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DMV tells Cruise to reduce its driverless vehicle fleet in SF by 50%
- ag8 3y agoAlso discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37184904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37184904
- politician 3y agoHow terrifying that must have been for all of the humans involved! You would think that emergency services vehicles would be equipped to broadcast shutdown codes to nearby driverless vehicles when their sirens are on. It’s my understanding that some intersections are equipped with devices to keep lights from changing when emergency vehicles (fire, police, ems) are moving through.
- HWR_14 3y agoIs Cruise offering to pay for the devices and retrofit them onto all vehicles? Or is the city supposed to pay for it as a gift to Cruise's bottom line?
- Mordisquitos 3y agoIt is not the responsibility of emergency services to make their vehicles predictable and tractable so as to make up for the shortcomings of self-driving cars. It is the responsibility of self-driving car operators to make their cars able to deal with the unpredictability and unforseen events that may happen on the road, particularly when first responders are handling an emergency.
- politician 3y agoThat’s completely wrong. There’s a reason fire trucks are painted brightly, have flashing lights and loud sirens, and can interact with intersections to flip lights: our governments have determined that these features are useful to make them conspicuous. Adding a sonic broadcast is just another doodad on the roof wired to the sirens and supported by laws to force autonomous vehicle manufacturers implement support.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago> There’s a reason fire trucks are painted brightly, have flashing lights and loud sirens Exactly. And why are those not enough for self-driving cars?
- politician 3y agoWhy aren't bright paint and flashing lights enough? Why do we need loud sirens too? The answer is that communicating over multiple spectrums turns out to be useful. Adding one more isn't the Herculean effort folks commenting on this proposal seem to think it is. Why isn't it in our national best interest for AV companies to standardize on an emergency shutdown/slowdown protocol? A cryptographically signed digital broadcast is a lot safer than relying on light/sound detection. It works in a variety of weather conditions and is much harder to spoof.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y agoFor the record, emergency vehicles are highly predictable and tractable: they have sirens and lights and will predictably not follow traffic laws when those indicators are on. It beggars belief that self driving cars are unable to correctly respond to such conspicuous signals.
- blq10 3y agoThis is a half of a good idea, but frankly every road mile traveled, airline flight, walk to the grocery store creates some number of dead people - I find this reaction from SF to be concerning because we appear to be placing higher standards on AVs than we are on humans.
- ausbah 3y agothe burden should lie with Cruise. instead, in typical tech fashion, they “move fast and break things” except now it’s interfering with emergency services, blocking traffic randomly, etc.
- someonehere 3y agoThey definitely aren’t ready and should move away from operating in SF altogether. They should operate out larger cities with wider roads or limit where they operate in SF like bus lines. I think this compromise needs to happen because SF didn’t plan for robotaxis when the roads were built decades ago. Towns like Phoenix and Las Vegas have the roads to support it. So they should consider splitting operations that way to continue working. This does nothing but make other towns think the taxis aren’t ready and will fight to keep them out of their towns. It’s an optics issue at this point if they want to convince people the robots can drive better than humans
- robswc 3y agoI think its certainly a matter of when, not if robo-cars are capable of driving as good as/better than human. Sooner, rather than later too. That said, totally agree. SF seems like the worst place to pilot this, for so many reasons.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y agoDefinitely a matter of when, but that’s also the case for nuclear fusion. Trouble is these perennial 5-10 year away things seem to always be later than we expect.
- mistymountains 3y agoIt’s probably the best from their training standpoint. The city is quite small relative to others and their only hope is to essentially memorize San Francisco in the neural networks. IMO you could not take a cruise and drop it into any other city and have it work.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agowhat stopped them from memorizing a different small city in the US? there are tens of thousands to choose from. it seems to me like their decision to start with SF instead of something a hundred times smaller was hubris
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- AtlasBarfed 3y agoWhat's really stupid about this entire thing with robo taxes is they're trying to solve the hardest problem where there's the most competition with humans In my opinion, the most underserved part of taxi type transport is rural and semi rural areas where the distances are large. The costs are high. The human salary cost is extremely high. But the driving is actually the simplest cuz there's just a lot of highway driving and pretty simple downtowns
- hengheng 3y agoSimilar to how pilots often ascend from freighters to passenger aircraft, self-driving systems should have started driving freight through the desert. (Or mining pits, for that matter.) Passenger operation as well as operation around people should have come much later, and step by step. Error rates must be determined step by step, and reliability ratings must be earned, similar to ETOPS. I can only see one reason why they would begin with taxi operations, the driving task with the most visible showing of servitude, and that reason has to do with US history.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoUrban taxis are also the most straightforwardly profitable part of the driving industry. Rural taxis can't be as profitable because they're spending more time in the driving phase (lower margin) and the distance between fares is much higher. Worse, almost all of your customers have alternative transportation that doesn't need to drive to their location that they'd rather use and the possibility of fare sharing doesn't exist to reduce prices. It's a difficult, low margin market to compete in, a terrible choice to demo your expensive and unproven technology.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoI wonder if there's a density benefit? eg it's more valuable to have 10 cars drive the same stretch of road every day than to have one car drive a lonely highway every 10 days
- carlmr 3y ago
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- jxmorris12 3y agoI wonder how observable a 50% decrease in self-driving cars actually is. Recently it’s felt like the Cruise (and some Waymo) cars are EVERYWHERE in downtown SF.
- iancmceachern 3y agoI'm selling bumper stickers that say "Self Driving Cars Have No Soul"