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Some of the incidents were overblown, sure, but even before the pedestrian dragging incident the CA DMV had ordered them to scale back their fleet by 50%. I to
by minwcnt5 2y ago
Some of the incidents were overblown, sure, but even before the pedestrian dragging incident the CA DMV had ordered them to scale back their fleet by 50%.
I took a few rides with Cruise and it was clear it was not ready for prime time, the potential was evident but it seemed like they were a couple years behind.
- jessriedel 2y agoI'm not disputing that Cruise was behind Waymo a bit, just the idea that development was stalling because supporters were losing faith in progress. (That was the possibility raised in the original comment I was replying to.) That is, there is no "autonomous driving winter". Separately, any level-headed quantitative assessment of the cost-and-benefits of the roll-out to society will find that we are going way, way too slowly. It is madness to slow down a research program -- whose every day of delay costs the US over a billion dollars -- because, out of hundreds of test vehicles driving over many months, a handful blocked traffic for a few minutes. If you wait to start building out the fleet until autonomous vehicles are 2x-10x safer than human drivers (the conventional wisdom among regulators), it will delay things by years and so literally cost tens of thousands of lives. (I've taken dozens of rides in a Cruise and had zero safety issues, am very happy to have them driving around in my neighborhood, etc.)