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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

• sharts 3y ago
  Good. Why socialize the cost of these platforms and privatize the profits? Understandably it is expensive. But the profits will similarly be great. They ought to build their own mini cities to test on as part of their own Manhattan Project.
• starbase 3y ago
  Is there evidence that Cruise is more dangerous than a human driver?
  • thatfrenchguy 3y ago
    Given they didn't suspend Waymo, I would guess they must have been doing something so egregious that the median driver would not do.
    • sleepybrett 3y ago
      I thought i just read that they were just allowed to put a lot more vehicles on the road, maybe because of a promise that they would be better but now we find that they are not?
  • potatolicious 3y ago
    ... a human driver doesn't stop in the middle of the road and become fully unresponsive when the cell phone network goes down?
  • runako 3y ago
    This is the standard to which the builders of autonomous vehicles wish to be held. However, this is unlikely in my opinion. I believe instead they will be held to the more rigorous standard of "is there evidence that this is dangerous?" Note for example today's suit against Meta for alleged harms against children. No such suit against TV aimed at children or e.g. fashion magazines that are well-known to have deleterious effects on children. Autonomous vehicles are new tech, so the bar will be higher.
  • add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    Specious and reductive. It's qualitative, not quantitative. Even though the latter is easier for people to understand. We have decades of data about human-caused accidents. We know the ceiling is relatively stable. We know an additional 20% of drivers won't wake up tomorrow incompetent or drunk. Anything above zero is bad, but we know and accept the status quo. But every new model or software update will invalidate what we've observed and know about automated driving. We're in an era of extreme obfuscation and enshittification by tech companies, even where safety is involved. I'd be more likely to trust self driving tech if I trusted the current form of the tech industry, and trusted that regulatory bodies had the power and ability to oversee them as effectively as when they were first regulating cars. Of course even that wasn't perfect, but my trust that we can even do that well is nonexistent.
  • DeIlliad 3y ago
    I do not believe "it's as dangerous as a human driver" is a good reason to look past all the problems with self-driving cars. There should be a higher standard than that.
    • notJim 3y ago
      Why? And what are "all the problems with self-driving cars"?
    • sorokod 3y ago
      Let's not forget that the companies that develop and lobby for self driving cars do it for profit. Whatever safety qualities they may or may not have are there to deliver and maximize profit. At this point in time. Public transport is a safer alternative but not as profitable
      • DeIlliad 3y ago
        I completely agree that self-driving and electric cars aren't the answer but investing in public transport is. You won't get an argument out of me about that.
    • josephcsible 3y ago
      If X is already allowed, Y is a replacement for X, and Y is safer than X, then why wouldn't you want to allow Y?
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    That is a standard that the self-driving industry likes to promulgate, I'm guessing because it's rhetorically powerful and because it suits them. is it accepted as a standard by any professionals? Why or why not?
    • endtime 3y ago
      I'm not in the industry, though I did briefly work on a self-driving car in grad school back in 2009. One simple and obvious reason for this standard is that it optimizes for human safety.
      • wolverine876 3y ago
        Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you are in the industry. I meant they've normalized it to a large degree.
        • endtime 3y ago
          I'm not who you were originally replying to so I definitely didn't think you were implying thing about me (I also didn't think you were implying anything about the person you were replying to). I was just qualifying my opinion on the safer-than-a-human standard as a non-industry one.
  • sonofhans 3y ago
    “A human driver” is not the standard, not should it be. Humans need training, experience, physical dexterity, and motivation (and more besides) to be good drivers. If you average human drivers you include barely-competent teenagers, barely-dextrous old people, drunk people, etc. “A highly-skilled and attentive human driver” is a reasonable standard. So-called autonomous vehicles are nowhere near that.
  • sleepybrett 3y ago
    There is evidence that when a self driving car is stalled in the middle of the street no one can actually figure out what they are going to do from moment to moment. No driver to yell at, doesn't respond to honking... should I go open the door and hit some big 'call mothership' button on the dash...Or will it try and run me over...
  • howinteresting 3y ago
    A human driver at what percentile? I think AVs need to be better than p95 or so to be socially accepted.
    • starbase 3y ago
      I like that threshold--the best driver in 20. If we can achieve that, the best in 100 or best in 1000 may not be far off.
    • josephcsible 3y ago
      Why? Do you think good drivers will be more willing to switch to AVs than bad drivers will?
• ra7 3y ago
  CA DMV statement [1] has some more information: Today’s suspensions are based on the following: 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation. 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (3) – The manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles. 13 CCR §227.42 (b) (5) – Any act or omission of the manufacturer or one of its agents, employees, contractors, or designees which the department finds makes the conduct of autonomous vehicle testing on public roads by the manufacturer an unreasonable risk to the public. 13 CCR §227.42 (c) – The department shall immediately suspend or revoke the Manufacturer’s Testing Permit or a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit – Driverless Vehicles if a manufacturer is engaging in a practice in such a manner that immediate suspension is required for the safety of persons on a public road. Misrepresenting safety seems like a big deal. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-statement-on-cruise-llc-suspension/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-statement-o... Edit: This Vice article [2] says Cruise tried to withhold pedestrian injury footage from the DMV. > In the Order of Suspension, the California DMV said that the Cruise vehicle initially came to a hard stop and ran over the pedestrian. After coming to a complete stop, it then attempted to do a “pullover maneuver while the pedestrian was underneath the vehicle.” The car crawled along at 7 mph for about 20 feet, then came to a final stop. The pedestrian remained under the car the whole time. > The day after the incident, DMV representatives met with Cruise to “discuss the incident.” During that meeting, Cruise only showed footage up to the first complete stop, according to the Order of Suspension. No one at Cruise told the officers or showed any footage of the subsequent pullover maneuver and dragging. The DMV only learned of that from “another government agency.” When DMV asked for footage of that part of the incident, Cruise provided it. [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspends-cruises-self-driving-car-license-after-pedestrian-injury https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspen...
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• throwaway5959 3y ago
  And yet TSLA is allowed to have “Full Self Driving” on the road in hundreds of thousands of cars as a “beta”.
  • colordrops 3y ago
    I understand why so many people hate Tesla, but they aren't allowed to drive fully automated without a human monitoring them, so not the same situation.
    • jaylittle 3y ago
      If by "not allowed" you actually mean, "implements safety protocols so easy to circumvent that they may as well not exist", then I agree. Otherwise... not so much.
      • keneda7 3y ago
        I have not seen any easy way to get a tesla to drive without anyone in it. Any chance you could provide a link showing this?
        • iamtheworstdev 3y ago
          not sure if you're trolling or not but last i heard people simply strapping an exercise/weighted wrist band to the steering wheel which simulated torque being applied to the steering wheel which leads a Tesla to believe someone is paying attention. A quick search on Youtube reveals more than a few videos confirming this.
          • manquer 3y ago
            You still need to be in the car and in the driving seat ? Unlike cruize which does not require anyone in the car Which would make the driver responsible not the the company for incidents especially ones which explicitly circumvented controls. The scenario with cruize is different because the company is responsible for everything
• not-my-account 3y ago
  Just this morning on my bike ride to work, a Cruise car was sitting in the middle of a road after turning right at an intersection. It was almost blocking the road entirely. The cherry on top was the Waymo that was stuck on the other side of the intersection because of this. People were not happy and had to snake their way around the Waymo. Having ridden in Cruise cars a couple of times, I am glad I was able to ride one while I had the chance. The novelty factor was very high, and while being hard to hail + very slow, it was a great thing to show to visitors to the city. Hopefully these safety issues can be resolved. As a biker, I feel much safer around a cruise than your average prius.
• s1mon 3y ago
  According to Cruise's X(Twitter) account [0], the suspension seems to be related to an incident in which a human driver hit-and-run propelled a pedestrian in front of a Cruise AV and the Cruise vehicle couldn't avoid hitting the person. When that incident was first reported [1], it seemed like a situation where if it was a human driver in the Cruise vehicle, they wouldn't be found to be at any fault. However given this suspension, I wonder if there's more to it than that. [0] https://twitter.com/Cruise/status/1716877217995894934 https://twitter.com/Cruise/status/1716877217995894934 [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autonomous-vehicle-san-francisco-18403044.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autono...
  • kelnos 3y ago
    The article you link to says there was more to it! The Cruise vehicle, after running over the woman, stopped on top of her with the rear axle/tires pinning her to the ground, trapping her there. And it just... sat there. I hesitate to believe that a human driver would do something like that. You could, however, argue that staying in place was the right thing to do; continuing to drive to get the woman out from under the car may have injured her further. A follow-up article[0] suggests just that, and emergency crews ended up lifting the car off of her instead of trying to tow it. If this is indeed why their permit was suspended, it seems like a questionable reason. Some of the other dumb things Cruise cars have done seem much more obviously egregiously bad. But in this case the crash may have been unavoidable (by human or robot), and avoiding injuring her further by not unpinning her may have been the right move. [0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/cruise-driverless-taxi-pedestrian-crash-18404108.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/cruise-driverless-tax...
    • elromulous 3y ago
      This is such a wild edge case though. So we think the vehicle should do what, keep driving, potentially causing more damage? It's highly situation specific, and I'd expect the emergency personal to make the judgement call on how to free the person (potentially by taking control of the vehicle, or other means).
• thereisnospork 3y ago
  How many surplus people will be killed by human drivers today, tomorrow, next year, and next decade because of this suspension I wonder? No one ever seems to consider them in these decisions[0]. [0]I can see myself not agreeing with the conclusions, but to not even see the question broached in these terms is maddening.
  • sleepybrett 3y ago
    I think there is also a consideration that should be made for traffic flow. Every time I see a report on these cars it's because they are clogging up a street or stopped dead in traffic. Of course no one reports when they are behaving well but at least if some asshole door dasher double parks and fouls traffic flow you can through persuasion or violence resolve the situation.
  • saalweachter 3y ago
    We -- in the US -- could cut our traffic-related death rate in half (or more!) by just doing whatever it is that most European countries [UK, German, Sweden, etc] do different from us. No advanced robotics necessary.
    • thereisnospork 3y ago
      The thing is we aren't doing those things. Maybe its because we don't want to, maybe its because we can't. My point is let's not add advanced robotics to the things we can't or won't do: There is a future where 40k automotive deaths/year becomes closer to 40 on the back of self-driving cars, but we can't get to that future[1] with the current level of risk tolerance. [1]And getting there slower has the opportunity cost of surplus deaths at the current rate minus the terminal rate - a year delay to that future costs 39,960 lives. (A year delay to ubiquitous public transport does as well ofc.)
• granshaw 3y ago
  At this rate self driving cars won’t be approved until they can also cure cancer and bring world peace
• lacker 3y ago
  I'm disappointed to hear this news. So many people are killed by cars every year. We just take that for granted. Self-driving cars have the potential to drastically improve this and save many lives. I worry that these regulators are weighing the costs heavily while ignoring the benefits of innovation. That said, I don't have access to the data and I don't really know if Cruise has been acting inappropriately. I'm glad that Waymo seems to be generating far fewer negative press reports, which seems to be a good proxy for whether regulators are going to clamp down. So I hope Waymo continues to operate successfully (and expands their service to me in particular) and I hope that Cruise improves their system and gets back online.
  • flutas 3y ago
    I'm not honestly. Cruise was pushing too hard and fast for where their stack is at and they seem to have some severe safety related bugs. Ex [1]: The car randomly starts swerving rapidly across traffic lanes towards an occupied sidewalk. Ex [2] (@1:31): The car doesn't stop for someone already in the crosswalk and nearly hits them. [1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12640657/self-driving-Cruise-car-sidewalk-San-Francisco.html#v-6419066414697237243 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12640657/self-drivi... [2]: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/video/driving-taxis-hitting-road-102923506 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/video/driving-taxis-hittin...
    • acyou 3y ago
      [2] Not just fail to stop, but fail to reduce speed when turning off into a heavily congested side street with visual distractions, blind spots and a pedestrian crossing. For some reason, I can't imagine literally any human driving quite like that?
  • awiejrliawejr 3y ago
    > That said, I don't have access to the data and I don't really know if Cruise has been acting inappropriately. That's a common response from people who would prefer NOT to know the facts.
• ProfessorLayton 3y ago
  As a pedestrian I'm not a fan of being an unwitting part of a private company's beta testing. Before this devolves into whatboutism vs the safety of human drivers, my opposition is to adding yet another unknown safety layer to walking down the street. Usually when private companies are developing products that could kill, drugs for example, it is on the company to exhaustively prove the safety and effectiveness before launching it to the public. It seems odd that self driving cars have been skipping this step.
  • alphabetting 3y ago
    The whole point of AVs is that they are a safety layer.
    • bobthepanda 3y ago
      They are theoretically a safety layer when we have proven they work. If they do not work well, then they aren't actually safer.
      • alphabetting 3y ago
        I haven't seen anything that indicates they don't work well. My anecdotal experience is feeling much safer inside and around them in comparison to vehicles with humans behind the wheel.
        • rurp 3y ago
          There are plenty of anecdotes of AVs behaving terribly, but anecdotes are beside the point. Normally when a company wants to introduce a dangerous new product on the market the burden of proof is on them to prove that it's safe enough. For various reasons tech companies have gotten to do this in reverse by testing on the public to find out how safe they are.
        • iakov 3y ago
          What does the article indicate then? Everything working as intended? I am wondering if the pedestrian that was dragged six meters by a autonomous machine felt much safer. The AVs do not work well in the edge cases - exactly in those situations where humans can apply common sense and behave accordingly. Exactly the cases that sceptics seemed to be worried about, and it turns out that the sceptics were right. I hope AVs will not be allowed on public roads where I live in the next decades.
• alphabetting 3y ago
  The large opposition to AVs gives these companies zero-margin for error especially in a place like SF. Hopefully they'll be back on the road soon. My experience in Waymos have felt much safer than the average Uber.
  • alsodumb 3y ago
    Let’s agree that Waymo and Cruise are not in the same league. I don’t use AV in general anymore, I explicitly differentiate between Waymo and everyone else.
• reset2023 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • cryptoz 3y ago
    Something like 30,000 Americans alone are killed every year in car accidents. I think the primary idea is to reduce the constant death on the road by making machines that are safer at driving than humans. The toll that car accidents have on society is honestly unconscionable.
    • hristov 3y ago
      That is a good point. A secondary benefit, is a self driving car can literally give most workers that commute about an hour per day of their lives back. For some people it will be two to three hours.
      • klyrs 3y ago
        If your favorite hobby is sitting by yourself, strapped to a chair, sure, you get your time back. But the reason I'm allergic to commuting is that I prefer to spend time with my family.
      • mrguyorama 3y ago
        How is being stuck in a small box for an hour "getting that hour back"? Most people don't want to read a book during their commute, they want to have less commute, so they can do actual things they want, like play with their kids or cook dinner or enjoy a movie in the comfort of their own home. "Fixing" commutes by making everyone sit alone in their car while it does the driving part as if that's the problem with an hour long commute, is the single dumbest way to make cities better.
    • nvy 3y ago
      If Americans were serious about reducing car deaths they'd ban gigantic pickups and SUVs with blind spots big enough to fit a Volkswagen. They'd ban cars from city centers and build bicycle highways. They'd invest in convenient rail infrastructure. Instead we've got "it's a car but you can doomscroll while on your 45 minute commute and we harvest your data to sell ads". This has nothing to do with public safety.
• cryptoz 3y ago
  So much is discussed about self-driving car safety because the implications are really big but also uncomfortable. However, I always get stuck on how little enforcement there is for human drivers who habitually break driving laws and cause dangerous situations. DUIs are one thing sure but honestly most drivers who are bad and dangerous are sober and face no consequences for reckless behavior. Is there something specific that caused this halt on Cruise's testing permits?
  • stfp 3y ago
    Not sure about the specifics here but to jump on your point about human drivers not being safe... 10000% we need safer designs for streets and roads, better education, automated enforcement of speed limits, dis-incentives for larger/heavier/more dangerous vehicles, ... All of these things need to be done, and can be done with existing technology today. We don't need self-driving cars to address our problems; they're essentially a distraction and an excuse to postpone improvements.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    Why the down votes? This seems like a reasonable discussion to be had, unless you're a binary thinker and think that anyone raising a point about humans must be secretly, implicitly arguing that cars should be able to do whatever they want.
  • vel0city 3y ago
    Automatic enforcement of driving laws should absolutely be a thing. People often argue "but they can't prove who was driving the car!" Its simple answer to me. Whoever registered the car is by default responsible for the actions of the car. If that car gets found doing something obviously illegal (speeding, running a red light, some kind of "reckless driving" camera review, etc) the registered owner is automatically assigned blame. They can potentially file paperwork to the court to prove someone else was driving (a lease arrangement, some valet ticket along with some proof from the restaurant or whatever at the time, a sworn statement from another individual confessing to it, etc). But ultimately by default the owner of the car is responsible for the safe handling of the vehicle. If you're worried someone is going to break the law with your car, don't give them your keys. If you don't like this, find another form of transportation. Tag enforcement needs to be stronger. If an automated system sees a tag that doesn't make sense, it should be immediately flagged and enforcement dispatched. Lots of cops already have ALPRs, those should immediately trigger. I see so many cars out there with sketchy paper tags, this whole thing needs to be shut down. Driving a car on public streets shouldn't be nearly as easy as it is in the US. Far too many people don't treat driving with the respect it needs.
• wstrange 3y ago
  Link to Cruise review of incident: https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-the-recent-sf-hit-and-run-incident/ https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-th...
  • yieldcrv 3y ago
    > This is called achieving a minimal risk condition so pulling over after a collision, which resulted in dragging the human 20 feet is an interpretation of this regulation. sounds like California and Federal AVs regulations are equally not safe for the public's operations which is a good enough reason to revoke permits too, until they fix this together with the private industry
    • leni536 3y ago
      I don't think it's the job of the regulation to cover every possible corner case and to codify the exact behavior of AVs in law.
      • yieldcrv 3y ago
        in the universe of possibilities from my post, that also means removing the minimal risk regulation since it created more danger until they figure that out, this is a not-intolerable course of action. it doesn't need to be interpreted as punitive.
        • leni536 3y ago
          I wonder how the "minimal risk regulation" is worded right now.
      • ccooffee 3y ago
        From my limited understanding, web browsers were improved drastically by the creation of cross-vendor testing (e.g. Acid tests). I wonder if there is a way to do some sort of AV simulator testing that would allow us to test the different manufacturers on data collected from the others. AVs seem to all have different "mental models" of the external world, so it seems like we've got a lot of work before we can pipe data collected from this Cruise incident into a simulator and test Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• paxys 3y ago
  It's always fun when the Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" ethos meets real world government bureaucracy and regulation. Filling out forms with made-up bullshit just to get an approval works great when you are putting together a SaaS sales presentation, not so much when it's the state Department of Transport on the other end and you are working on matters of public safety.
• vel0city 3y ago
  Will California ban all human drivers next? After all, the pedestrian was first hit by a human driver, and was probably the but for cause.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    the Cruise dragged her 20 feet and rolled over her leg though. Obviously this is mainly the other drivers fault, but self driving cars need to be able to react properly to unexpected scenarios. A reasonable human driver would not have continued driving with a person trapped under the car.
    • ceejayoz 3y ago
      Yeah. This is essentially a safety recall; that behavior needs to be fixed.
  • _ea1k 3y ago
    No, because fixing all humans is impossible. Fixing all Cruise vehicles so that this doesn't happen might be hard, but it isn't impossible.
    • vel0city 3y ago
      > fixing all humans is impossible Sounds like a good argument to ban almost all human drivers.
  • mumblemumble 3y ago
    I think that a suspension pending investigation and possible remediation is appropriate. I realize assuming this is the California DMV's line of reasoning is speculation, but this sentence from Cruise's own public statement on the event really does it for me (emphasis mine): > The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. The tricky thing about these vehicles' control software is that it has absolutely no judgment or common sense. That's really on display here, where the vehicle immediately goes into a canned program instead of following a course of action that takes into account all the details of the situation in which it found itself, not just the ones that its creators had anticipated. That doesn't necessarily mean that testing self-driving cars on the roads is inherently irresponsible, but it does mean that the ground rules for how we manage such programs need to be tailored to the situation. What we have here is a situation where a rather nasty software defect has been discovered. We can assume that this defect is present in all of the vehicles Cruise is operating on public roadways. It is therefore reasonable and prudent to temporarily suspend autonomous testing operations on public roadways pending analysis and remediation. Because, let me emphasize again, TESTING. Pausing to analyze and iterate when you find problems is an essential part of testing. It's arguably the main thing that distinguishes testing from just YOLOing shit into production.
• qrush 3y ago
  I saw these driving around Austin today near the UoT campus. Pretty creepy looking with all of the equipment hanging off the cars.
• carbocation 3y ago
  This is just anecdote, but having taken trips in both Waymo and Cruise in SF, I feel very comfortable in Waymo: it drives carefully but confidently. It alerts me when cyclists are near when I'm getting out. It navigates coned-off work areas. Cruise required a lot of (remote) human intervention during my trips.
  • eastbound 3y ago
    We were sold self-driving cars as safer than humans.
    • unshavedyak 3y ago
      And snake oil salesmen exist everywhere, not sure what your point is. Are you saying that they should all be equally safe? If so that would require a level of oversight and control (plus knowledge share?) not typically seen in US government, no? I agree in principle, I’m not defending them at all. However this is exactly what much of the US wants, given how much de regulation and reduced “red tape” is often argued for. Until then, we’re going to get some companies that put everyone’s lives at risk. Hell Tesla alone has over promised to insane degrees (the Full in FSD). I don’t see companies having less power any time soon.
    • ipqk 3y ago
      No one was sold anything yet. These things don't go from 0 to 100 overnight. We've assumed that self-driving cars will be safer than humans in the future, though that's yet to be determined. And even if their safety record is better than humans, they will be more dangerous in different ways than human drivers, much like this recent incident where the woman was dragged and pinned.
      • FireBeyond 3y ago
        LOL, what? Musk has repeatedly stated that Teslas on FSD/AP are safer than humans, now. You can take issue with the veracity of his claims (and I certainly do, on several levels), but let's not pretend like "no-one is selling this, yet" - let's also not forget, "The driver is only in the seat for legal reasons. The car is driving itself" - that was six years ago now.
• cp9 3y ago
  finally, they never should have had access to public roads in the first place
• xyst 3y ago
  TxDMV needs to follow this. Fuck these companies. They are testing their garbage in dense urban areas. Too many times their vehicles just stop in the middle of the road. If it rains, vehicle stops. If the light is out, vehicle panics and stops. Somebody puts a cone on the hood, vehicle panics. If a single variable not accounted for in their algorithms shifts beyond expected range, it fucking panics. So much money dumped/wasted into “autonomous personal vehicles”. How about we invest in making our cities more pedestrian, bike, and public transportation friendly? Let’s move people more efficiently rather than further digging ourselves into this hole.
  • therealmarv 3y ago
    This! A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.
    • xnx 3y ago
      An advanced country is one where as many people as possible can go where they want, when they want, as cheaply as feasible. In the US, autonomous vehicles are the best bet for facilitating this in urban areas.
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      This is true - where I live only the relatively wealthy can afford close enough to schools to cycle to them. Anyone on a regular salary has to drive in.
  • jdross 3y ago
    What if we do both? Cars should be safe everywhere, and cities should be very pedestrian and bike friendly. Cars also don't only exist in dense cities. They're even used, among other things, to get people into and out of those cities
  • freedomben 3y ago
    Do you think the potential future where humans are freed from doing anything for their transportation (no driving, no pedaling, no steering, no danger, no waiting in traffic, etc) is worth some short term pain while we develop the tech? Was the pain and suffering during the industrial revolution days that have led to our current high tech world worth it? (I'm not just asking this rhetorically, I'm really interested in what you or somebody who agrees with you thinks about these things). Alternatively if you reject the premise of those questions that this is a necessary phase to pass through to get to the other side, what do you think the impact on progress would be if no "real world" training opportunities were allowed for these companies? Do you think they'd be hampered and progress would take longer, and what would the impact of that be?
• eep_social 3y ago
  But not Waymo. Which confirms all my personal biases. More seriously, the statement cites four specific clauses that caused the permit to be suspended. The second one seems really interesting as it implies that there was a lie of omission where the others are more or less what I’d expect regarding safety risks: > Today’s suspensions are based on the following: > 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation. > 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (3) – The manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles. > 13 CCR §227.42 (b) (5) – Any act or omission of the manufacturer or one of its agents, employees, contractors, or designees which the department finds makes the conduct of autonomous vehicle testing on public roads by the manufacturer an unreasonable risk to the public. > 13 CCR §227.42 (c) – The department shall immediately suspend or revoke the Manufacturer’s Testing Permit or a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit – Driverless Vehicles if a manufacturer is engaging in a practice in such a manner that immediate suspension is required for the safety of persons on a public road.
  • yegle 3y ago
    > "The AV braked aggressively before impact and because it detected a collision, it attempted to pull over to avoid further safety issues," Cruise added. "When the AV tried to pull over, it continued before coming to a final stop, pulling the pedestrian forward. Our thoughts continue to be with the victim as we hope for a rapid and complete recovery." This looks like Cruise's fault, dragging a pedestrian while pulling over for "safety"?
    • _ea1k 3y ago
      Yes, and it sounds like a fairly fundamental flaw. Does the car have sensors that can determine pulling over is the wrong thing to do in this situation? In general, getting out of the way is the right course of action, but this clearly shows that there are exceptions. I'm not sure that the vehicles are currently equipped for differentiating to even be possible.
      • WesternWind 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• SilverBirch 3y ago
  > then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. That’s a pretty enormous screw up and not one I’d heard about when this was initially reported. Interesting the statement from the DMV implies they were lying…
• mips_avatar 3y ago
  The incident last month where that woman got dragged and pinned by the Cruise vehicle was pretty disconcerting. The initial collision wasn't the fault of the cruise vehicle (another vehicle hit her pushing her into the cruise vehicle and fled the scene), but the cruise vehicle then proceeded to try to "pull over" and just dragged this woman and rolled over her leg. Weird situation but definitely something made much much worse by not having a person in the loop once the incident occurred.
  • hindsightbias 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • twisteriffic 3y ago
      ... Stopped?
    • dehugger 3y ago
      Stopped the vehicle, instead of continuing to drag them?
      • mgiampapa 3y ago
        That's if they even saw the person was under them. My aunt got dragged by my grandfather as a child for a block and he at one point ran over my grandmother in a parking lot when she fell behind the car... this may say more about my grandfather than anything else, but average encompasses all kinds of drivers.
    • parshimers 3y ago
      stop and get out of the car because someone just got flung onto/underneath your car? or perhaps have enough situational awareness to see that someone is about to walk into oncoming traffic?
    • mips_avatar 3y ago
      This woman got dragged 20 feet and then the car rolled over her leg and stopped. The fire department had to come and remove the wheel of the car to get it off her leg. I don't know of a single person who would have done that.
• jiveturkey42 3y ago
  They will continue to roll out in business-friendly less-regulated states
  • paxys 3y ago
    Great, let the people who voted to be guinea pigs be guinea pigs and leave the rest of us alone.
    • jiveturkey42 3y ago
      Innovation is seldom compatible with risk aversion. Some folks enjoy the risk
      • kirubakaran 3y ago
        Ah yes, that's why California has very little innovation compared to other "business friendly" states /s
• nvarsj 3y ago
  I was in SF last month and saw a Cruise car get stuck in an intersection on Divisadero. I have no idea what it was trying to originally do, but it kept just going back and forwards perpendicular to the incoming traffic. After about 5-10 mins of that, it looked like someone took remote control and got it out of the intersection.
• tschellenbach 3y ago
  43k deaths per year due to human drivers. DMV should stop sticking their heads in the sand. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state#:~:text=Posted%20May%202023.-,Fatal%20crash%20totals,in%20which%2042%2C939%20deaths%20occurred https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state....
  • tschellenbach 3y ago
    Though maybe good to have a system where a human remote driver takes over in cases where it's confused?
    • olex 3y ago
      Cruise has exactly that. In this case however, the car decided to "pull over" autonomously after the incident, before a remote driver could get involved, and with that pulled the struck pedestrian 20 feet along the ground and pinned them under the vehicle. If it instead alerted a remote driver immediately and waited for their decision before moving again, this would've likely ended much more lightly.
    • LegitShady 3y ago
      its not really helpful for split second judgement calls like this. If your pizzabot is stuck behind another pizzabot or can't figure out something, ok. But this happens before anyone can intervene. The switchover + time to comprehend and react remotely aren't going to change anything.
    • dangerwill 3y ago
      Some of the players in this space do this but it doesn't work because driving via streaming video over the internet is nowhere near as effective as a human driver. And is simply not possible in a fast moving emergency, only being helpful if the car gets stuck and won't move
    • Miraste 3y ago
      The concept of "human remote driver" isn't feasible. Imagine driving a car using a cell phone network Zoom call. It's less safe than just stopping.
• Lonestar1440 3y ago
  From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably. They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far below the level of most Human drives. They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways. Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down.
  • RC_ITR 3y ago
    I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either. EDIT: This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)? That seems like a comically bad baseline.
    • moralestapia 3y ago
      Yes, but replacing something shitty with something shittier will not improve the status quo. The bar for AI should be way higher than just "outperform mediocre humans".
      • panarky 3y ago
        > way higher Even 10% less grievous bodily harm would be a massive improvement.
• cp9 3y ago
  if people weren't VC brained they would realize that the way to prevent traffic deaths isn't to build fancy self driving cars, it's to invest in safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities
  • evilotto 3y ago
    But how would they make money off pedestrian infrastructure or old boring technology? If there's not an app for it, then no one's interested.
    • cp9 3y ago
      true, one must think of the billionaires in these troubling times
    • duckmysick 3y ago
      To use the pedestrian infrastructure you would have to pay a monthly subscription. If you pay for one year in advance you get two months for free.
    • xnx 3y ago
      A lot of companies are getting very rich building boring technology (e.g. $2.6 billion per subway mile).
  • bdamm 3y ago
    Ignoring reality 101. Cars were here yesterday, people loved them for their freedom. Cars are here today, people love them and build communities around them. Cars will be here tomorrow, and people will still love them.
    • vecinu 3y ago
      OP is not arguing against cars completely, they just have very limited use within high density city centers. Most people can travel by foot, bike, scooter, bus, train, trolley, etc... to get their daily errands done. When you need to go further or out of the city, by all means, jump in your environment-destroying metal cage but you don't need it daily, I guarantee it. Please don't cite extreme exceptions like disabled people or families with 10 kids.
• b33j0r 3y ago
  I know that the geography of North America and the timing of industrialization basically made this a pipe dream… Yet, trying to create near-peer artificial human driving intelligence—just so cities can continue to be designed around horseless carriages, minivans, and truck nuts—well, that may not have been the best solution to the problem. Ideally, autonomous driving would be for “the edge” of a transportation network. Like a house on a dirt road, or a camping site, or the home of a misguided friend who moved to south Gilbert, AZ ;) You shouldn’t need to be watching for basketballs and red lights on interstate highways. Everyone is going the same direction for long distances between transfers. Cars are often individualism, which I’m certainly not against. The arrogance of “driving driverless should be easy” probably comes from a lot of people seeing driving as a part of their basic humanity. The car is nearly a cyborg extension of their mobility and physical power. Me? I just wanna get to the concert. Take the humans out of the equation where it makes sense. I’d rather go with light rail; not my friend who offered to drive, then road rages over a merge, then follows some minivan psychopathically for a few minutes (true stories). We shot ourselves in the foot because mass transportation in America has failed to impress us as much as a Jaguar XK or Jeep KJ, or whatever your Soul Car is.
  • bsder 3y ago
    > We shot ourselves in the foot because mass transportation in America has failed to impress us as much as a Jaguar XK or Jeep KJ, or whatever your Soul Car is. As much as I'd like to agree with this, the fundamental problem is that most people in the US do not work at a single point in the city anymore. That's the real problem. You don't get to connect existing enclaves. You have to build your mass transit, fund it at a loss for decades, make sure it doesn't get overrun with crime, and maybe after 10-20 years there will be enough housing and office space along the line in order to make it viable. Maybe. Or you can throw down a couple more roads and let people figure out where to live, themselves.
    • b33j0r 3y ago
      Very true! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path But like. We can certainly innovate more flexible routing systems of transport that don’t require specific neural training and licensing to use foot pedals to stop it crashing. (Maybe I could have reserved some of those neurons to be better at drumming!) What stops us from using modular mass transit systems? Lots of things. But when mountains stopped trains, we exploded the mountains. Built huge bridges over ravines. Because of the period between 1850 and 1970, I don’t buy the excuses. Unless it’s just “we’re still not there yet.”
• Fauntleroy 3y ago
  Until cars are capable of simulating real-world human decision making (of a smart and considerate driver), it's not going to be enough. It simply won't be possible to eliminate all the teeny tiny liability laden edge cases otherwise.
• monkaiju 3y ago
  One down, now lets get those others off the roads too!
• batch12 3y ago
  As long as we mix human and machine control, I think we will continue to have problems. If we take humans out of equation somehow, we may eliminate a lot of edge cases like this. Self driving cars need their own lanes. After that, we could couple them together. Then maybe put them on rails...
• epaulson 3y ago
  What's the ratio of humans back at headquarters ready to take over vs the number of cars active on the road? That's a really interesting number that I don't think I've ever seen reported anywhere. It does feel like a lot of these weird/longtail situations should be more quickly resolved with some better combination of letting a human override in person (like when a AV car blocks a firetruck) and/or quickly getting a human to remotely take over, but yet we keep seeing these reports of where the car does something dumb for a long period of time. Is it as simple as they don't have enough employees on-hand to intervene?
  • joewrong 3y ago
    I’d be interested in that stat as well, and love imagining a person sitting in front of dozens of screens showing video of automated cars
• thejarren 3y ago
  I took one ride in a cruise car in San Francisco. A person on a moped in front of me accidentally dropped their phone on the road. The person stopped their moped in the middle of the road but the cruise car insisted on continuing and started jerking around. Later, the car in front of me was going down the hill and my cruise car kept accelerating and then braked very hard once its sensors were able to see that something was in front of it. It was an okay experience, but I’ll be honest, I don’t think I would be willing to take myself in it again or my family anytime soon. And honestly, I can’t believe that moped driver didn’t get hit/I didn’t get whiplash.
• Animats 3y ago
  Cruise started as a fake-it-til-you-make-it operation. See if you can find their first demo video. That mindset apparently continues. Waymo has been very cautious. This turned out to be much harder than expected. Waymo's stats get better each year, and it looks like this is going to work.
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• NelsonMinar 3y ago
  Vice has the details. Cruise tried to failed to disclose their video evidence of their vehicle nearly killing a pedestrian. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspends-cruises-self-driving-car-license-after-pedestrian-injury https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspen... One wonders WTF they were thinking. Were they so sloppy they just forgot to show the video? Were they hoping DMV would never see it? Either way it's a terrible stupid and short sighted mistake. A major problem for Cruise is convincing governments their technology is safe and responsible. Hiding evidence is not going to help that case.
  • _xivi 3y ago
    > Either way it's a terrible stupid and short sighted mistake Uh, 'Mistake' is a really generous word here. Cruise isn't some amateur one-man startup. It's a multi-billion dollars company with tons of lawyers, advisors, resources, support from GM, etc. It was a deliberate act full-stop. The only 'mistake' they made was probably thinking they could get away with it.
• paxys 3y ago
  I had an epiphany about self driving recently late at night on the streets of San Francisco. It was a somewhat deserted part of town, and the roads were empty. There was a lone Cruise car chugging along and constantly stopping at red lights. The signals were so badly optimized that the car would be the only one waiting at a completely empty intersection for minutes at a time, only to be stopped again at the next one, and the one after that. A single mile of empty road must have taken this car 15+ minutes to traverse. All the top engineering, sensors and ML algorithms in the world and the car was still at the mercy of a basic city planning failure. We have been conditioned to think of autonomous driving as the answer to the traffic nightmares in every city, but tech will never ever be able to solve a social problem (just like how building a wider road will never ease congestion). Had even a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into self driving so far been spent towards, say, improving sidewalk quality, making traffic lights smarter, putting sensors along roads, coming up with a standard communication protocol for these sensors, building out public transit, improving urban planning etc. over the last 15 years, we would all be living better lives today. But a VC would rather set that money on fire to have a small chance at a 100x return.
  • mepiethree 3y ago
    I agree with your general point but will note that Google has been working on smarter traffic lights (albeit with much less funding than Waymo) https://sites.research.google/greenlight/ https://sites.research.google/greenlight/
  • oceanofsolaris 3y ago
    But SF is a damn rich city (due to all the tech companies and their employees). Why didn’t they solve or at least tackle these problems? It’s not like Cruise / Waymo could change city planning against the cities will, even if they wanted.
    • paxys 3y ago
      Because smart people who work in tech are above silly things like urban planning and getting involved in local politics.
• paul7986 3y ago
  Their behavior reminded me of Uber's behavior..frat bro ... do anything... killing it, etc mantra yet people's lives are at stake here. I've been writing my distaste for Cruise for the past few month or so here, because of this. Of course getting downvoted by those with skin in the game but c'mon you can't act like how Travis Kalanick did...you are pushing technology onto the streets that can kill people! As well Waymo (Google who im no fan of) has been working on their robot car tech since 2007 ... Cruise no way for that long. There were reports they are pushing their tech onto many city streets. Sorry to say and hopefully other cities/states follow CA's lead!
• huytersd 3y ago
  Waymo is leagues ahead of Cruise. They feel absolutely safe and go at the speed limit.
• topherPedersen 3y ago
  I had a Cruise driverless car here in Austin, TX blow through a cross walk and get really close to me. I had a broken leg at the time and was using a walker. I almost hit the cruise car with my walker. Before this, I was really impressed by Cruise and actually bought shares in General Motors because I was so blown away. But yeah those cars aren't perfect. However, maybe a human was controlling the car when it blew threw that cross walk? I would not be surprised if a person were to do something like that because people drive horrible all the time, but I would expect better from a computer. Maybe that's part of the problem? We have bad drivers who are ultimately writing the software that controls the cars. Anyway, those are my thoughts. If someone from Cruise happens to read this, try and add some code to prevent these cars from blowing through cross walks with people in them. (I'm not sure what the law says about this, but my interpretation is that if the cross walk sign is lit up, and there's a pedestrian in the cross walk, you should stop. Maybe it's okay to go if they haven't made it to your side of the street yet, but you should never get so close to a pedestrian that they can strike the vehicle out of anger with an object.)
• throwaway9274 3y ago
  After the CPUC voted to approve the self-driving expansion, the same people that tried to block self-driving cars there pulled two regulatory levers. First, the California DMV, with result seen here. The incident that triggered this event happened when a human driver, who is still at large, hit a pedestrian who flew into the path of the Cruise vehicle. The car executed a maneuver to pull over for a safety stop, but failed to recognize the woman who was dragged some distance. Second, they reached to the Federal agencies via Nancy Pelosi’s office, with primary focus being the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The request was to gather data, which given the friendly posture of the NHTSA at this time will likely result in the opening of an investigation. Both of these moves have some bite. The California DMV can suspend licensure as happened here. But they’re fairly straight-shooter civil service types in the end, and they’ll eventually clear the vehicles for use. You can see this in part because of the action against Cruise only, rather than Waymo. Some may attribute this to Waymo’s greater political sway in California. But my experience of the products themselves is that Waymo has a higher quality self-driving system. The NHTSA is a bit trickier to predict. The NHTSA’s powers are broad in theory and as granted by statute. They could theoretically issue an order to remove a type of vehicle from the road for imminent threat to public safety. However, their typical modus operandi is to issue recalls and work with the auto companies. They won’t want to test these powers under the current court, so my opinion is that they won’t take much action.
• hallqv 3y ago
  GM can’t do tech, what else is new?
• gen220 3y ago
  Any speculation on how big a deal this is for the prospects of Cruise as a competitor in the AV space? As far as I can tell, they were open in 4 metro areas (SF, Austin, Houston, Phoenix). So this is their original testing zone, and 1 out of 4 of contemporary zones down. Will this impede their ability to retain and expand existing zones?
• honeybadger1 3y ago
  Autonomous driving is a fickle thing.
• Bvlynicole 3y ago
  [dead]
• oblio 3y ago
  Maybe someone knows, why can't I reply to ra7? No reply link :-(
• tristanb 3y ago
  Good. These things have been a real danger around my neighborhood. They are not currently safe. They do not understand crosswalks, and will drive towards pedestrians who are on them until they move. Additionally every time i've encountered a safety issue Cruise have not been accessible to take the report. So I went above and beyond to make sure i reported it. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-autonomous-vehicles-feedback-form/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-autonomous-vehicles-feedba...
• ternaus 3y ago
  So sad. We, I mean humanity, need an example that L4 self driving is possible. When SpaceX showed that private company can access space and build a product in the area world changed. Startup founders, investors, government changed their opinion and many space companies were created and trying to do things that they would not even consider before SpaceX: Astra, Rocket Labs, Planet Labs, Firefly, etc (Great book on the topic "When Heavens went on sale": https://amzn.to/46NRx9l https://amzn.to/46NRx9l) If we get one example of self driving as a product on the roads, it may have the same effect. We are going toward self driving winter and unless Cruise, Waymo or similar companies will do the impossible new iteration will happen in 10+ years. It is mentioned in the text that in Q3 GM spent 700M on Cruise. Not that many companies in the world: 1. have similar level of talent as engineers at Cruise 2. can spent similar amount of money 3. are willing to spend them And we need all three. There are so many corner cases that without large scale as close to the real life deployment as possible... I feel very sad. P.S. Worked for 3 years in a self driving company, till our division was sold :(
  • deleted 3y ago
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• robomartin 3y ago
  Well, the problem is that our AI systems don't have a clue. At all. They are classification systems. They have no understanding whatsoever of anything around them. Which means it is likely that the AV which is the subject of this accident didn't understand that it hit a person, what a person is, how a person could be stuck under the car, how a person could be dragged by a car, how a person could be hurt by a car, how a person is more fragile than a car, why it might be better to not move in any of the above contexts, how a human driver would more likely get out of the car and make sure it was safe to move (and render first aid), etc. We are calling this crap "Artificial Intelligence". It isn't. It is not at all. It's a parlor trick devoid of anything that resembles understanding. A dog understands the world far better than the most advanced self-driving-car. This lack of understanding issue carries with it layers of significance. For example, a human driver understands consequences to his/her actions. Yes, of course, there are a-holes in every crown...yet, the vast majority of people are good. If that were not the case society would not function as it does. Lacking the concept and understanding of consequences, just assigning scores to things and path planning accordingly, removes important decision-making layers and drives suboptimal AV decisions. You can add responsibility, fear, financial consequences, emotion, care, consideration and a whole host of human condition realities to the list of important factors completely lacking from AV's today. Driving is fine when reality is reduced to easy-to-classify monotonically varying experiences. Not so easy when reality becomes, well, real.
• riscy 3y ago
  I feel safer as a cyclist and pedestrian in SF with Cruise and Waymo vehicles driving around than I do any other vehicle. At least the autonomous vehicles actually follow the rules: they are patient and always watching the bike lane and crosswalks. I've never had one try to cut me off, make an illegal turn, or aggressively turn into me while in the crosswalk. These things are daily occurrences for me with human drivers due to the sheer lack of traffic enforcement.
• freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  I'll take the down votes but none of these should be on the road. Especially when a coning is enough to disable the car. After leaving the state, I'm glad to not have to drive on the same road as these.
• coding123 3y ago
  Aren't there more incidents with Tesla? Where's a similar statement for Tesla?
• forgetfreeman 3y ago
  "Ultimately we develop and deploy autonomous vehicles to save lives." Of all of the self-serving counterfactual horseshit I've seen sneak out of a corporate mouthpiece that right there might take the cake. Y'all deploy AVs to make money, The End. If saving lives was a primary goal GM would have stripped center console infotainment displays out of their vehicles a decade ago, or maybe never put them there to begin with.
• lucubratory 3y ago
  This has got to be a huge relief for Waymo. Cruise's atrocious safety was bad press for Waymo every single time it hit the news, and would be a significant contributor to local sentiment against all AVs. It's like OpenAI; when you're leading in a product category and your name is synonymous with the tech, other people's failures with the technology make you look bad.
• ern 3y ago
  GM vehicles are generally regarded as not particularly well engineered or reliable, based on what I've seen and heard from mechanics. Why aren't they investing in core engineering, instead of moonshots?
• ken47 3y ago
  Safety is certainly a huge concern with this class of vehicles. But by programming these cars to drive extremely conservatively, they cause disproportionate congestion as well. This seems to be underplayed in approval discussions around these vehicles, but is a major cost.
• b20000 3y ago
  ok, maybe this will put an end to the endless self driving hype and free up some vc funding for other stuff
• Narkov 3y ago
  IMHO, Accidents...manageable. Hitting a pedestrian...still manageable. Deliberately withholding evidence....burn them at the stake and regulate them to an inch of their corporate lives.
• HALtheWise 3y ago
  Thanks for digging in and providing sources. The Vice article seems to have been updated to include that Cruise is contesting the narrative where they withheld the full video. It seems like this story is still playing out. > In a statement, Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow disputed that Cruise failed to provide the full video during the first meeting with the DMV. “I can confirm that Cruise showed the full video to the DMV on October 3rd, and played it multiple times,” Lindow told Motherboard in a statement.
• InTheFutureRob 3y ago
  Really disappointed at the suspension. Seems like a knee jerk reaction, although cruise should have been more transparent. At this point we should have 4 or 5 self driving car companies testing on public roads not just 2 companies (Waymo and Cruise I don't count Tesla to be self driving but driver assist, the 2 are waymo and Cruise), in Two cities (Phoenix and San Franscio, although LA< Houston Dallas coming soon). In 2015 I anticipated by early 2020s we would have self driving taxis in a dozen US metro cities not just two. What can we do to accelerate the transition towards this fantastic future? Also Canada so far behind.
• jack_squat 3y ago
  My prediction is it'll be Cruise in red states and Waymo in blue states. I think they are done in SF but this will endear them in TX.
• Guy_w_Keyboard 3y ago
  This industry is evil, and I can't fathom what kind of a market would exist for driverless cars. KITT is science fiction. In reality, human drivers are almost always going to be safer. I would never trust my life or those I care about to ride inside a computer-operated vehicle. Those that do are making a costly mistake. Any robot-assisted car still requires a human driver to be paying attention to the road, but by definition, because the robot does most of the driving, the human failsafe is going lulled into a false sense of security, or bored by effectively driving without actually driving. They will slack, and when the critical moment of awareness from the human is needed, he will be caught off guard, as opposed to the actual human driver who was aware the entire time, because he always had to be. More to the point, even if I had a 100% guarantee of safety, I would never want to have the joys of driving taken away from me in the first place! Driving is liberating. It's power. It's the freedom to go anywhere and do anything. It's, dare I say, cathartic. And for those that are unable to drive, Uber & Lyft exist to fill in the gap. They are themselves a relatively new technology, just under a decade old, and you can always find a quick, affordable ride on demand to just about anywhere. What gap in the market would a self-driving car even fulfill? This is yet another example of the arrogance of big tech, pushing out unsafe and socially deleterious products in the hopes of a get rich quick scheme. It's no different to what social media did a decade ago or what "generative a.i." is doing now.
• golemiprague 3y ago
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• mayneack 3y ago
  I just started seeing Cruise cars driving around Santa Monica this week. Are they already paused in SF and we're somehow later or is pausing just a SF thing?
  • minwcnt5 3y ago
    Are you sure those were Cruise and not Waymo?
    • mayneack 3y ago
      Yes, although the ones I've seen today all have humans in the driver seat.
• my12parsecs 3y ago
  lkjlkj
• botanical 3y ago
  I've said this previously 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 of the lot with something like millions of hours on the road and no incidents, but when they started accepting passengers, it failed to proceed past a traffic cone on a sunny day: https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742 https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742 The government should initiate a comprehensive test on a self-driving car's capabilities. In their current form, 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 that too with Tesla and their cost-saving no-LIDAR nonsense. These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from beta testing out in public.
• xnx 3y ago
  I'm glad that it's becoming clear to more people that Cruise and Waymo are at very different levels of maturity. Waymo is so far ahead that it's hard to see anyone catching up. We really need some alternative so there isn't a pure monopoly 10 years from now. I'm not sure there are any mergers that would bring anyone close ("two turkeys don't make an eagle" and all that).
• linuxhansl 3y ago
  Are there any reliable statistics of something like accident per mile driven that compare between autonomous vehicles and human drivers? What I found so far is this: - Waymo and Cruise have driven about 8 million miles driverless (mostly in San Francisco) and reported about 100 crashes (mostly minor like scraping shopping cart, etc) and many that were fault of another car. (as of September 2023) - Apparently a human drives am average 100 million miles between fatal accidents. In that case we do not have enough data, yet. I'm not sure what to think. Is the rate of accidents a cause of concern? Or is this blown out of proportion and driverless cars are actually safer? Or (most likely) we simply do not know, yet?
• sashank_1509 3y ago
  As someone who has had FSD for the past 2 months, I would never trust it with left turn merges into fast lanes, any weird situation (I’ve seen it deal with construction fine but once an excavator was blocking the road and it kept trying to inch forward in the smallest of gaps even though it was clear that the only solution was to wait till it was off the road) and extreme turns (>150 degrees). My drive to work is 20 miles and a really good stretch of that is just 1 lane where I’m stuck behind a car or the road is empty. In those cases I have no problem letting FSD handle everything, the road is extremely hilly, bendy, lane lines vanish every once in a while and it’s fine so I do find it useful at times, though not worth 200$ a month by a long stretch. I’ll probably cancel the subscription soon. Its problems appear very clearly whenever it needs to accurately predict what other cars on the road will do to make its decision. It is honestly horrible at that and while a few times I tried to not intervene, I realized I was just creating a nuisance and now stopped allowing FSD to deal with those situations. It is also bad if there are wrong lane lines (happens at one final stretch of my daily drive) Finally, as someone working in AI, I’m actually very optimistic about their next approach of just learning an end to end model to drive the car. I think this is the only scaleable way to reach human level driving. Any set of rules based + optimization based planner will have those edge cases that ruin the cars capability, in fact it turns out the long tail is really long. When a human is not drunk and focused he is a remarkably good driver. On the other hand, if you just need to capture the edge cases data and add it to your training set to solve it, you can capture all the possible driving conditions that come up on road. This reminds of how there were hundreds of failure modes and jailbreaks for ChatGPT early on while now there are close to None, presumably because they just added them to the training set. If a good human level self driving car appears, I’m convinced it will be an end to end approach, whether the Tesla team are capable of this, who knows. Also for those who think, OpenAI’s scale based approach only works for language, I have access to ChatGPT Vision and its capabilities astound me. Scale for sure works
  • ra7 3y ago
    > Finally, as someone working in AI, I’m actually very optimistic about their next approach of just learning an end to end model to drive the car. I think this is the only scaleable way to reach human level driving. Any set of rules based + optimization based planner will have those edge cases that ruin the cars capability, in fact it turns out the long tail is really long. Tesla doesn’t have an end-to-end model. They call it “end-to-end AI”, which just means they’re applying AI to all subsystems, exactly like everyone else. All the big players already use heavy ML-based planning systems that are not “rules or optimization based” and which are way more sophisticated than anything Tesla has put out or is planning to.
• alsodumb 3y ago
  It's wild that Cruise intentionally decided to hide the information of them dragging a person under the car for 20 feet from regulators. However, now that the news is out, their PR team says they showed the video to DMV folks while DMV denies that. Well, someone is lying and I bet it is Cruise. Here is Cruise initial NHTSA filing: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2023/INOT-PE23018-11585P2.pdf https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2023/INOT-PE23018-11585P2.p... They mention every detail from start to end but don't mention the fact that they dragged a person under the car. Let me be very clear, if Cruise just collided with a person due to the mistake of another driver, that's cool. However, this is something way worse. Cruise car stopped, and then decided to drive 20 feet dragging the pedestrian under the car because someone on Cruise team designed a rule that says "if there is a collision, move away from the spot after stopping to avoid blocking traffic". No human driver will ever do that.
• sourcecodeplz 3y ago
  Well, who is surprised?
• DrScientist 3y ago
  In terms of self driving car technology I do wonder once it matures how new entrants will ever be able to get into the market. Why would you let, by definition, more dangerous cars on the road in order to perfect their software, when perfectly good solutions exist? Perhaps in the end Waymo will be forced to license the base technology somehow.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• snewman 3y ago
  Related: robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks just wrote up an incident where a Cruise cab he was riding in stopped suddenly in the middle of an intersection, nearly causing a bad collision: http://rodneybrooks.com/autonomous-vehicles-2023-part-ii/ http://rodneybrooks.com/autonomous-vehicles-2023-part-ii/. Consistent with the discussion here of Cruise cars being dangerously timid.
• varelse 3y ago
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• ubermonkey 3y ago
  I do not understand why we're letting these companies test autonomous cars without someone clearly on the hook for both financial and criminal liability for each car.
• psini 3y ago
  From Europe and wasn't aware there currently were at least 2 different self-driving cab companies already operating in (at least some parts of) the USA. Feels like I just aged 15 years in 5 minutes
• robotburrito 3y ago
  Good. While people may argue that these things are safer, their success will only lead to the development of more car centric living spaces. Streets will be wider, harder to walk, less people centric. IMO its cheaper in the long run to just have transit and bike lanes.
• electrondood 3y ago
  I saw a Waymo in my neighborhood stopped in the middle of the road. Cars backed up behind it, and the driver quickly took over and accelerated. The car then returned to driving 20 mph in a 25 mph zone. Tesla is going to smoke these companies. Theirs is the only software trained on high quality actual driver behavior (which they can pull from their fleet because they have telemetry in the form of a real-time safety score for every driver). It's like every other company is trying to write an algorithm to construct strings, and Tesla has GPT-4.
  • goalonetwo 3y ago
    Tesla is not going anywhere. They are a driver assist technology. I don't even understand how you can put them in the same bucket. They don't have the hardware to compete with Waymo and Cruise. But sure, it is a good narrative for the stock to go to the moon.
• ChicagoBoy11 3y ago
  I ran a non-profit website in Brazil where schools could look up a question-by-question breakdown of how their students did in the high-school exit exam. I was a bit flummoxed by the process of maintaining a decently sized database with that data, and realized that there were only so many visualizations I'd need for it. So, over a week, I just had an algorithm compute everything I would need for each school for the several million students in the db, and then handily save a file for each institution with that data in an S3 bucket. No databases, no complex logic, just a few pennies of cost for S3... and it made building out the visualization such a breeze!
• someonehere 3y ago
  I took a Cruise for the first time a month ago. It arrived and it sat there for almost ten minutes. It kept telling me that my ride was getting ready. Someone from the operations center also called into the car and asked if I was ok and reassured me the ride would start soon. This was at night with zero traffic. I have no idea why it took so long. When the CPUC was set to vote on expanding Cruise’s operations several months ago, SF first responders and other residents spoke out against expanding operations. CPUC ignored all the feedback and concerns and voted to expand. I believe the press pointed out the CPUC people that voted to expand Cruise operations would benefit off the expansion (can’t recall if they were former employees or tied to the driverless industry). But despite emergency responders giving numerous examples of how dangerous the cars were in emergency situations, they were ignored.
• mdavid626 3y ago
  This news site is simply unusable. The web is broken.