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Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

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Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#61

Post by ufo »

_up wrote: post #50
jorts wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was driving home a few months ago in the rain on Division in SF. Cars were stopped, and I immediately couldn't figure out why. When I passed the stopped vehicles I got my answer: there was seemingly a wall of water coming down from the freeway overhead and an autonomous car was stopped as it apparently didn't know how to handle the situation.

Couldn't they have something like a real Human remote driver. That can intervene, but also can oversee multiple cars.

Does anyone here know if California driving law allows for remotely-operated vehicles like that?

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#62

Post by organsnyder »

sloppycee wrote: post #25
abalone wrote: post #15

> 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…

I'm not involved in autonomous vehicles at all but as an engineer, I'm pretty confident we are a long way away from level 4/5. Without significantly reworking current infrastructure the challenges presented by city driving are too fuzzy to guarantee safety. For example, traffic lights can be obscured, out of order, or spoofed; unless they are modified to support av; I don't think this is solvable. Although autonomous…

> For example, traffic lights can be obscured, out of order, or spoofed

Wouldn't that also potentially impact human drivers?

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#63

Post by organsnyder »

miheermunjal wrote: post #13

Can't believe I'm saying this... but what an acquisition for GM. Masterful potential future pivot

Automakers are likely in a precarious position that they are just beginning to realize: If car-sharing really takes off (due to automation making it cheaper to hail on demand rather than owning a vehicle), they could see sales drop off by orders of magnitude. Glad to see that some of them realize this; though as a resident of western Michigan (home to many automotive suppliers), I am concerned about the potential impact up the supply chain.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#64

Post by Retric »

Fricken wrote: post #36
abalone wrote: post #15

> 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…

Waymo (Google) is not that far from level IV. Average U.S. driver has one accident roughly every 165,000 miles and disengagements is not 1:1 with crashing. I suspect drunk drivers would probably be safer handing over control which could make a huge difference.

Most interesting is the Disengagements by location. (page 9) https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b...

  Interstate 0
  Freeway 0
  Highway 12
  Street 112
Which might be good or bad depending on the relative amount of driving in each situation.

PS: Disengagements per 1,000 miles also dropped from 0.8 (2015) to 0.2 (2016) which suggests very good things.

PPS: Been getting a lot of up and down votes I wander what people agree / disagree with?

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#65

Post by organsnyder »

macNchz wrote: post #38
delegate wrote: post #18

Self-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 prop…

> 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?

Some people will still own cars. But owning a car will shift from being a necessity (as it is for people today in areas without adequate transit systems) to a luxury.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#66

Post by mikepurvis »

ufo wrote: post #61
_up wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they have something like a real Human remote driver. That can intervene, but also can oversee multiple cars.

Does anyone here know if California driving law allows for remotely-operated vehicles like that?

Hopefully not, at least not yet. That doesn't sound nearly as safe, or as accountable— you just wouldn't have the same situational awareness looking at sensor feeds vs. looking out the actual windows.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#67

Post by tyingq »

deckar01 wrote: post #49
tyingq wrote: post #16

Sounds like the tech itself is in pretty good shape, but was surprised at the haphazard looking way it's grafted onto the car. Pretty sure I'm seeing zip ties and generic aluminum t-slot, with the front sensors sticking quite a ways out from the overall profile of the car. Pretty sure that's hitting someone's shin/knee as they exit the car at some point. Not trying to make too big a deal of that, but now that they ar…

They stick out about the same amount as the side mirrors, which I assume is not a coincidence. I suspect that molded body parts to hide the extra hardware won't make much of a difference to the majority of consumers. Do you want a ride in the cheap, safe, ugly car or the expensive, glitchy, sexy car?

>Do you want a ride in the cheap, safe, ugly car or the expensive, glitchy, sexy car?

Consumers tend to perceive things a certain way that's not always grounded in common sense.

Also, obstacles close to the ground are easier to miss visually.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#68

Post by bryanlarsen »

yourapostasy wrote: post #58
lucidrains wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason I paid any attention was because of an impressive demo they put out a few months back. https://youtu.be/6tA_VvHP0-s Still, who knows at this point.

Neat, but I've yet to see a demo of a self-driving vehicle in rain so hard drivers slow down from 65 mph to 45 mph, the wipers at their fastest setting are struggling to keep up, and when you drive through a puddle, the splash from the water obscures the windshield for a couple seconds. Conditions with such low visibility from the rain coming down so hard that you wish you had a clear view screen (also called spin wi…

If conditions are so bad that it's unsafe for humans or robots to drive, then refusing to drive in such conditions is the correct behaviour.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#69

Post by mikepurvis »

yourapostasy wrote: post #58
lucidrains wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason I paid any attention was because of an impressive demo they put out a few months back. https://youtu.be/6tA_VvHP0-s Still, who knows at this point.

Neat, but I've yet to see a demo of a self-driving vehicle in rain so hard drivers slow down from 65 mph to 45 mph, the wipers at their fastest setting are struggling to keep up, and when you drive through a puddle, the splash from the water obscures the windshield for a couple seconds. Conditions with such low visibility from the rain coming down so hard that you wish you had a clear view screen (also called spin wi…

IMO, the real answer is that no one should be driving in that kind of weather, and autonomous systems which refuse to do so are simply doing what humans should be doing.

I'd be very content with an autonomous vehicle that would detect these conditions and pull to the side of the road to wait for things to improve before proceeding.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#70

Post by Animats »

headmelted wrote: post #3

That they are dogfooding a private beta makes me think that this has leapfrogged what Google had been shooting for previously, and where Uber is now. I don't know what other options there are on the ground as I'm not based there. It does seem though that there's a real opportunity for GM to sneak past Uber and Google into a first-mover advantage with this. I'd no idea they were anywhere near this close to a working A…

Volvo has a hundred self-driving cars in test in Gothenburg, Sweden. They're driven by selected Volvo customers. They're only self driving on a few freeways, but they don't have a "safety driver", and the customers are not required or expected to pay attention while in automatic mode.
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