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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

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.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      The fastest way to do that is to put size limits on personal vehicles. There has been study after study showing that the larger and heavier cars get the greater the risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the-tide-of-pedestrian-deaths-from-large-cars-and-suvs/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...
      - xnx 3y ago
        > Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. Requiring cellphones to disable themselves in cars might be even more effective.
      - billy99k 3y ago
        What about the studies on deaths and injury with smaller vehicles only involving another vehicle? My guess is that it's much higher. Most families with kids want larger vehicles for exactly this reason.
  - groby_b 3y ago
    Outperform mediocre humans means AI cars replace something shitty with something less shitty. That means the net danger of traffic as a whole goes down. Setting an unreasonably high bar - like "drive with perfect record" - will simply prevent that happening, and we're stuck with humans. Perfection is a north star, not an attainable goal. As long as we get net positive, the world is a tiny bit better. And then you make it a tiny bit better again. And again. Why do you think the bar for AI should be higher than "better than what we have"?
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    The problem is that the bar for autonomous cars is perfection as far as public perception goes. Right now, any incident involving a autonomous car is going to immediately be blamed on the autonomous car and not any other party, even if the fault lies entirely on the dickhead running the red light. It won't be enough for autonomous cars to merely not cause crashes, people will expect them to actively avoid them, even in cases where a human would have failed.
- epa 3y ago
  So you observed 21 cars with issues out of the 1000 you saw, a marginal hit rate.
  - RC_ITR 3y ago
    Yeah - same thing as only 30k /300mn Americans dying in car accidents per year, right? A rounding error? The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad. Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
    - riffic 3y ago
      "accident" is a word specifically mentioned by George Carlin as a soft language euphemism for crash or collision. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566
  - seagullriffic 3y ago
    This is such a poor use of numbers to prove a point. Any unsafe car - one - could potentially end multiple lives. Therefore, one unsafe car is unacceptable. Look up "Vision Zero". It's possible, and should be expected from our town planners, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers.
    - darkerside 3y ago
      Vision Zero is being used to justify some of the dumbest, most shortsighted traffic changes I've seen
    - pie420 3y ago
      Vision Zero is literally the least effective program out there. Almost every metric they track has gotten worse in the past 5 years
      - bluGill 3y ago
        Vision zero when done correctly makes a big difference. However useful changes are often expensive so instead they do cheap things (like put up signs, and flyers) that don't really make a difference. Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars. We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed. Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.
- Lonestar1440 3y ago
  Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse. I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car. I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.
  - RC_ITR 3y ago
    >Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either. Yeah we agree? The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad. Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
    - cozzyd 3y ago
      yes, but wouldn't it be easier to remove the unsafe drivers? All of this AI would be really great at automatic traffic enforcement. Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Further, you kind of assume human drivers are going to do these dangerous things, so you can anticipate them. It's more important to be predictable than to be conservative/safe. Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      > it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems. Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  > I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. This one could be fixed tomorrow by adopting regulations that other advanced countries have had for decades.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. The only thing that seems to get enforced around where I live is speeding, and very unevenly: one time a month or so you see them out giving tickets like gangbusters. On all other days and for all other laws, it seems like the highway is a free-for-all: Stop sign rolling, running red lights, playing with your phone while driving, weaving in and out of traffic, burnouts, excessive noise, coal rolling, go right ahead--nobody is stopping you.
    - bonestamp2 3y ago
      > We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases. For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  If humans aren't the baseline then what is?
  - RC_ITR 3y ago
    IDK, no fatalities caused by cars?
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      you're describing a goal or a requirement, not a baseline. baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles. Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?
    - stickfigure 3y ago
      Cars are large masses moving at high velocity. If there are humans in the vicinity, "no fatalaties" is simply not an option.
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      That's a fine baseline if your plan is to otherwise eliminate cars. Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win. When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis. We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers. However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice. For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.
- mumblemumble 3y ago
  In a sane world, the existence of shitty human drivers would not be an excuse for lowering the bar for self-driving cars. It would be a reason to start treating a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roadways as a privilege rather than a right.
  - RC_ITR 3y ago
    Who is asking for a lower bar for Cruises? I'm asking for a higher bar than humans!
- barkingcat 3y ago
  Humans should be the baseline precisely because they aren't very good. Imagine a whole fleet of hundreds of self driving car that are worst than the average human driver (who are already really bad) all making the exact same worst than human mistakes.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    I don't want imagination, I want real numbers! Several groups must have them, but so far nobody is talking, except those who have reason to conceal the truth. (Average drivers includes those driving drunk, which isn't a useful compare for someone who doesn't do that) It is not hard to imagine that self driving cars are normally better except for some situation. If we can know those situations we can also talk about hybrid where we don't allow humans to drive where they are bad, and don't allow cars to drive where they are bad. However someone with real numbers needs to talk.
    - bhelkey 3y ago
      > I want real numbers Every single accident involving a self driving car in California must be reported to the DMV. In addition, miles driven and disengagements are reported. All that information is available today online (e.g. accidents [1]). > nobody is talking No one talks data about the biggest player Waymo because "human driver causes an accident" is not news. In September, there were three crashes involving a Waymo car. On September 3rd and again on the 11th, a driver hit a parked Waymo car[1]. On September 30th, a car rear-ended a Waymo car stopped at a red light[1]. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-vehicle-collision-reports/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
- computing 3y ago
  I regularly see human drivers intentionally run red lights. Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I don't know the last time I've seen a driver do that. The closest I've seen is a school bus/van a few months back drive through a red light after the light had already been red for a number of seconds. (I already had a green for the left turn.)
    - mindslight 3y ago
      I don't even drive that much, but I've seen this behavior twice in the past week and a few more times in the past few month: Driver stopped at non-sensor intersection in straight lane. Left turn arrow turns green, straight solid red stays red. Driver starts going and proceeds straight through intersection. I'm left wondering if this is part of the general breakdown of norms following Covid, or aging boomers not caring about tickets, or what. It could just have been a spurious pattern too, of course.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  > I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. Did the bike lanes have a "no parking in bike lane" sign? Because (and I learned this by getting the question wrong on my CA license test when moving here) it's not illegal to park in bike lanes in CA.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > 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. Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k. The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline. If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die. We should do our best to keep standards high and increase them as technology permits, but there is no reasonable way to avoid using the current numbers as a baseline.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    I think the better question is why we try to replace cars 1 to 1, even if it is in terms of mileage rather than number of vehicles. The problem isn't just drivers, the problem is cars. For most trips there are superior technological alternatives, there's just no political motivation to implement them because infrastructure is boring and it's easier to justify throwing more money at roads in the short term than investing in long term urban renewal projects to build and expand tram networks, underground transit, dedicated bus lanes and bicycle-first road networks. Especially now that the idea of "walkable neighborhoods" has cynically become a culture war issue rather than something that's objectively improving quality of life while reducing emissions and resource waste.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      I like reducing car use too, but that's not what autonomous driving tech in particular is useful for. Also I expect that a single autonomous taxi can replace more than one private car.
Waterluvian 3y ago
Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly? I realize I don’t have a real concrete sense of just how many of these there are. Like is this a whole thing already? Edit: thanks for the responses…. Good gravy…
- tmpz22 3y ago
  > Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly? In SF yes. Even small amounts of driving in certain areas will have multiple daily interactions with these vehicles.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    Where can I see videos (in the wild, not corporate) of this? I've never seen one in my life, though I'm in LA.
    - milesskorpen 3y ago
      I see them multiple times per day in the Alamo Square/Divisadero neighborhood in SF.
    - ra7 3y ago
      Well, Waymo is now giving rides in LA as part of a promotional tour. So you might be able to see one sooner than you think. https://youtu.be/iNlS1LSDjl8?si=Me-zKKD7g0dPo6tH https://youtu.be/iNlS1LSDjl8?si=Me-zKKD7g0dPo6tH
    - masto 3y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/@JJRicks https://www.youtube.com/@JJRicks has almost 200 videos of his Waymo rides at this point, and has probably captured everything one could hope to see them do.
    - JoblessWonder 3y ago
      It is probably an odd thing to find because in SF they really are everywhere. I don't live in SF but visit a few times a year and after the first time I saw one they just sort of became part of the cityscape and not worth filming.
_2d30 3y ago
My day-to-day experience with Cruises on the road is much better, mile for mile, than with human drivers. Cruise's failures, in my view, have come broadly at the long tail where their cars stall out entirely in the road due and it cascades to other Cruises.
- dopamean 3y ago
  There's literally no way you know this for a fact.
  - _2d30 3y ago
    There's literally no way in which I expressed it as being known as a fact by me. Did you make sure to reply like this to poster I replied to as well?
  - pie420 3y ago
    The comment you are replying to starts with "My day-to-day experience..."
    - dopamean 3y ago
      Yes and then go on to say something they could not possibly know for a fact. In my day to day experience Cruise cars are, mile for mile, far worse than human drivers . How could I possibly know that? I've had a couple bad encounters with Cruise cars but I've had countless encounters with human drivers in between all those. How could either of us possibly know which one is better "mile for mile." It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with "in my experience" they attempt to make it sound like they're just talking about their personal experience but then they go on to say something that sounds rather objective and _could_ be measured (but wasn't).
      - _2d30 3y ago
        Scene: dopamean and their partner get home from the grocery store with a trunk full of groceries. dopamean's partner knows dopamean has had a tough week at work and wants to do something nice for them. dopamean's partner: "Hey dopamean, in my experience, the grocery bags full of canned goods are heavier than the ones full of chips. Let me take the heavier ones and you can take the lighter ones!" dopamean: infuriated "How could you possibly know which bags are heavier? It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with 'in my experience' you attempt to make it sound like you're just talking about your personal experience but then you go on to say something that sounds objective and _could_ be measured but wasn't! Did you weigh each bag to determine their objective heft? No!" dopamean's partner: distraught "I'm so sorry, dopamean! I will never again share informed personal experience with you about objective matters without first conducting a rigorous measurement program beforehand to confirm my priors. Thank you for showing me just how much better I can be! I can tell you're so much smarter than me and I can learn so much from you." dopamean: angrier than anyone has ever been "Oh 'I'm so much smarter than you' am I? You fail yet again! Did you measure my IQ, did you measure yours?? Have you learned nothing!? I could easily be 3 or even 4 standard deviations below your IQ!" Fin.
nfriedly 3y ago
> ...San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year... I spent a year in the bay area, working in the city for about half of it. It completely destroyed any joy I got from driving. I've been back in Ohio for 10+ years now, and I still hate driving. It was that bad then, and I hear it's only gotten worse.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  Commuting into a major city on a weekday isn't a good idea, no matter which city. Luckily SF has a good (for the US) transit system.
- Lonestar1440 3y ago
  I'm fortunate in that I can usually avoid rush hour(s) and have a fairly normal experience. Most of the milage is out on the big highways, away from Bay traffic. Within the city it's fine, as far as city driving goes. Modern vehicles with driver assistance help. When I do have to get from SF to Santa Clara for a 9 AM meeting... the joy indeed slides away.
fhub 3y ago
From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all. * Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic. There was zero chance a human would pull that off. Not enough time for a head check or mirror check. There wouldn't have been an accident but the Waymo clearly has insane reaction time and vision advantages - and uses them.
- gcampos 3y ago
  That is actually an interesting question. We track how many accidents the automated cars cause, but I'm not sure how many accidents they prevent are tracked.
  - jimnotgym 3y ago
    They should let an accident happen occasionally, and then show how it had the data to avoid it if humans had just trusted them.
  - olex 3y ago
    That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.
    - reneherse 3y ago
      It would be interesting if some kind of active/inductive measurement could be made. As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky. No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!
edge17 3y ago
While I don't disagree, this is also a city that has whole lanes on major streets reserved for cable cars. The city isn't exactly known for making decisions that drive efficiency.
- earthling8118 3y ago
  Can you gather some information that backs up your claims here? How would devoting an extra lane to cars increase efficiency? I can't see a scenario where this would do anything but the opposite effect.
  - edge17 3y ago
    Simple math? Assuming a fixed number of cars on the road, more lanes will increase the flow. The cable cars are novelty transportation for tourists that residents of the city don't actually use for commuting. In case it's not clear, I'm refering to California st starting downtown and going all the way up the hill.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      Yeah but the cable cars only run in a limited area, basically the scenic hill you mentioned.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - edge17 3y ago
        Not sure the point here. California St is a major artery in and out of downtown. All I'm saying is there is an opportunity for improving the quality of traffic but instead the public resource of an entire lane is wasted on a bespoke piece of transportation history that runs at a loss in excess of $40m/year
    - SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
      Increasing flow often increases the number of cars on the road, particularly with dynamic routing apps, so the first assumption is invalid.
wannacboatmovie 3y ago
> 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 [...] They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways. You've just described the average Subaru driver in the Seattle area. How is this notably different? Should they be banned from the roads as well?
- sieabahlpark 3y ago
  [dead]
- hot_gril 3y ago
  If it were Subaru's fault then yes. Or if you stop on green during your driving test, you will fail.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
[flagged]
cogman10 3y ago
How would you rank others? Tesla, ford, Mercedese, etc?
- Lonestar1440 3y ago
  Cruise and Waymo are the only two fully automated services I encounter. There might be others in other cities, but I can't comment. I have all sorts of thoughts on the quality of driver assist from various manufacturers, but that's out of scope here and better material if I ever do Youtube.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  The others aren't fully autonomous.
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
    Mercedes is fully autonomous below 40MPH, which is most city driving. Including, they accept insurance liability for any accident -- since human isn't involved and isn't required to be alert/attentive/intercede/etc.
babl-yc 3y ago
I’ve got 5+ rides with each platform and would agree with this assessment. Cruise rides generally have a few uncomfortable moments per ride with some erratic swerving or sudden unexplained stops. Waymo rides feel much more predictable and human like. Although note that “human like” and “smooth” rides do not necessarily mean safer, but qualitatively Waymo feels that way.
dheera 3y ago
I live in the Bay Area and I largely agree with this, but I should also add that the design of most San Francisco streets is stupid, turn-only lanes sneak up on you without advance notice, there are too many individual garages and too few parking structures, there are homeless encampments everywhere, there is always the crazy-new-scooter-contraption-of-the-week being ridden everywhere, there are too many construction projects being taken up at once that never finish, instead of concentrating the entire Bay Area's construction forces to do 1 project start-to-finish in 1 day. Cruise cars do not perform acceptably in SF but they probably would if they deployed in the bazillion mid-sized cities out there with wide streets and ample shoulder space.
- minwcnt5 3y ago
  They're deployed in Austin and there have been a lot of complaints there too, although no serious injury accidents as far as I know. Wide fast streets come with their own set of problems. For instance, stopping in the middle of an intersection is much riskier, the car needs to see objects farther away, etc.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  Sneaky turn-only lanes is one area that SDVs should do better than humans because they've already mapped out the whole city
pbarnes_1 3y ago
I would never let my family ride in a Cruise (and have never). Waymo's are far, far better. I ride one every day, and trust them more than I trust 99% of Uber/Lyft drivers.
iancmceachern 3y ago
We live in SF right near one of their yards and I have the same opinion. They're not ready, and there are incidents I see nearly daily
bparsons 3y ago
I think it was the covering up of an extremely serious accident that got their permit yanked.
lmm 3y ago
> 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. Are they performing worse, or are they just making a better risk tradeoff? Human drivers kill a lot of people every week.
- __loam 3y ago
  I've seen multiple cruises strand just walking around the city. I've never seen a waymo strand. Anecdotally I've heard the ride quality of cruise is a lot worse.
- quest88 3y ago
  Honestly they scare me a little. I frequently walk my dog where a lot of cruises operate. I dislike there's no.. two-way communication? with car. I mean that with a human driver if we make eye contact then I know they see me and I can safely (yes yes not 100%) cross the street. With a cruise I have no idea if it sees me, or if there's a bug that will make it drive as I'm in the middle of the crosswalk. They actually make me jog across out of fear.
lziest 3y ago
I second the absurd conservative driving of Cruise. At the peak hour, even going straight, the Cruise car would suddenly slow down in the middle of the intersection because it seemed it just discovered the pedestrian cross walk and got scared.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  This sounds like Berkeley human drivers.
actinium226 3y ago
I love that we're at a point in time where we can compare and contrast two different self driving systems.
- hiddencost 3y ago
  From somewhat random consumers!
jiveturkey 3y ago
average miles per year for male drivers in the US is 16,550. So 10-20k is smack in the middle average. not a LOT. ok, maybe it's objectively "a lot", but you are no more qualified than the average driver to assess. maybe it's more compelling to say: as an average driver, EVEN I can see that Cruise is far less competent than Waymo.
- Lonestar1440 3y ago
  I didn't realize the average was so high, but looked it up and confirmed. Still feels like "a LOT" when I finally get home, and I also don't know anyone personally who drives nearly this much. Probably biased by my living in the city.
covi 3y ago
Now just need a Waymo invite code :)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
screye 3y ago
> driving extremely conservatively one-third of all road vehicle deaths resulted from speeding [2]. > traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd Because that is how most people in SF pedestrians are killed: in an unobstructed left against traffic. More than 300 people are injured by left-turning drivers every year in San Francisco. In 2019, 40% of traffic deaths occurred when drivers making left turns hit pedestrians – mostly people using crosswalks who weren’t seen by drivers until it was too late [1] > far below the level of most Human drives While the median driver might not be that bad, the average driver sure kills a lot of people. The average person crashes their car 3-4 times over a lifetime [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90702355/40-of-san-franciscos-traffic-deaths-are-from-left-turns-these-design-fixes-could-change-that https://www.fastcompany.com/90702355/40-of-san-franciscos-tr... [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/speed-campaign-speeding-fatalities-14-year-high https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/speed-campaign-speeding... ___________ > 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. In that sense, I agree that we should aspire for better self-driving cars in general. Technology allows us to have some of our cake and eat it too. I'd take this further. Given that self-driving cars not a fashion/emotional purchase, we should similarly tech-them-out to improve collision outcomes. Make the car collide with a pedestrian at their feet rather than the torso. Make it impossible for someone to go 'under' the car. promote outside-airbag design to minimize collision impact. For starters, I support mandating driverless cars for all people with DUIs (at any phase in life), the elderly and those who have been in serious at-fault-accidents. Yes, self-driving cars are worse than the average human driver. But these people are clearly in the bottom 10 percentile.
- Lonestar1440 3y ago
  Yes, the annoying things Cruise do are intended to prevent Unsafe things. But remember the context here: the DMV just yanked the permit because they don't believe these cars are safe. In their eyes, the new dangers introduced outweigh the things cruise might do better. And as we agree; there are clearly better technologies ( waymo) out there that let us have it both ways.
- josefresco 3y ago
dchftcs 3y ago
This looks like the moment of truth for Waymo. Waymo had self-driving for years but rolled out slowly as they prioritized safety. Competitors seemingly had caught up pretty quickly, the space got crowded and for a long time people were thinking Waymo moved too slowly. But now it seems their strategy is paying off, at least in terms of developing an acceptable solution. It still remains whether they can monetize it well, but other people will have to more or less adopt Waymo's model or they won't have a business. Knowing about software, if the key differential factor is how well you can handle a long tail of edge cases, it'll take years before others can compete with today's Waymo in fully autonomous self-driving cars. If you don't have an architecture and culture to obsess about edge cases, it could even be easier to tear down the software and rebuild.

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.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    The fastest way to do that is to put size limits on personal vehicles. There has been study after study showing that the larger and heavier cars get the greater the risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the-tide-of-pedestrian-deaths-from-large-cars-and-suvs/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...
    - xnx 3y ago
      > Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. Requiring cellphones to disable themselves in cars might be even more effective.
    - billy99k 3y ago
      What about the studies on deaths and injury with smaller vehicles only involving another vehicle? My guess is that it's much higher. Most families with kids want larger vehicles for exactly this reason.
- groby_b 3y ago
  Outperform mediocre humans means AI cars replace something shitty with something less shitty. That means the net danger of traffic as a whole goes down. Setting an unreasonably high bar - like "drive with perfect record" - will simply prevent that happening, and we're stuck with humans. Perfection is a north star, not an attainable goal. As long as we get net positive, the world is a tiny bit better. And then you make it a tiny bit better again. And again. Why do you think the bar for AI should be higher than "better than what we have"?
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  The problem is that the bar for autonomous cars is perfection as far as public perception goes. Right now, any incident involving a autonomous car is going to immediately be blamed on the autonomous car and not any other party, even if the fault lies entirely on the dickhead running the red light. It won't be enough for autonomous cars to merely not cause crashes, people will expect them to actively avoid them, even in cases where a human would have failed.
epa 3y ago
So you observed 21 cars with issues out of the 1000 you saw, a marginal hit rate.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  Yeah - same thing as only 30k /300mn Americans dying in car accidents per year, right? A rounding error? The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad. Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
  - riffic 3y ago
    "accident" is a word specifically mentioned by George Carlin as a soft language euphemism for crash or collision. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566
- seagullriffic 3y ago
  This is such a poor use of numbers to prove a point. Any unsafe car - one - could potentially end multiple lives. Therefore, one unsafe car is unacceptable. Look up "Vision Zero". It's possible, and should be expected from our town planners, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    Vision Zero is being used to justify some of the dumbest, most shortsighted traffic changes I've seen
  - pie420 3y ago
    Vision Zero is literally the least effective program out there. Almost every metric they track has gotten worse in the past 5 years
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Vision zero when done correctly makes a big difference. However useful changes are often expensive so instead they do cheap things (like put up signs, and flyers) that don't really make a difference. Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars. We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed. Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.
Lonestar1440 3y ago
Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse. I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car. I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  >Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either. Yeah we agree? The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad. Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
  - cozzyd 3y ago
    yes, but wouldn't it be easier to remove the unsafe drivers? All of this AI would be really great at automatic traffic enforcement. Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Further, you kind of assume human drivers are going to do these dangerous things, so you can anticipate them. It's more important to be predictable than to be conservative/safe. Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    > it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems. Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.
bonestamp2 3y ago
> I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. This one could be fixed tomorrow by adopting regulations that other advanced countries have had for decades.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. The only thing that seems to get enforced around where I live is speeding, and very unevenly: one time a month or so you see them out giving tickets like gangbusters. On all other days and for all other laws, it seems like the highway is a free-for-all: Stop sign rolling, running red lights, playing with your phone while driving, weaving in and out of traffic, burnouts, excessive noise, coal rolling, go right ahead--nobody is stopping you.
  - bonestamp2 3y ago
    > We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases. For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
If humans aren't the baseline then what is?
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  IDK, no fatalities caused by cars?
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    you're describing a goal or a requirement, not a baseline. baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles. Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    Cars are large masses moving at high velocity. If there are humans in the vicinity, "no fatalaties" is simply not an option.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    That's a fine baseline if your plan is to otherwise eliminate cars. Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win. When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis. We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers. However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice. For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.
mumblemumble 3y ago
In a sane world, the existence of shitty human drivers would not be an excuse for lowering the bar for self-driving cars. It would be a reason to start treating a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roadways as a privilege rather than a right.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  Who is asking for a lower bar for Cruises? I'm asking for a higher bar than humans!
barkingcat 3y ago
Humans should be the baseline precisely because they aren't very good. Imagine a whole fleet of hundreds of self driving car that are worst than the average human driver (who are already really bad) all making the exact same worst than human mistakes.
- bluGill 3y ago
  I don't want imagination, I want real numbers! Several groups must have them, but so far nobody is talking, except those who have reason to conceal the truth. (Average drivers includes those driving drunk, which isn't a useful compare for someone who doesn't do that) It is not hard to imagine that self driving cars are normally better except for some situation. If we can know those situations we can also talk about hybrid where we don't allow humans to drive where they are bad, and don't allow cars to drive where they are bad. However someone with real numbers needs to talk.
  - bhelkey 3y ago
    > I want real numbers Every single accident involving a self driving car in California must be reported to the DMV. In addition, miles driven and disengagements are reported. All that information is available today online (e.g. accidents [1]). > nobody is talking No one talks data about the biggest player Waymo because "human driver causes an accident" is not news. In September, there were three crashes involving a Waymo car. On September 3rd and again on the 11th, a driver hit a parked Waymo car[1]. On September 30th, a car rear-ended a Waymo car stopped at a red light[1]. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-vehicle-collision-reports/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
computing 3y ago
I regularly see human drivers intentionally run red lights. Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I don't know the last time I've seen a driver do that. The closest I've seen is a school bus/van a few months back drive through a red light after the light had already been red for a number of seconds. (I already had a green for the left turn.)
  - mindslight 3y ago
    I don't even drive that much, but I've seen this behavior twice in the past week and a few more times in the past few month: Driver stopped at non-sensor intersection in straight lane. Left turn arrow turns green, straight solid red stays red. Driver starts going and proceeds straight through intersection. I'm left wondering if this is part of the general breakdown of norms following Covid, or aging boomers not caring about tickets, or what. It could just have been a spurious pattern too, of course.
aidenn0 3y ago
> I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. Did the bike lanes have a "no parking in bike lane" sign? Because (and I learned this by getting the question wrong on my CA license test when moving here) it's not illegal to park in bike lanes in CA.
Dylan16807 3y ago
> 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. Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k. The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline. If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die. We should do our best to keep standards high and increase them as technology permits, but there is no reasonable way to avoid using the current numbers as a baseline.
- hnbad 3y ago
  I think the better question is why we try to replace cars 1 to 1, even if it is in terms of mileage rather than number of vehicles. The problem isn't just drivers, the problem is cars. For most trips there are superior technological alternatives, there's just no political motivation to implement them because infrastructure is boring and it's easier to justify throwing more money at roads in the short term than investing in long term urban renewal projects to build and expand tram networks, underground transit, dedicated bus lanes and bicycle-first road networks. Especially now that the idea of "walkable neighborhoods" has cynically become a culture war issue rather than something that's objectively improving quality of life while reducing emissions and resource waste.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    I like reducing car use too, but that's not what autonomous driving tech in particular is useful for. Also I expect that a single autonomous taxi can replace more than one private car.

Waterluvian 3y ago

Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly? I realize I don’t have a real concrete sense of just how many of these there are. Like is this a whole thing already? Edit: thanks for the responses…. Good gravy…

tmpz22 3y ago
> Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly? In SF yes. Even small amounts of driving in certain areas will have multiple daily interactions with these vehicles.
- Solvency 3y ago
  Where can I see videos (in the wild, not corporate) of this? I've never seen one in my life, though I'm in LA.
  - milesskorpen 3y ago
    I see them multiple times per day in the Alamo Square/Divisadero neighborhood in SF.
  - ra7 3y ago
    Well, Waymo is now giving rides in LA as part of a promotional tour. So you might be able to see one sooner than you think. https://youtu.be/iNlS1LSDjl8?si=Me-zKKD7g0dPo6tH https://youtu.be/iNlS1LSDjl8?si=Me-zKKD7g0dPo6tH
  - masto 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/@JJRicks https://www.youtube.com/@JJRicks has almost 200 videos of his Waymo rides at this point, and has probably captured everything one could hope to see them do.
  - JoblessWonder 3y ago
    It is probably an odd thing to find because in SF they really are everywhere. I don't live in SF but visit a few times a year and after the first time I saw one they just sort of became part of the cityscape and not worth filming.

_2d30 3y ago

My day-to-day experience with Cruises on the road is much better, mile for mile, than with human drivers. Cruise's failures, in my view, have come broadly at the long tail where their cars stall out entirely in the road due and it cascades to other Cruises.

dopamean 3y ago
There's literally no way you know this for a fact.
- _2d30 3y ago
  There's literally no way in which I expressed it as being known as a fact by me. Did you make sure to reply like this to poster I replied to as well?
- pie420 3y ago
  The comment you are replying to starts with "My day-to-day experience..."
  - dopamean 3y ago
    Yes and then go on to say something they could not possibly know for a fact. In my day to day experience Cruise cars are, mile for mile, far worse than human drivers . How could I possibly know that? I've had a couple bad encounters with Cruise cars but I've had countless encounters with human drivers in between all those. How could either of us possibly know which one is better "mile for mile." It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with "in my experience" they attempt to make it sound like they're just talking about their personal experience but then they go on to say something that sounds rather objective and _could_ be measured (but wasn't).
    - _2d30 3y ago
      Scene: dopamean and their partner get home from the grocery store with a trunk full of groceries. dopamean's partner knows dopamean has had a tough week at work and wants to do something nice for them. dopamean's partner: "Hey dopamean, in my experience, the grocery bags full of canned goods are heavier than the ones full of chips. Let me take the heavier ones and you can take the lighter ones!" dopamean: infuriated "How could you possibly know which bags are heavier? It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with 'in my experience' you attempt to make it sound like you're just talking about your personal experience but then you go on to say something that sounds objective and _could_ be measured but wasn't! Did you weigh each bag to determine their objective heft? No!" dopamean's partner: distraught "I'm so sorry, dopamean! I will never again share informed personal experience with you about objective matters without first conducting a rigorous measurement program beforehand to confirm my priors. Thank you for showing me just how much better I can be! I can tell you're so much smarter than me and I can learn so much from you." dopamean: angrier than anyone has ever been "Oh 'I'm so much smarter than you' am I? You fail yet again! Did you measure my IQ, did you measure yours?? Have you learned nothing!? I could easily be 3 or even 4 standard deviations below your IQ!" Fin.

nfriedly 3y ago

> ...San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year... I spent a year in the bay area, working in the city for about half of it. It completely destroyed any joy I got from driving. I've been back in Ohio for 10+ years now, and I still hate driving. It was that bad then, and I hear it's only gotten worse.

jonny_eh 3y ago
Commuting into a major city on a weekday isn't a good idea, no matter which city. Luckily SF has a good (for the US) transit system.
Lonestar1440 3y ago
I'm fortunate in that I can usually avoid rush hour(s) and have a fairly normal experience. Most of the milage is out on the big highways, away from Bay traffic. Within the city it's fine, as far as city driving goes. Modern vehicles with driver assistance help. When I do have to get from SF to Santa Clara for a 9 AM meeting... the joy indeed slides away.

fhub 3y ago

From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all. * Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic. There was zero chance a human would pull that off. Not enough time for a head check or mirror check. There wouldn't have been an accident but the Waymo clearly has insane reaction time and vision advantages - and uses them.

gcampos 3y ago
That is actually an interesting question. We track how many accidents the automated cars cause, but I'm not sure how many accidents they prevent are tracked.
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  They should let an accident happen occasionally, and then show how it had the data to avoid it if humans had just trusted them.
- olex 3y ago
  That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.
  - reneherse 3y ago
    It would be interesting if some kind of active/inductive measurement could be made. As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky. No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!

edge17 3y ago

While I don't disagree, this is also a city that has whole lanes on major streets reserved for cable cars. The city isn't exactly known for making decisions that drive efficiency.

earthling8118 3y ago
Can you gather some information that backs up your claims here? How would devoting an extra lane to cars increase efficiency? I can't see a scenario where this would do anything but the opposite effect.
- edge17 3y ago
  Simple math? Assuming a fixed number of cars on the road, more lanes will increase the flow. The cable cars are novelty transportation for tourists that residents of the city don't actually use for commuting. In case it's not clear, I'm refering to California st starting downtown and going all the way up the hill.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Yeah but the cable cars only run in a limited area, basically the scenic hill you mentioned.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - edge17 3y ago
      Not sure the point here. California St is a major artery in and out of downtown. All I'm saying is there is an opportunity for improving the quality of traffic but instead the public resource of an entire lane is wasted on a bespoke piece of transportation history that runs at a loss in excess of $40m/year
  - SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
    Increasing flow often increases the number of cars on the road, particularly with dynamic routing apps, so the first assumption is invalid.

wannacboatmovie 3y ago

> 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 [...] They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways. You've just described the average Subaru driver in the Seattle area. How is this notably different? Should they be banned from the roads as well?

sieabahlpark 3y ago
[dead]
hot_gril 3y ago
If it were Subaru's fault then yes. Or if you stop on green during your driving test, you will fail.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

[flagged]

cogman10 3y ago

How would you rank others? Tesla, ford, Mercedese, etc?

Lonestar1440 3y ago
Cruise and Waymo are the only two fully automated services I encounter. There might be others in other cities, but I can't comment. I have all sorts of thoughts on the quality of driver assist from various manufacturers, but that's out of scope here and better material if I ever do Youtube.
hot_gril 3y ago
The others aren't fully autonomous.
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  Mercedes is fully autonomous below 40MPH, which is most city driving. Including, they accept insurance liability for any accident -- since human isn't involved and isn't required to be alert/attentive/intercede/etc.

babl-yc 3y ago

I’ve got 5+ rides with each platform and would agree with this assessment. Cruise rides generally have a few uncomfortable moments per ride with some erratic swerving or sudden unexplained stops. Waymo rides feel much more predictable and human like. Although note that “human like” and “smooth” rides do not necessarily mean safer, but qualitatively Waymo feels that way.

dheera 3y ago

I live in the Bay Area and I largely agree with this, but I should also add that the design of most San Francisco streets is stupid, turn-only lanes sneak up on you without advance notice, there are too many individual garages and too few parking structures, there are homeless encampments everywhere, there is always the crazy-new-scooter-contraption-of-the-week being ridden everywhere, there are too many construction projects being taken up at once that never finish, instead of concentrating the entire Bay Area's construction forces to do 1 project start-to-finish in 1 day. Cruise cars do not perform acceptably in SF but they probably would if they deployed in the bazillion mid-sized cities out there with wide streets and ample shoulder space.

minwcnt5 3y ago
They're deployed in Austin and there have been a lot of complaints there too, although no serious injury accidents as far as I know. Wide fast streets come with their own set of problems. For instance, stopping in the middle of an intersection is much riskier, the car needs to see objects farther away, etc.
8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
Sneaky turn-only lanes is one area that SDVs should do better than humans because they've already mapped out the whole city

pbarnes_1 3y ago

I would never let my family ride in a Cruise (and have never). Waymo's are far, far better. I ride one every day, and trust them more than I trust 99% of Uber/Lyft drivers.

iancmceachern 3y ago

We live in SF right near one of their yards and I have the same opinion. They're not ready, and there are incidents I see nearly daily

bparsons 3y ago

I think it was the covering up of an extremely serious accident that got their permit yanked.

lmm 3y ago

> 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. Are they performing worse, or are they just making a better risk tradeoff? Human drivers kill a lot of people every week.

__loam 3y ago
I've seen multiple cruises strand just walking around the city. I've never seen a waymo strand. Anecdotally I've heard the ride quality of cruise is a lot worse.
quest88 3y ago
Honestly they scare me a little. I frequently walk my dog where a lot of cruises operate. I dislike there's no.. two-way communication? with car. I mean that with a human driver if we make eye contact then I know they see me and I can safely (yes yes not 100%) cross the street. With a cruise I have no idea if it sees me, or if there's a bug that will make it drive as I'm in the middle of the crosswalk. They actually make me jog across out of fear.

lziest 3y ago

I second the absurd conservative driving of Cruise. At the peak hour, even going straight, the Cruise car would suddenly slow down in the middle of the intersection because it seemed it just discovered the pedestrian cross walk and got scared.

hot_gril 3y ago
This sounds like Berkeley human drivers.

actinium226 3y ago

I love that we're at a point in time where we can compare and contrast two different self driving systems.

hiddencost 3y ago
From somewhat random consumers!

jiveturkey 3y ago

average miles per year for male drivers in the US is 16,550. So 10-20k is smack in the middle average. not a LOT. ok, maybe it's objectively "a lot", but you are no more qualified than the average driver to assess. maybe it's more compelling to say: as an average driver, EVEN I can see that Cruise is far less competent than Waymo.

Lonestar1440 3y ago
I didn't realize the average was so high, but looked it up and confirmed. Still feels like "a LOT" when I finally get home, and I also don't know anyone personally who drives nearly this much. Probably biased by my living in the city.

covi 3y ago

Now just need a Waymo invite code :)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

screye 3y ago

> driving extremely conservatively one-third of all road vehicle deaths resulted from speeding [2]. > traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd Because that is how most people in SF pedestrians are killed: in an unobstructed left against traffic. More than 300 people are injured by left-turning drivers every year in San Francisco. In 2019, 40% of traffic deaths occurred when drivers making left turns hit pedestrians – mostly people using crosswalks who weren’t seen by drivers until it was too late [1] > far below the level of most Human drives While the median driver might not be that bad, the average driver sure kills a lot of people. The average person crashes their car 3-4 times over a lifetime [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90702355/40-of-san-franciscos-traffic-deaths-are-from-left-turns-these-design-fixes-could-change-that https://www.fastcompany.com/90702355/40-of-san-franciscos-tr... [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/speed-campaign-speeding-fatalities-14-year-high https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/speed-campaign-speeding... ___________ > 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. In that sense, I agree that we should aspire for better self-driving cars in general. Technology allows us to have some of our cake and eat it too. I'd take this further. Given that self-driving cars not a fashion/emotional purchase, we should similarly tech-them-out to improve collision outcomes. Make the car collide with a pedestrian at their feet rather than the torso. Make it impossible for someone to go 'under' the car. promote outside-airbag design to minimize collision impact. For starters, I support mandating driverless cars for all people with DUIs (at any phase in life), the elderly and those who have been in serious at-fault-accidents. Yes, self-driving cars are worse than the average human driver. But these people are clearly in the bottom 10 percentile.

Lonestar1440 3y ago
Yes, the annoying things Cruise do are intended to prevent Unsafe things. But remember the context here: the DMV just yanked the permit because they don't believe these cars are safe. In their eyes, the new dangers introduced outweigh the things cruise might do better. And as we agree; there are clearly better technologies ( waymo) out there that let us have it both ways.
josefresco 3y ago

dchftcs 3y ago

This looks like the moment of truth for Waymo. Waymo had self-driving for years but rolled out slowly as they prioritized safety. Competitors seemingly had caught up pretty quickly, the space got crowded and for a long time people were thinking Waymo moved too slowly. But now it seems their strategy is paying off, at least in terms of developing an acceptable solution. It still remains whether they can monetize it well, but other people will have to more or less adopt Waymo's model or they won't have a business. Knowing about software, if the key differential factor is how well you can handle a long tail of edge cases, it'll take years before others can compete with today's Waymo in fully autonomous self-driving cars. If you don't have an architecture and culture to obsess about edge cases, it could even be easier to tear down the software and rebuild.