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Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

137 points by ra7 3y ago

mrjin 3y ago
Safe driving needs understanding of the situation on roads, unfortunately there is no such thing in all current approaches, period.
CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
I am a little confused at how the reduction request is coming from the CA DMV… > The California Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that regulates the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles in the state, requested the reduction in operations. … while it was the CPUC that allowed an expansion of their fleet: > The CPUC, the agency that regulates ride-hailing operations including those involving robotaxis, approved Cruise and Waymo on August 10 for final permits that allow the companies to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, expand their fleets and charge for rides throughout the city. I guess Cruise is still officially allowed to run the expanded fleet, but the DMV has the ability to say "Stop everything" and so their request has the weight of an order?
- minwcnt5 3y ago
  CPUC permit only governs what they can charge money for. The DMV permit controls what they can put on the road.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  CPUC regulates taxis. CPUC gave them the ability to charge for rides. DMV regulates other aspects, including the overall self-driving program.
joshuahedlund 3y ago
> The latest Cruise incident occurred Thursday night when a Cruise robotaxi and an emergency vehicle crashed and left a passenger injured. Cruise said in a social media post that one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene. Noticing and responding to emergency sounds/signals in the road, distant but approaching, is yet another subtly complex aspect of human driving I hadn’t thought of but which seems obvious in retrospect. Seems solvable in theory but also involves a lot of uncertainty and contingencies. Then I suppose the cone-blocking hackers will start playing siren recordings to confuse the robotaxis…
- bsder 3y ago
  > Then I suppose the cone-blocking hackers will start playing siren recordings to confuse the robotaxis… Ummm, that would even confuse normal drivers, and I hope that it would wind you up in jail. Those siren sounds get played on the radio sometimes, and I really wish that it was illegal to do so.
  - CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
    In BobbyBroccoli's "The man who tried to fake an element", the title sequence music has a police siren play at one point. Every time I watch the video, I think there's an real-life siren outside.
- CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
  Honestly, looking at recent news reports in the Chronicle, I don't think cone-blocking hackers need to do anything more right now. I mean, why cause trouble for someone if they're already slipping up in this way?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    In fact, if they kept pushing it gives an easy excuse - it’s the coners! Even if not completely true. You have to know when to stop and let the cards fall where they may.
- bdowling 3y ago
  > Noticing and responding to emergency sounds/signals in the road… How do deaf drivers respond to sirens from emergency vehicles?
  - seizethecheese 3y ago
    Flashing lights
    - hattmall 3y ago
danavar 3y ago
That’s some IRL congestion control
paul7986 3y ago
Unbelievable these things are on the street and more have been deployed! A bunch of Cruise cars lose internet connection and become disabled blocking a street. All because the 5G network is being slammed by a music festival 6 miles away. Laughable! Has Verizon, ATT, etc solved that issue of too many connections at a Taylor Swift concert for example? Then a passenger is hurt because AI can't hear or detect emergencies vehicles rushing to save lives, but in the end the EMT vehicle is blocked from saving lives and hurts another life. All in the name of rich tech moguls trying to win the AI robot car market. Progress will be deadly killer ... Uber's car already killed a pedesterian. I have a bit more faith in Waymo as Google has been at it since 2005 or 2007. Cruise seems like another Uber ... do whatever it takes to win the AI robot car race... knowing all along they are not ready for prime time and are learning as they go. What's next a Cruise car gets hacked and then is used as a weapon.
- pengaru 3y ago
  > What's next a Cruise car gets hacked and then is used as a weapon. Nobody would burn that hack on just a single vehicle. It'll be fleet-wide once inside, then we'll see some Daniel Suarez level chaos in the streets with mobs of robotaxis converging on targets at 100% throttle.
  - bushbaba 3y ago
    Unless it’s a nation state attack against a high value target.
rootusrootus 3y ago
Everywhere I've lived, it's the responsibility of the emergency vehicle to avoid a wreck when they are crossing an intersection against the signal, whether they're lit up and blasting the siren or not. If the Cruise vehicle really did have a green and the emergency vehicle struck them, then this doesn't actually seem like their fault.
- paul7986 3y ago
  Ummm when you are driving and hear a EMT vehicle you as a driver have to immediately pull to the side and out of the way. Sounds like your giving the robot guinea pig AI car a pass when clearly it did not and will not act like a human does.
  - justrealist 3y ago
    Unless it was already in the intersection and blocked... or the fire truck turned a corner quickly. Or a hundred other things. There's a reason the emergency drivers don't plow straight through intersections. Let's just see the footage when it comes out rather than making stuff up.
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    Both of you are right. Drivers are supposed to pull over, but also the emergency vehicle is required to avoid crashing into the ones that don't/can't.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    Safety is the first rule, yielding the right-of-way is second. This was not an emergency vehicle behind the Cruise car, it was an emergency vehicle entering an intersection against the signal (running the red). They are supposed to stop and proceed only once they verify the intersection is clear. Another example is when you are at a red light and an emergency vehicle comes up behind you with their lights & siren activated. What do you do? Wait where you are for them to go around, or the light to turn green. Firefighters everywhere urge you not to run a red light just to make way for them, because it makes everyone less safe, including them.
botanical 3y ago
I've said it before when a self-driving Uber killed a woman, and I'll say it again: I don't understand why authorities allow self-driving cars to beta test out in public. I thought Waymo was the best with something like millions of hours on the road but when they started accepting passengers, it failed to proceed past a traffic cone: https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742 https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742 I wouldn't trust any of the others like Tesla and Uber that think self-driving is as easy putting it out on the road. And Tesla with their cost-saving no LIDAR nonsense. These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from testing out in public.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I feel like there logically must be a phase where testing in public will have to occur on the path to self driving.
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    No plan of attack survives contact with the enemy. The same is true for test mocks
- freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  I agree 100%. The fact that they let this happen is an affront to the mandate of those safety organizations. Who is paying whom to clear these hurdles?
- dehrmann 3y ago
  You're criticizing them for both being dangerous and overly cautious? If anything, the Waymo clip confirms that Waymo's offering is safe.
  - Gabrys1 3y ago
    Those are not mutually exclusive.
- zmnd 3y ago
  How do we distinguish if it's "beta" or not? Waymo didn't kill anyone, is it beta? How does non-beta rollout look like?
jhugo 3y ago
> “Over one hundred people lose their lives every day on American roadways, and countless others are badly injured, Cruise said in a statement sent via email. I’m so tired of this angle being accepted at face value. Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing into an emergency vehicle that has its sirens and lights blazing. Nobody should trust their evidence-free assurances that they will also be better at the less routine, more complex situations that human drivers (who almost universally have better sensors and better cognition) currently fail at.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Just because they have weird failure cases does not mean they fail more often than human drivers. FWIW as a biker in SF i feel much more comfortable around driverless than actual drivers, especially in areas like the Mission where people don’t check their right before turning onto streets like Guerrero or Valencia. The self driving ones always do
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    but just because they have weird failure cases does not mean they fail less often than human drivers either.
    - gruez 3y ago
      Right, but the OP seems to be skipping that part entirely. The only metric we should care about is overall accident rates (controlling for reasonable variables of course), not "safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with".
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Given that driverless cars are slim minority on our roads, if they exist at all, failure modes actually do matter a lot. Human drivwr failure modes are what everybody is used to, and trained by everyday life to cope with. The radom, unpredictable stuff driverless cars do is in itsrlf dangerous from that perspective.
YeBanKo 3y ago
> The latest Cruise incident occurred Thursday night when a Cruise robotaxi and an emergency vehicle crashed and left a passenger injured. Cruise said in a social media post that one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene. It sounds serious. But more importantly, it’s a self driving car and a public emergency vehicle. I expect both to have a high def video of the accident and it should be released soon for the public benefit. The US is one of the most driving countries and it’s one of those rear cases when it’s about a public safety and everyone is an expert.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  It would be interesting to see, but emergency vehicles responding to a call (and with lights and sirens going) clearly have right of way. That said, every emergency driver I know and have seen slows to a near stop at intersections to make sure it's clear before proceeding. But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.
  - YeBanKo 3y ago
    An emergency vehicle with sirens on obviously has the right of way. And they absolutely slow down for traffic in California. Right of way does not absolve emergency vehicle drivers from responsibility to avoid accidents. It’s easy to get confused especially in busy traffic when an emergency vehicle approaches. But if we have videos, everyone can judge for themselves if self-driving vehicle failed the expectations. Here is interesting stats: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/emergency-vehicles/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/emergen...
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    No, the driver with the green light has right of way. Emergency vehicles are not allowed to break traffic laws in any state; they're just afforded some privileges other vehicles aren't, and other operators are required to get out of the way. If an ambulance hits a car that had a green light, the ambulance driver is cited. https://www.google.com/search?q=ambulance+driver+cited https://www.google.com/search?q=ambulance+driver+cited
xnx 3y ago
The headline is weird. New York Times headlines conveys more information: "Cruise Agrees to Reduce Driverless Car Fleet in San Francisco After Crash" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/technology/cruise-crash-driverless-car-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/technology/cruise-crash-d...
ecshafer 3y ago
This is a good step. Next step is reduce all cars on the road by 50, 75 and eventually 99%.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  As an avid cyclist I agree. I’d love to neither on roads personally. Delivery trucks, tradespeople, emergency vehicles , that’s it.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    Mostly delivery bikes and trades on bikes, one hopes.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      Amsterdam is pretty awesome like this, there are even removalist bikes
- agensaequivocum 3y ago
  No!
woah 3y ago
Lots of top level comments here are making sweeping generalizations about self driving cars from this event, but the truth is that we won't know which vehicle is at fault here until some video comes out of the incident.
- munchler 3y ago
  “Cruise said one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene.” Hard to imagine a scenario in which an emergency vehicle with its lights and sirens on is at fault here. Normal traffic is required to STOP in this situation, even if the traffic light is green.
thereisnospork 3y ago
Absurd: Are we going to call for a 50% reduction in human operators next time there is a crash caused by something with a pulse? We can't have progress if we don't get over this inane sentimentality(?) over how accidents, deaths, and dismemberments are just 'how things are' so long as they are caused by people and 'Safety of the traveling public is the California DMV’s top priority[0]' when a robot does it. [0]Editorial comment: it sure as shit isn't the rest of the time.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  After a human killed a four-year-old child in central San Francisco earlier this week (did not hit the front page of HN despite being as relevant to AVs as this story) unfortunately nobody called for an immediate reconsideration of the whole car thing.
- jancsika 3y ago
  > We can't have progress if we don't get over this inane sentimentality(?) over how accidents, deaths, and dismemberments are just 'how things are' so long as they are caused by people and 'Safety of the traveling public is the California DMV’s top priority[0]' when a robot does it. That sure does sound like the way to have progress. Blockchain and self-driving seem to be the only digital domains where adherents argue for lowering our standards for the technology being offered-- typically in pursuit of some unspecified improvement at an unspecified future date. It's actually difficult to come up with an analogy in any other domain. Perhaps if VR hardware had some inane limitation that required users to always walk the entire physically analogous distance to move around in the virtual world. And when a user complains about not being able to teleport to different areas, VR adherents push back that the VR world is no worse than the physical world in this sense.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > lowering our standards Lowering from what baseline? I almost always see people advocate for similar accident rates as humans or better. That's not lowering. > It's actually difficult to come up with an analogy in any other domain. Perhaps if VR hardware had some inane limitation that required users to always walk the entire physically analogous distance to move around in the virtual world. And when a user complains about not being able to teleport to different areas, VR adherents push back that the VR world is no worse than the physical world in this sense. In this analogy, is walking the only option in the physical world too? Or can VR have vehicles too? If yes to either of those, I don't see what's so ridiculous about this scenario. Am I the dumb one? For the analogy to fit, there must have been enormous amounts of money spent on trying to invent VR teleportation, but it hadn't happened yet. And in that case... yes the complaint is valid, but it doesn't make VR a failure. You wouldn't be lowering your standards because of the lack of teleportation.
8bitsrule 3y ago
Good idea. Let's extend that to all gasoline vehicles. They can only be driven (or robo-ride) every other day. Cuts congestion and gas consumption. Makes parking easier. Every driver can still get to all of things they have to. They just have to learn to schedule things better. Car pool, transit, whatever. Most cars aren't driven many hours a day anyways.
- oezi 3y ago
  When they did such things for instance in Beijing, the wealthy just bought two cars to cover either day.
  - gjm11 3y ago
    I assume most people aren't wealthy enough to do that, so the measure still reduces the number of cars on the road and the amount of petrol consumed. And the net effect is to transfer wealth from rich people to all the people involved in making cars. Sounds like a win to me.
    - agensaequivocum 3y ago
      I think I understand. You hate poor people.
      - gjm11 3y ago
        Er, no, not in the least. Where do you get that from? Maybe something along the following lines: 1. Everyone hates either rich people or poor people. 2. I didn't get outraged at one particular thing some rich people are alleged to have done, therefore I don't hate rich people. 3. Therefore I hate poor people. The only thing wrong with this argument is every part of it, so I hope you mean something more reasonable. But what?
        agensaequivocum 3y ago
        You admit that most people won't have the money to retain their cars, thus they will lose the greatest tool for individual travel ever. So you want to force poor people to be stuck in their current location regardless of how safe it is, and how much opportunity it has.
kotaKat 3y ago
From another article: > According to a CPUC press release, Cruise could charge for service between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. without a safety drive, while Waymo could charge for passenger service at any time but only with a safety driver in the car. Waymo was also able to operate its cars completely autonomously but was unable to charge passengers for those services. Once again, why the fuck was and is GM/Cruise getting special privileges up and over Waymo when Waymo doesn't have this level of critical failures on the road? There's some point where we need to start leaning in and actually fining AV companies for this horseshit and taking actual action. Limiting the fleet is one thing, but actually stripping them of special privileges would be a better idea. It sounds like Cruise needs to go back to safety drivers in every vehicle. On top of this, GM's allowed to market and sell Super Cruise (their Autopilot-esque clone) on public highways. Why isn't the NHTSA looking a lot closer at GM and scrutinizing their products? @kvogt has some explaining to do.
- dylan604 3y ago
  > Why...? GM has better lobbyists?
syndacks 3y ago
Now please have the SF Giants remove their Cruise badge advertisement from their jerseys. What an embarrassment.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  It's true. They should just rename the team cruisers. No badge required.
Dowwie 3y ago
Pedestrian safety is to self- driving cars what child porn is to encryption. It is the excuse used by government to conceal its true motives. How many millions of dollars of traffic fine revenue will government be deprived of when self- driving cars follow every law governing it? This isn't about safety. It's about money.
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
The amount of mental gymnastics in the comments here to justify the Cruise vehicle's actions baffles me. Emergency vehicles have right of way, always, in the USA. This is non-negotiable, especially if sirens are blaring. It does not matter if other vehicles have a green light.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
therealpygon 3y ago
This is like cracking down on all e-cigarettes because some people got sick from for some crappy e-liquid, while regular cigarettes kill nearly half a million people a year without anyone batting an eye. Classic misdirection while ignoring the real problems.
nielsbot 3y ago
“The Cruise AV did identify the risk of a collision and initiated a braking maneuver, reducing its speed, but was ultimately unable to avoid the collision.” Yea, but why? The article doesn’t actually explain the critical issue.
RecycledEle 3y ago
If you want to know who rules over you, ask who you are not allowed to crash into.

137 points by ra7 3y ago

Safe driving needs understanding of the situation on roads, unfortunately there is no such thing in all current approaches, period.

CaliforniaKarl 3y ago

I am a little confused at how the reduction request is coming from the CA DMV… > The California Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that regulates the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles in the state, requested the reduction in operations. … while it was the CPUC that allowed an expansion of their fleet: > The CPUC, the agency that regulates ride-hailing operations including those involving robotaxis, approved Cruise and Waymo on August 10 for final permits that allow the companies to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, expand their fleets and charge for rides throughout the city. I guess Cruise is still officially allowed to run the expanded fleet, but the DMV has the ability to say "Stop everything" and so their request has the weight of an order?

minwcnt5 3y ago
CPUC permit only governs what they can charge money for. The DMV permit controls what they can put on the road.
jeffbee 3y ago
CPUC regulates taxis. CPUC gave them the ability to charge for rides. DMV regulates other aspects, including the overall self-driving program.

joshuahedlund 3y ago

> The latest Cruise incident occurred Thursday night when a Cruise robotaxi and an emergency vehicle crashed and left a passenger injured. Cruise said in a social media post that one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene. Noticing and responding to emergency sounds/signals in the road, distant but approaching, is yet another subtly complex aspect of human driving I hadn’t thought of but which seems obvious in retrospect. Seems solvable in theory but also involves a lot of uncertainty and contingencies. Then I suppose the cone-blocking hackers will start playing siren recordings to confuse the robotaxis…

bsder 3y ago
> Then I suppose the cone-blocking hackers will start playing siren recordings to confuse the robotaxis… Ummm, that would even confuse normal drivers, and I hope that it would wind you up in jail. Those siren sounds get played on the radio sometimes, and I really wish that it was illegal to do so.
- CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
  In BobbyBroccoli's "The man who tried to fake an element", the title sequence music has a police siren play at one point. Every time I watch the video, I think there's an real-life siren outside.
CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
Honestly, looking at recent news reports in the Chronicle, I don't think cone-blocking hackers need to do anything more right now. I mean, why cause trouble for someone if they're already slipping up in this way?
- bombcar 3y ago
  In fact, if they kept pushing it gives an easy excuse - it’s the coners! Even if not completely true. You have to know when to stop and let the cards fall where they may.
bdowling 3y ago
> Noticing and responding to emergency sounds/signals in the road… How do deaf drivers respond to sirens from emergency vehicles?
- seizethecheese 3y ago
  Flashing lights
  - hattmall 3y ago

danavar 3y ago

That’s some IRL congestion control

paul7986 3y ago

Unbelievable these things are on the street and more have been deployed! A bunch of Cruise cars lose internet connection and become disabled blocking a street. All because the 5G network is being slammed by a music festival 6 miles away. Laughable! Has Verizon, ATT, etc solved that issue of too many connections at a Taylor Swift concert for example? Then a passenger is hurt because AI can't hear or detect emergencies vehicles rushing to save lives, but in the end the EMT vehicle is blocked from saving lives and hurts another life. All in the name of rich tech moguls trying to win the AI robot car market. Progress will be deadly killer ... Uber's car already killed a pedesterian. I have a bit more faith in Waymo as Google has been at it since 2005 or 2007. Cruise seems like another Uber ... do whatever it takes to win the AI robot car race... knowing all along they are not ready for prime time and are learning as they go. What's next a Cruise car gets hacked and then is used as a weapon.

pengaru 3y ago
> What's next a Cruise car gets hacked and then is used as a weapon. Nobody would burn that hack on just a single vehicle. It'll be fleet-wide once inside, then we'll see some Daniel Suarez level chaos in the streets with mobs of robotaxis converging on targets at 100% throttle.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  Unless it’s a nation state attack against a high value target.

rootusrootus 3y ago

Everywhere I've lived, it's the responsibility of the emergency vehicle to avoid a wreck when they are crossing an intersection against the signal, whether they're lit up and blasting the siren or not. If the Cruise vehicle really did have a green and the emergency vehicle struck them, then this doesn't actually seem like their fault.

paul7986 3y ago
Ummm when you are driving and hear a EMT vehicle you as a driver have to immediately pull to the side and out of the way. Sounds like your giving the robot guinea pig AI car a pass when clearly it did not and will not act like a human does.
- justrealist 3y ago
  Unless it was already in the intersection and blocked... or the fire truck turned a corner quickly. Or a hundred other things. There's a reason the emergency drivers don't plow straight through intersections. Let's just see the footage when it comes out rather than making stuff up.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  Both of you are right. Drivers are supposed to pull over, but also the emergency vehicle is required to avoid crashing into the ones that don't/can't.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Safety is the first rule, yielding the right-of-way is second. This was not an emergency vehicle behind the Cruise car, it was an emergency vehicle entering an intersection against the signal (running the red). They are supposed to stop and proceed only once they verify the intersection is clear. Another example is when you are at a red light and an emergency vehicle comes up behind you with their lights & siren activated. What do you do? Wait where you are for them to go around, or the light to turn green. Firefighters everywhere urge you not to run a red light just to make way for them, because it makes everyone less safe, including them.

botanical 3y ago

I've said it before when a self-driving Uber killed a woman, and I'll say it again: I don't understand why authorities allow self-driving cars to beta test out in public. I thought Waymo was the best with something like millions of hours on the road but when they started accepting passengers, it failed to proceed past a traffic cone: https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742 https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742 I wouldn't trust any of the others like Tesla and Uber that think self-driving is as easy putting it out on the road. And Tesla with their cost-saving no LIDAR nonsense. These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from testing out in public.

whimsicalism 3y ago
I feel like there logically must be a phase where testing in public will have to occur on the path to self driving.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  No plan of attack survives contact with the enemy. The same is true for test mocks
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
I agree 100%. The fact that they let this happen is an affront to the mandate of those safety organizations. Who is paying whom to clear these hurdles?
dehrmann 3y ago
You're criticizing them for both being dangerous and overly cautious? If anything, the Waymo clip confirms that Waymo's offering is safe.
- Gabrys1 3y ago
  Those are not mutually exclusive.
zmnd 3y ago
How do we distinguish if it's "beta" or not? Waymo didn't kill anyone, is it beta? How does non-beta rollout look like?

jhugo 3y ago

> “Over one hundred people lose their lives every day on American roadways, and countless others are badly injured, Cruise said in a statement sent via email. I’m so tired of this angle being accepted at face value. Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing into an emergency vehicle that has its sirens and lights blazing. Nobody should trust their evidence-free assurances that they will also be better at the less routine, more complex situations that human drivers (who almost universally have better sensors and better cognition) currently fail at.

whimsicalism 3y ago
Just because they have weird failure cases does not mean they fail more often than human drivers. FWIW as a biker in SF i feel much more comfortable around driverless than actual drivers, especially in areas like the Mission where people don’t check their right before turning onto streets like Guerrero or Valencia. The self driving ones always do
- fsckboy 3y ago
  but just because they have weird failure cases does not mean they fail less often than human drivers either.
  - gruez 3y ago
    Right, but the OP seems to be skipping that part entirely. The only metric we should care about is overall accident rates (controlling for reasonable variables of course), not "safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with".
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Given that driverless cars are slim minority on our roads, if they exist at all, failure modes actually do matter a lot. Human drivwr failure modes are what everybody is used to, and trained by everyday life to cope with. The radom, unpredictable stuff driverless cars do is in itsrlf dangerous from that perspective.

YeBanKo 3y ago

> The latest Cruise incident occurred Thursday night when a Cruise robotaxi and an emergency vehicle crashed and left a passenger injured. Cruise said in a social media post that one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene. It sounds serious. But more importantly, it’s a self driving car and a public emergency vehicle. I expect both to have a high def video of the accident and it should be released soon for the public benefit. The US is one of the most driving countries and it’s one of those rear cases when it’s about a public safety and everyone is an expert.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
It would be interesting to see, but emergency vehicles responding to a call (and with lights and sirens going) clearly have right of way. That said, every emergency driver I know and have seen slows to a near stop at intersections to make sure it's clear before proceeding. But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.
- YeBanKo 3y ago
  An emergency vehicle with sirens on obviously has the right of way. And they absolutely slow down for traffic in California. Right of way does not absolve emergency vehicle drivers from responsibility to avoid accidents. It’s easy to get confused especially in busy traffic when an emergency vehicle approaches. But if we have videos, everyone can judge for themselves if self-driving vehicle failed the expectations. Here is interesting stats: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/emergency-vehicles/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/emergen...
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  No, the driver with the green light has right of way. Emergency vehicles are not allowed to break traffic laws in any state; they're just afforded some privileges other vehicles aren't, and other operators are required to get out of the way. If an ambulance hits a car that had a green light, the ambulance driver is cited. https://www.google.com/search?q=ambulance+driver+cited https://www.google.com/search?q=ambulance+driver+cited

xnx 3y ago

The headline is weird. New York Times headlines conveys more information: "Cruise Agrees to Reduce Driverless Car Fleet in San Francisco After Crash" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/technology/cruise-crash-driverless-car-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/technology/cruise-crash-d...

ecshafer 3y ago

This is a good step. Next step is reduce all cars on the road by 50, 75 and eventually 99%.

ChatGTP 3y ago
As an avid cyclist I agree. I’d love to neither on roads personally. Delivery trucks, tradespeople, emergency vehicles , that’s it.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Mostly delivery bikes and trades on bikes, one hopes.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Amsterdam is pretty awesome like this, there are even removalist bikes
agensaequivocum 3y ago
No!

woah 3y ago

Lots of top level comments here are making sweeping generalizations about self driving cars from this event, but the truth is that we won't know which vehicle is at fault here until some video comes out of the incident.

munchler 3y ago
“Cruise said one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene.” Hard to imagine a scenario in which an emergency vehicle with its lights and sirens on is at fault here. Normal traffic is required to STOP in this situation, even if the traffic light is green.

thereisnospork 3y ago

Absurd: Are we going to call for a 50% reduction in human operators next time there is a crash caused by something with a pulse? We can't have progress if we don't get over this inane sentimentality(?) over how accidents, deaths, and dismemberments are just 'how things are' so long as they are caused by people and 'Safety of the traveling public is the California DMV’s top priority[0]' when a robot does it. [0]Editorial comment: it sure as shit isn't the rest of the time.

jeffbee 3y ago
After a human killed a four-year-old child in central San Francisco earlier this week (did not hit the front page of HN despite being as relevant to AVs as this story) unfortunately nobody called for an immediate reconsideration of the whole car thing.
jancsika 3y ago
> We can't have progress if we don't get over this inane sentimentality(?) over how accidents, deaths, and dismemberments are just 'how things are' so long as they are caused by people and 'Safety of the traveling public is the California DMV’s top priority[0]' when a robot does it. That sure does sound like the way to have progress. Blockchain and self-driving seem to be the only digital domains where adherents argue for lowering our standards for the technology being offered-- typically in pursuit of some unspecified improvement at an unspecified future date. It's actually difficult to come up with an analogy in any other domain. Perhaps if VR hardware had some inane limitation that required users to always walk the entire physically analogous distance to move around in the virtual world. And when a user complains about not being able to teleport to different areas, VR adherents push back that the VR world is no worse than the physical world in this sense.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > lowering our standards Lowering from what baseline? I almost always see people advocate for similar accident rates as humans or better. That's not lowering. > It's actually difficult to come up with an analogy in any other domain. Perhaps if VR hardware had some inane limitation that required users to always walk the entire physically analogous distance to move around in the virtual world. And when a user complains about not being able to teleport to different areas, VR adherents push back that the VR world is no worse than the physical world in this sense. In this analogy, is walking the only option in the physical world too? Or can VR have vehicles too? If yes to either of those, I don't see what's so ridiculous about this scenario. Am I the dumb one? For the analogy to fit, there must have been enormous amounts of money spent on trying to invent VR teleportation, but it hadn't happened yet. And in that case... yes the complaint is valid, but it doesn't make VR a failure. You wouldn't be lowering your standards because of the lack of teleportation.

8bitsrule 3y ago

Good idea. Let's extend that to all gasoline vehicles. They can only be driven (or robo-ride) every other day. Cuts congestion and gas consumption. Makes parking easier. Every driver can still get to all of things they have to. They just have to learn to schedule things better. Car pool, transit, whatever. Most cars aren't driven many hours a day anyways.

oezi 3y ago
When they did such things for instance in Beijing, the wealthy just bought two cars to cover either day.
- gjm11 3y ago
  I assume most people aren't wealthy enough to do that, so the measure still reduces the number of cars on the road and the amount of petrol consumed. And the net effect is to transfer wealth from rich people to all the people involved in making cars. Sounds like a win to me.
  - agensaequivocum 3y ago
    I think I understand. You hate poor people.
    - gjm11 3y ago
      Er, no, not in the least. Where do you get that from? Maybe something along the following lines: 1. Everyone hates either rich people or poor people. 2. I didn't get outraged at one particular thing some rich people are alleged to have done, therefore I don't hate rich people. 3. Therefore I hate poor people. The only thing wrong with this argument is every part of it, so I hope you mean something more reasonable. But what?
      - agensaequivocum 3y ago
        You admit that most people won't have the money to retain their cars, thus they will lose the greatest tool for individual travel ever. So you want to force poor people to be stuck in their current location regardless of how safe it is, and how much opportunity it has.

kotaKat 3y ago

From another article: > According to a CPUC press release, Cruise could charge for service between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. without a safety drive, while Waymo could charge for passenger service at any time but only with a safety driver in the car. Waymo was also able to operate its cars completely autonomously but was unable to charge passengers for those services. Once again, why the fuck was and is GM/Cruise getting special privileges up and over Waymo when Waymo doesn't have this level of critical failures on the road? There's some point where we need to start leaning in and actually fining AV companies for this horseshit and taking actual action. Limiting the fleet is one thing, but actually stripping them of special privileges would be a better idea. It sounds like Cruise needs to go back to safety drivers in every vehicle. On top of this, GM's allowed to market and sell Super Cruise (their Autopilot-esque clone) on public highways. Why isn't the NHTSA looking a lot closer at GM and scrutinizing their products? @kvogt has some explaining to do.

dylan604 3y ago
> Why...? GM has better lobbyists?

syndacks 3y ago

Now please have the SF Giants remove their Cruise badge advertisement from their jerseys. What an embarrassment.

LegitShady 3y ago
It's true. They should just rename the team cruisers. No badge required.

Dowwie 3y ago

Pedestrian safety is to self- driving cars what child porn is to encryption. It is the excuse used by government to conceal its true motives. How many millions of dollars of traffic fine revenue will government be deprived of when self- driving cars follow every law governing it? This isn't about safety. It's about money.

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

The amount of mental gymnastics in the comments here to justify the Cruise vehicle's actions baffles me. Emergency vehicles have right of way, always, in the USA. This is non-negotiable, especially if sirens are blaring. It does not matter if other vehicles have a green light.

deleted 3y ago
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therealpygon 3y ago

This is like cracking down on all e-cigarettes because some people got sick from for some crappy e-liquid, while regular cigarettes kill nearly half a million people a year without anyone batting an eye. Classic misdirection while ignoring the real problems.

nielsbot 3y ago

“The Cruise AV did identify the risk of a collision and initiated a braking maneuver, reducing its speed, but was ultimately unable to avoid the collision.” Yea, but why? The article doesn’t actually explain the critical issue.

RecycledEle 3y ago

If you want to know who rules over you, ask who you are not allowed to crash into.