Hi HN, engineer at Cruise here. I just wanted to point out that most people are surprised when I tell them we're hiring a ton of backend/full stack/android engineering positions (mostly go/node/react), and you don't need prior robotics or machine learning experience to apply (although we like those too). So, if you're interested in working on AVs or the systems that support them, please take a look at our careers pag…
Do you know if Cruise will be looking for interns next Summer? It's a hugely interesting field to me and I'd love to get my feet wet prior to graduating.
Yes! I think we're kicking off 2018 intern hiring in the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the website :)
You have to pay a human to take you. Humans are expensive.
The human part is pretty cheap compared to the other parts at least here in Toronto: Car insurance $220 (20h at minimum wage) Car payment $780 (70h at minimum wage) Gas $200 (18h at minimum wage) Parking $250 (22h at minimum wage) If I didn't enjoy driving and having a nice car, it would already be cheaper to Uber everywhere.
Maybe I'm getting confused due to currency changes, but I think you could certainly divide all of those numbers by two in many American markets.
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…
The real question is, what routes are being followed and in what conditions? Presumably Waymo et al stick to exquisitely-mapped routes with excellent road markings between well-known autonomous-friendly endpoints during good daytime weather for the vast majority of their testing. Performance in less-than-ideal conditions is a more important question. I'm curious if there's any publicly available data on the routes followed, times, conditions, etc.
The Uber car's are absolutely everywhere in Pittsburgh. See probably an average of two one way on my daily commute.
And Pittsburgh is a far more challenging driving environment than either San Francisco or Phoenix, with far more diversity of weather and a lot messier infrastructure due to terrain and freeze-thaw cycles and reduced maintenance after population decline— think 20% grade on cobbles after a snowstorm. e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4763879,-80.0106331,3a,75y,2...
Does Uber's autonomous service go to such locations?
Can't believe I'm saying this... but what an acquisition for GM. Masterful potential future pivot
GM is killing it right now. Bolt is the first truly great EV ever built at an "affordable" price. Model 3 is getting all the hype now, but when it's all said and done GM will have beaten them to market by a year with an equally comparable or better product at the same price point.
So GM bought this, but I thought they also had their partnership with Lyft? Are GM just betting on different horses and seeing which properties turn out to be the most fruitful?
Sounds like you're assuming level 4 merely means parity or better with human error. Lots of problems with that. For instance if it's Google's negligent bug that kills the family of 4 instead of a driver, Google gets sued. Google has much deeper pockets than the driver who would typically declare bankruptcy, effectively capping the damages. No real cap for Google, every time. So that explodes the cost of autonomous ve…
Google however does have the ability to hand over the cost of insuring such a system to the consumer, so even at current accident rates the cost is around 100 dollars a month per car using such a system (driving 12000 miles in a year). This equates to something like a cent per mile. So let's say they want incredibly high quality insurance, charging an extra 5 cents per mile won't make a difference in the scheme of th…
This aspect of insurance is widely misunderstood. First of all an extra 4 cents/mile just for insurance is really expensive. But wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits can result in very large judgements, especially when we get to punitive damages for a large corporation. Individual offenders regularly go bankrupt. It may be wishful thinking that this can be easily solved with "insurance". There is also the criminal negligence aspect to consider.
For those nay-sayers pointing out the incidents where the cars had to have manual control taken, I think you're missing the forest for the trees. 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 occu…
Paraphrasing Tolstoi, every accident is different in its own way. I see that approach as unscalable as current antivirus companies.
Making a blacklist of every possible accident condition is as foolish as making a blacklist of every possible harmful Turing-complete program.
Can't believe I'm saying this... but what an acquisition for GM. Masterful potential future pivot
GM is killing it right now. Bolt is the first truly great EV ever built at an "affordable" price. Model 3 is getting all the hype now, but when it's all said and done GM will have beaten them to market by a year with an equally comparable or better product at the same price point.
>"Bolt is the first truly great EV ever built at an "affordable" price."
I would curious to hear your opinion on what things specifically makes the Bolt a great EV - features, comparative specs etc.