11 ms·
Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco
- irtefa 3y agoIt's not 100% perfect but I still get butterflies when I see a Cruise vehicle driving around on its own.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoIt’s called “primal fear”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- elif 3y agoI dunno I've been using FSD over a year now and I still get giddy like I'm watching a DARPA challenge car in the university computer lab every time. Some of us are just excited and not scared by the future?
- forgetfreeman 3y agoIt's pretty trite to try to frame individuals healthy skepticism of self-driving tech as fear of some nebulous future outcome. The tech continues to demonstrate deficiencies -right now-, in this time. All evidence (and the industry's own reporting) suggest that parity with human drivers capability is nowhere on the horizon, and may not be credibly possible with current implementations. That being the case proponents now get to explain on what grounds drivers are supposed to celebrate introduction of additional mediocre operators to our streets.
- elif 3y agoThe comment I replied to literally said "primal fear" I'm not framing anything... People had "primal fear" of seatbelts when they were introduced, even though the statistics, like those of AV, prove their absolute benefit in the preservation of life.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoMeanwhile self driving cars get stuck in wet concrete.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoApparently they can also be captured in a ring of salt: https://laughingsquid.com/performance-artist-uses-solid-and-dotted-circles-of-salt-to-create-a-confusing-trap-for-a-self-driving-car/#:~:text=Jame%20Bridle%2C%20an%20artist%2C%20writer,in%20a%20circle%20of%20salt https://laughingsquid.com/performance-artist-uses-solid-and-....
- juanani 3y ago[dead]
- farrarstan 3y ago[dead]
- andrewmutz 3y agoStill safer than human drivers, who do this all the time
- mminer237 3y agoUh, I know hundreds of drivers, and I've never met someone who's done this. Who are you hanging around?
- andrewmutz 3y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=humams+driving+in+to+wet+concrete https://www.google.com/search?q=humams+driving+in+to+wet+con... It happens all the time
- forgetfreeman 3y agoIf you want to play that game now we get to compare the number of human operator hours per wet pavement incident vs self-driving cars. A quick google search suggests the estimated number of human drivers on the road today is 1.4 billion. The rest of that calculation is left as an exercise.
- andrewmutz 3y agoIf you do a true apples-to-apples comparison between Waymo and humans, the waymo cars are about five times safer. > Accidents per million miles driven for Waymo self-driving cars are 0.59, compared to the general U.S. rate of 2.98 https://blog.gitnux.com/self-driving-cars-safety-statistics/ https://blog.gitnux.com/self-driving-cars-safety-statistics/
- forgetfreeman 3y agoPfft. How much of Waymo's million was done on unfamiliar roadways or in inclement weather? Does it snow much in Phoenix?
- 3y ago
- TulliusCicero 3y agoAt least going by the r/selfdriving cars subreddit, it seems like Cruise cars get into a lot more 'incidents' than Waymo cars. Especially getting randomly stuck because they don't know what to do.
- johndhi 3y agoSfgate had some stats recently that align with this. Though from what I understand there are more cruise cars than wayno cars on the streets.
- mdorazio 3y agofwiw, my personal experience testing both has been that Waymo's vehicles are noticeably better at driving, and also drive more aggressively. It's to the point where sitting in a Waymo vehicle is unremarkable and I don't even pay attention to its driving, while Cruise still typically has at least 2 "that wasn't great" moments per ride.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoOne of the articles about this past weekend's Cruise traffic jams mentioned the company blamed a flakey cell phone signal as the root cause. Now why would having perfect access to cell networks be required to keep the car driving... I suspect because Cruise is relying much more heavily on remote human drivers. It would not surprise me to find out Cruise is just a big scam and the self driving algorithm fails so often the cars are basically just remote piloted taxis.
- mdorazio 3y agoA quick search on Google News shows at least 3 human drivers did the same thing in the last 3 months, so this doesn't bother me all that much.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago1)Absolute counts are meaningless given the wildly disproportionate population sizes. We're talking many orders of magnitude difference here. Cruise operates 100 vehicles during the day, 300 at night. 2)Absolute counts worldwide are meaningless when comparing against crashes in SF. 3)You picked an arbitrary period 4)Whether it makes the news is not reliable for statistical comparison. Millions of crashes go unmentioned. Many of them don't even result in a report to any officials.
- mminer237 3y agoI'm not saying this is damning evidence, but how many human drivers are on the road versus AI? A quick Google search says there are 300 Cruise vehicles operating at night currently. I am confident I could survey 10 times that many taxi drivers and not find a single one who has accidentally driven into wet concrete.
- TOMDM 3y agoThat's the difficulty with n=1 Was this a freak accident, or indicative of expected performance. I guess we'll only find out if more Cruise cars turn themselves into modern art.
- mr_toad 3y agoTrue, but presumably Cruise can fix this issue. Can we fix human drivers?
- elif 3y agoThe problem with that analysis is that "driving into wet concrete" is not even in the top 1000 problems affecting road users. It is non-fatal for starters, which makes it in a separate category completely from the worst idk ~200 or so problems on roadways. Ask how many of those taxi drivers how many have interacted with their smartphone while driving, and you will find that 100% of them have been part of a common roadway problem that leads to fatalities.
- woah 3y agoGlad they were able to get Paul Harvey's take on this
- bsder 3y agoIt seems like Cruise is speedrunning all the mistakes that human drivers make. The question is whether they learn from it.
- nasmorn 3y agoI once saw a women drive into a light rail construction site where her car was driving on the rail tracks which were held up by poles. She apparently thought that was how she could also cross the vast chasm that was the construction pit. Unfortunately humans have nothing on the self driving cars in this.
- farrarstan 3y ago[dead]
- afavour 3y agoThis specific scenario doesn’t seem like a damning indictment of the tech, you can absolutely see how it could happen. But on the other hand it speaks to the “death by a thousand cuts”-yness of it all. How many other weird little edge cases exist out there for drivers? Countless. You’re going to struggle to program solutions to every one.
- pshc 3y agoYeah, the infinitely long tail of exceptional circumstances mean that automated driving is an AGI-complete problem. These exceptions are fairly rare, but once there are many driverless vehicles they’ll be more common. Vehicles will need to learn and problem solve to keep up.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago1000s of exceptional circumstances, but once added to training data, is solved forever.
- lores 3y agoOnly if they are discretely identifiable, in a wide range of conditions, in a short enough time, and do not conflict with other circumstances...
- bcrl 3y agoYou say that with the air of confidence of someone that believes their test cases cover all possible circumstances. I know for a fact that none of the large, complex real world systems I've worked on have ever had complete test coverage.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoWhat I'd like to know is if the concrete was marked out with cones. If it was then clearly the car's fault, if not then the worker's fault. Cones become more critical with the proliferation of non-human drivers.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoAh yes, it is clearly incumbent upon all other industries to modify their practices to pave over the gross deficiencies of self-driving cars.
- benatkin 3y agoIt's fine by me if self-driving cars need help and get it, so long as the technology is beneficial. I think it is.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoOk, on what grounds is technology that performs a job that humans can generally do better at beneficial in the broad sense? That it's benefitting a handful of individuals who profit off eliminating jobs isn't in question, but where's the upside for the rest of us?
- squokko 3y agoThe upside is that automobile crashes kill >30,000 people in the US alone and self-driving cars may one day bring that number down by 90%
- forgetfreeman 3y agoMight they? Is that a purely faith-based assertion or is that claim grounded in anything? Because current performance suggests otherwise.
- 3y ago
- stevage 3y agoHow badly protected does a piece of fresh concrete have to be for this to be possible? Never heard of this happening before.
- moomoo11 3y agoI always wonder what actual native SF residents think vs what people in other cities without AI cars think.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoFrom reading news stories like this it seems like roadworks in some places in the USA aren't cordoned off as clearly as they are UK. I'm not sure if this is an accurate assessment or not. But unless the car drove through a cone, maybe it wasn't cordoned off sufficiently?
- xnx 3y agoSidenote: I'm glad the title explicitly says "Cruise vehicle" and not "Self driving car". Cruise and Waymo are very different.
- viraptor 3y agohttps://archive.md/gasFa https://archive.md/gasFa
- lukevp 3y agoThis link just put me in a captcha loop on iOS Safari. Anyone else? Never had a problem with archive.is links.
- xirdstl 3y agoSame happened to me using Brave on desktop
- TheMiddleMan 3y agoSame on firefox/osx
- chainwax 3y agoSame on Chrome/osx
- hipitihop 3y agoSame here, Brave on Android
- tivert 3y ago> Never had a problem with archive.is links. I've been having that problem with archive.is links for weeks.
- runeks 3y agoWorked for me on iOS/Safari
- jaden 3y agoSame with Brave and Firefox on desktop
- systems_glitch 3y ago"No cipher overlap" on Firefox 102.12.0 ESR on Slackware 15 :/
- monero-xmr 3y agoBut if you look at the statistics of human-driven cars getting stuck in wet concrete this is actually 34.7% better /s
- jwsteigerwalt 3y agoHuman abilities are typically gonna fall into a normal distribution. There’s definitely an opportunity for driverless cars to have a much thinner dangerous end of the tail. You can’t fix stupid, but you can limit an algorithm…
- grecy 3y agoThis is good, this is how the AI learns and gets better. Just like a learner driver who stalls the engine, forgets to put on a turn signal and can't keep up with traffic. We've all got to learn sometime.
- nzoschke 3y agoPlus there is an opportunity for all the cars to learn the same lesson at once and forever. Also humans can learn from this too. It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago> It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away. Isn't that kind of defeating the point of autonomous vehicles if we need to build a world that will accommodate them?
- dotnet00 3y agoThe point of autonomous vehicles is to not have to totally reshape the world before being able to accommodate them. But small shifts like adjusting signs to also be easily read by autonomous vehicles aren't that crazy. It'd just be done such that new signage is made to be easily readable, so that over time, as old stuff is replaced, the signage becomes more readable for machines. This sort of thing can also benefit regular vehicles.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoIt's corralling in the possible range of the vehicles - anywhere without the enhanced signage will have to be no man's land. If an autonomous car drives to a small town that doesn't have the enhanced cones and gets into an accident at a construction zone whose fault is it? I'm not sure what "This sort of thing can also benefit regular vehicles." means in this instance. If the cone is machine readable how does that help me?
- danielvaughn 3y agoThis might be a naive question, but are driverless lanes being considered? For instance we have bike lanes all over the US. It might make sense to make a similar investment for AI-friendly lanes to help transition to driverless transportation.
- ww520 3y agoThey are called train track.
- danielvaughn 3y agoWell I mean yeah, one of the benefits of trains is how efficient the track system is. So in a sense yes I'm talking about extending the notion of a train track and applying it to commonly used roads. If we get to a point where the majority of vehicles are capable of being driverless, then an automated lane would be much more efficient and would probably reduce traffic congestion.
- ericmay 3y agoIt'll be a dark, sick twist that driverless cars will get their own protected lanes in many American cities before bikes do.
- danielvaughn 3y agoCounterpoint: traffic congestion is almost entirely due to individual driver differences. An automated lane would be vastly more efficient and could potentially lead to fewer lanes being needed for vehicles altogether. This is assuming that most cars would be automated so I'm talking about a more distant future, but I see that as more realistic than convincing America to abandon it's car addiction.
- ericmay 3y agoMaking it easier to take a car places has always caused an increase in driving. I don't see a reason that this would change with increases in automation. It's an additive solution (like feature bloat, for example) when we need subtractive solutions (better products)
- hoppyhoppy2 3y agoGift Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/driverless-car-accident-sf.html?unlocked_article_code=eWPBR3WWCe_JsnQHIoVe7cKsOcuuZhCSfUHbPVEvuLGId53f2mTyxnHnb_YbTkEYJx5_QTaf-afr-sft0Yd49TR_lMKtZfwhod2_6_27GNepgfBpd7WHejsejgH9QzOlseVvYbJ9hPU5u6hKOJNNab9O8DPX0uFrmCS8aYQg9rvduwl_qGUT_KH8cGPYSU9ER_F5tY6pUwZ7WXD4nVoQBS4J5_6aumyEiIF4WRxaR_2hfGNhR3O6wxUxpkBUKxlEFBIfb67C1OKDBuviYBZw3PBQtSRxeKvZih6vcMdrMJ4sINCzRQHNdqMKzb6zVDk6jsCDRQTqLGbMdrWDhUSd&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/driverless-car-acciden...
- kayodelycaon 3y agoThe scary part of this is it went through construction cones and flaggers with stop signs to end up in the concrete. Basically, this thing went right through a construction zone without stopping. Granted, people are this dumb every single day. But who is liable for the fines here?
- JimtheCoder 3y agoWell, if a corporation is technically a person, I would say the owner of the driverless car. Assuming it is owned by a corp...
- LatteLazy 3y agoThe owner of the car initially. The passenger(s) and maker may also be liable depending on circumstances.
- sundaeofshock 3y agoUnder what circumstances would the passenger be liable? They have no control over the vehicle so I fail see how an event like this would be their fault.
- haterforhire 3y agoIf you hire someone to perform a service for you, and during the performance of the service they cause someone harm, you can definitely be sued civilly, or even be criminally liable (to take an exaggerated example, consider murder for hire). No idea how that would apply specifically here though.
- toss1 3y agoYES The problem here is dispersed responsibility so no one is responsible The result is that no one takes responsibility for not actually creating blatantly dangerous events, such as blowing through cones, signs and other obvious indicators of a construction / no-driving zone and endangering construction workers & passengers (cones also initially mark a washout/bridge-out problem). To the software developers and managers, it is just some lower-priority edge case they'll handle later. To the corporate promoters, it's just a cost to be externalized on the public. To the regulators, obviously, they don't want to be seen as "Luddites", so they just approved MORE, not less, of these obviously-not-self-driving cars. If a person actually had both personal responsibility (e.g., they will get fined or potentially imprisoned for approx. negligent homicide if death results) and authority (e.g., they can stop deployment until it is truly fixed after a car mistakes a truck for the sky and decapitaties the driver or blows through a construction zone) to prevent these situations, they would not happen as much. Who should have such responsibility and authority? Start with the CEO and board. EDIT: stray words, tenses, added examples
- dlokshin 3y agoWas fun to google image search "car drives into wet concrete." Humans are worse drivers than I thought! https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=557782243&sxsrf=AB5stBig0FBycbTLqXd1eqy6C2BWKKSyMQ:1692280132718&q=car+drives+into+wet+concrete&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjJ6q7h6uOAAxXTJ0QIHS55Ar4Q0pQJegQICxAB&biw=1280&bih=1340&dpr=2 https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=557782243&sxsrf=AB5stB...
- arp242 3y agoI've walked over wet concrete. It wasn't really signed very clearly (there were some cones on the corners, but that doesn't automatically mean "wet concrete"), it's really not that obvious unless you're looking for it, and I was late and in a hurry. Looking at those pictures, I think loads of people could have made that mistake for quite a few of them, as it often doesn't seem indicated very clearly, and in some situations going through the wet concrete was the only way the car could go from a parked position.
- pkdpic 3y agoI wonder if this had anything to do with them being desensitized to cones because of the cones on the hoods...
- bryanlarsen 3y agoDriverless car from Cruise. Headlines every day about autonomous driving mishaps from Tesla & Cruise, seemingly never from Waymo. Does this hurt or help Waymo? They're being painted with the same brush, but perhaps they can leverage that into regulatory capture. When the inevitable regulations come along they'll likely be set to "difficult, but achievable". Which at this point feels like "Waymo pass, Tesla & Cruise fail".
- dmazin 3y agoThe article does mention that a Waymo car was also involved in an incident. > In May, a driverless Waymo car blocked a fire vehicle while it was backing into a station.
- burkaman 3y ago> On Friday night, as many as 10 Cruise driverless cars stopped working near a music festival in San Francisco’s North Beach, causing traffic to back up, according to The San Francisco Chronicle, which reported that the company had blamed “wireless connectivity issues.” They just stop if they lose service?
- soco 3y agoIt's definitely safer than going on blind. Wet concrete might be the least bad situation.
- dmazin 3y agoI mean, that's a good failsafe.
- alistairSH 3y agoAnd if they lose connection on a foggy morning on a busy street and cause a pile up? I agree that "stopping" should happen. But, they need to stop safely (pulled onto the shoulder/parking lane/low volume side road), not just abruptly stop in the middle of the street, blocking the rest of the traffic.[1] 1 - https://www.wsmv.com/2023/08/15/driverless-cars-stall-causing-traffic-jam-san-francisco/# https://www.wsmv.com/2023/08/15/driverless-cars-stall-causin...
- burkaman 3y agoIt's a good failsafe if there's a human driver there to take over. I don't think they should be on the road unsupervised if they can't operate without connectivity.
- stronglikedan 3y agoAt a bare minimum, the onboard systems should know how to "pull over" like a human driver would if their vehicle was malfunctioning.
- xnx 3y agoThis must've been proposed, but why don't we ticket Cruise as a single "driver"? The number of infractions they've had would certainly get their license suspended.
- HPsquared 3y agoReminds me a bit of the Onion clip "High Unemployment Rate Linked to One Man with 42,000 Jobs" https://www.theonion.com/high-unemployment-rate-linked-to-one-man-with-42-000-jo-1819595241 https://www.theonion.com/high-unemployment-rate-linked-to-on... EDIT: or, more appropriately, the case of Prawo Jazdy: an alleged Polish national with hundreds of speeding tickets (Prawo Jazdy is Polish for driving licence) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm
- mhb 3y agoIt depends on your goal. Does aggressively ticketing new teenage drivers lead to better driving? There is a huge potential benefit. If the cars are going to improve they need to be tested in the real world. So maybe some forbearance is justified?
- xnx 3y agoTicketing and suspension for repeat offenses is an appropriate response to a single teenage driver or single self driving system. Cruise needs to spend more time in simulation. They are at least a few years from being ready for the road.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37142065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37142065
- smegsicle 3y agothis is the kind of human interest story i log into hn for each morning