just have a human drive the taxi?

steveBK123 4y ago
Yup. It's a shame SV took advantage of ZIRP to fund never-going-to-work software and perma-unprofitable businesses, subsidizing the urban upper class lifestyle.. but governments did not use the same cheap funding to build some trains.
- prottog 4y ago
  Yes, it's a damn shame that the so-called innovators in SV didn't tackle actual problems the solutions to which would materially improve human existence. Imagine if those billions went to companies like TerraPower or NuScale instead of unprofitable food deliveries.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Human existence being miserable perpetuates demand for half-baked solutions forever. Actually solving the problem once and for all would eliminate said demand.
    - prottog 4y ago
      If that was true, we'd still be riding around horse buggies, instead of the imperfect-but-better cars. Because we live in an imperfect world populated by imperfect human beings, every solution is a half-baked solution, and misery will only be reduced at the margins, one small step at a time. There's no cabal of greedy capitalists who are purposely holding us back in order to profit off of more misery. Edit: I take that back: there is a group of greedy people who do actually benefit from misery, and that would be our dear politicians ;-)

standardUser 4y ago

All of these "incidents" sounds far less severe than what I see human drivers doing on urban streets day in and day out. And I bet that unlike half of human drivers, these robots at least have the capacity to use a fucking blinker.

prottog 4y ago
A lot of human drivers indeed are awful, but at least you can put a name and a face to them and punish them if they hurt you out of negligence, and maybe that makes people feel better about them than driverless cars owned by faceless corporations.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Exactly, imagine if we had food robot delivery and it worked like 99.999% of the time, but 0.001% of the time it consistently maims or murders the customer. How many 9s are enough? How do you punish and regulate the large entity behind the bulk main&murder?
effingwewt 4y ago
City cultures are weird af. Albuquerque NM has/had issues with older drivers (lots of retirees there and Santa Fe) who would refuse to use turn signals and would purposefully drive slow on the highways to slow the flow of traffic. Police and highway patrol had to start issuing tickets and instituted minimum highway speeds. Here in California, drivers all use their highbeams in the city. Police refuse to enforce it so it's become rampant. Blinds me and sears my retinas thanks to my astigmatism. Like staring at the sun with those damned halogen lights. When I was a young man with a new wife and child I applied with a local IT company to be a 'desktop expert' (they only knew business/IT solutions). Part of the interview was driving around talking. A person was pulling to a dog leg to turn, we were far from them and the other car had plenty of time/room to turn...since so were we. The owner- an older man, said 'I'm not going to signal because if I do, he will go first.' Blew my mind someone could do that on purpose . Moved back to California years later and it was endemic. People all over now do this and it infuriates me every time. Or they see you waiting to turn and speed up until they see you give up on going, then slow to a crawl. Contrast all of this with rural Texas and all of Washington where people wave, give right of way, always dim lights, move over for bikers, and are generally nicer, more respectful on the roads and in general.

xnx 4y ago

Everyone who isn't Waymo seems to be doing more harm than good with their self driving programs by either killing people (Uber/Tesla) or having accidents and scaring the public away from self-driving (Cruise).

steveBK123 4y ago
Yes. But also I think it's the sort of white elephant project that can only thrive in a ZIRP environment. Once money has an actual cost, and investors require actual returns, there are 1000s of better business models than this. Hopefully there is consolidation & regulation in the space before we have too much testing in public gone wrong. In my mind the entire self driving industry is trying to apply ML/AI practices from use cases that just require ~51%-ish "right more often than wrong" precision onto driving which needs 99.999+%. If some of your phones images are mis-tagged as a cat instead of dog, or some of your cat photos are not tagged as a cat, it's not a huge issue.. In quant trading as long as your trade makes money 51+% of the time, you are going to accumulate returns in the long run. Car license plate readers for speed tickets / tolls / etc have a similar "pretty close / pretty good" requirement.