FYI I see cruise cars all the time in SF. Natural next step.
Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
31–40 of 183 posts
Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#32This makes me so excited. I can't wait until the interiors of cars can change completely due to the safety brought by self driving cars. If all cars were self driving and communicated with each other, the risk of crash would be almost nonexistent (obviously there would still be wildlife and other issues). Given a near 0% chance of crash however, we could remove many of the annoying 'features' of a current car, like s…
A public 'bed car' sounds gross.
Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#33Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#34This makes me so excited. I can't wait until the interiors of cars can change completely due to the safety brought by self driving cars. If all cars were self driving and communicated with each other, the risk of crash would be almost nonexistent (obviously there would still be wildlife and other issues). Given a near 0% chance of crash however, we could remove many of the annoying 'features' of a current car, like s…
A public 'bed car' sounds gross.
I mean, yea. I guess I left out the details of how the car service you were renting from would clean things between uses. Didn't think that was necessary to spell out. There are public 'nap rental' places now that have that particular problem pretty well sorted out.
Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#35Why does the photo show a lady getting in the back seat? There is no driver(?), and the front seat has an airbag...
Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#36> Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions Not trying to pour cold water on this but.. it's all about those "few occasions". The difference between level 2 and level 4/5 autonomy is vast. Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. A small corporate shuttle service…
At the end of 2016 all companies testing autonomous vehicles in California filed their disengagement reports. Waymo reported 1 unplanned disengagement every 5000 miles, and GM reported 1 every 180. Nobody else was even in the running. These metrics are crude, but it's currently the only benchmarking system we've got, and we'll see in December where Cruise is really at when they report their 2017 numbers.
Cruise does distinguish itself by driving mostly on busy downtown SF streets, a challenging environment, and they've released impressive videos showing off their capabilities.
A few weeks ago Kyle Vogt claimed Cruise would surpass Waymo 'in a few months', whether they do or not remains to be seen, but they are making sustained progress and they have the full force of General Motors behind them.
Unlike Waymo, Tesla's Autopilot program, and Uber's autonomous driving program, Cruise's operation has been drama free, without any lawsuits, leadership blowouts, or departures of key people. This implies they've got a solid team under good leadership, and I think it matters a lot with complex software projects like this.
Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#37Why does the photo show a lady getting in the back seat? There is no driver(?), and the front seat has an airbag...
I think they're legally required to have drivers at the moment.
Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#38Self-driving cars will slowly (or quickly) make car ownership redundant. Why own a car (pay taxes, insurance, parking), when you can have one at your door in a couple of minutes ? When you arrive at the destination, just exit the car - no need to look for parking or anything like that, let the car figure it out. If technology can do that, then owning a car becomes more of a hobby than necessity. I hope GM's strategy…
> Why own a car (pay taxes, insurance, parking), when you can have one at your door in a couple of minutes ?
Because when I want to use one to go to the mountains or the beach on a holiday weekend there will be none available or surge pricing? This is already the case to some extent with rentals and car sharing services.
I own a car in NYC that is only used on the weekends. Financially this is a somewhat dubious proposition compared to Zipcar, but it's a win for me in two ways: it's always available without any reservation process, and my financial incentive is to use it more often since I've already paid all of the fixed costs (tax, insurance, parking) of ownership. I like this incentive since I enjoy getting out of the city. With Zipcar the annualized costs are fairly similar to owning a car and using it a couple of weekends per month, but a simple weekend getaway comes with a $300+ pricetag up front for the car rental.
Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#39Self-driving cars will slowly (or quickly) make car ownership redundant. Why own a car (pay taxes, insurance, parking), when you can have one at your door in a couple of minutes ? When you arrive at the destination, just exit the car - no need to look for parking or anything like that, let the car figure it out. If technology can do that, then owning a car becomes more of a hobby than necessity. I hope GM's strategy…
I used to think this, and I still think it'll happen in urban centers, but there are pretty big swaths of rural or just low density areas that wouldn't be well served by this, so it'd take a while (a couple decades extra maybe) to get local rideshare hubs going, and in some more remote places it maybe would never happen.
Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
#40I've seen these driving around SF, they're still using the standard engineer in the driver's seat model. One almost hit me when I did the standard SF, 'drive around the person waiting to turn left in your lane' thing on 16th.
Did you have the right of way in that situation?