81–90 of 183 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen ~10 Cruise cars around Mission Dolores and Soma in SF. 100% of the time the driver has his hands on the wheel and appears to be making the turns himself. I'm skeptical of how automated this service actually is. Maybe those are training runs or the drivers are letting the wheel guide them.
I have made the same observation in SOMA area. Not even once I saw the car being driven autonomously
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…
Waymo is doing this with real, public customers (albeit hand-selected ones) in Phoenix[0]. Uber has been doing this for months with customers in Pittsburgh[1]. This is certainly a sign that Cruise is making good progress, but I wouldn't say it means they've leapfrogged the competition by any means. [0] https://waymo.com/apply/ [1] https://www.uber.com/blog/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-self-driving...
This 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…
Rear-facing seats are not illegal I think (obviously not allowed for the pilot, currently) - and they have been amply proved to actually be safer. They've been the standard on military planes (again, not for the pilot :-) ) for quite a few years. Once people get around the initial shock (something not to be discounted - it may kill the sales of a car) they are quite happy with them on planes.
What makes it safer? Do you have any references? It sounds interesting.
Is it because if you crash, your back absorbs the impact better?
> 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…
But, there's no guarantee of safety now. Human drivers are fallible and fail all the time.
A guarantee of safety is a crazy metric to require before we can allow autonomous vehicles. A better metric is: "before the vehicle is more safe than the median human driver". Once it hits that level of safety, it should be in the streets.
Just an observation. There's this tricky corner in the Marina Fillmore/NorthPoint. It took the corner pretty fast and I was surprised (could have been under manual control). People cross there indiscriminately without looking and I have been caught in a few close situations in my car. A creeping system around corners blocked by cars could be helpful.
Fast forward a few days and the same thing happened, this time at Mission and 18th. Only at this intersection there's a no left turn restriction and the driver overrode it and made the left.
If one of Cruise's autonomous cars is doing something aggressive I'd assume it's under human control. Hopefully the cars won't pick up too many bad habits.
> 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…
San Francisco would be one of the harder cities to make self-driving work: bad light, heavy traffic traffic, bicycles, poor lane markings, spotty GPS downtown, etc. I haven't been to Phoenix, so can't comment on the difficulty of running a self driving car there, but I would guess its easier than SF.
When there's an incident of a car needing a human to take control, what happens next? Cruise will record the incident, and add it to the training data set. Now, the system will learn what it should have done instead and that same kind of incident becomes less likely to occur.
I think this isn't about beta testing the product. I think this is primarily about gathering those failure data points. More cars driving means more miles driven, more data collected, leading to a consumer ready product faster.
And if it happens to give the employees a neat benefit, all the better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rear-facing seats are not illegal I think (obviously not allowed for the pilot, currently) - and they have been amply proved to actually be safer. They've been the standard on military planes (again, not for the pilot :-) ) for quite a few years. Once people get around the initial shock (something not to be discounted - it may kill the sales of a car) they are quite happy with them on planes.
I've never heard abour rear-facing seats being safer befofe. What makes it safer? Do you have any references? It sounds interesting. Is it because if you crash, your back absorbs the impact better?
Rear-facing seats are definitely not illegal in cars. Tesla has them as an option for a third row in the Model S. I think they would be legal in airplanes too, and the main reason they don't see more use is just that people are often uncomfortable not facing the direction they're going.
Why does the photo show a lady getting in the back seat? There is no driver(?), and the front seat has an airbag...
> 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…
I don't doubt that it's a challenging environment, but there are many, many different kinds of challenges that are not even present in that city.