131–140 of 183 posts
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?
These two horses aren't competing against each other.
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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…
>> 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. 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.
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Thanks, that certainly is impressive. I didn't understand your last comment: >"At a price that just barely starts to make sense for the average driver when you factor in fuel savings and tax subsidies." At $36K and just using $5K as an arbitrary tax subsidy number isn't it the same price as most US mini SUV style cars?
Hatchbacks are not mini-SUVs, and many people can't afford to own a mini-SUV. $36,000 with no trims is pricy for a new car. I've been adamant that owning an EV would be a non-starter for me, but having seen the Bolt, if I were shopping for a new car, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
$36K is pretty close to average car price in the US now:
https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/average-vehicle-transact...
I think you are right that there are many people who can't afford a $35K car which is why leasing is seeing such an uptick:
https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/automotive-lease-volume-...
A compact SUV is one of the best selling card this year in the US and at ~20K its not actually that pricey compared the average car price in the USA of $34K.
And the compact SUV is looking like it it will dislodge the sedan's long dominance. See:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4064632-new-u-s-car-sales-k...
and
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/05/01/why-nis...
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…
I applied on the website. I have a solid background in embedded systems and C++ but I immediately received a rejection email. I wish I could have chatted with an engineer first :-(
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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 fo…
I've never seen them pulled over in the bike lane on Valencia like very other Uber/Lyft, which is a good thing, but picking up and dropping off is far from autonomous friendly in that neighborhood.
Of course sometime it's obvious a person is in control and presumably they're generating training data.
I wonder what the premium would be for the psychological anxiety of taking a self driving car. If I pay $5 for a Uber ride, I'd need a significant discount for the equivalent autonomous ride at this stage.
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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.
And if you're somewhere this is common (e.g. Florida), and there are still human drivers, you'll have to account for them not slowing down at all.
If you're in an area where flash flooding can happen, waiting may be a more dangerous option. Or you could be in a place where there is no place to stop.
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I think so? I don't know the law, but I do know if I'm turning left and someone else is turning left in the other lane - in sf, I need to make sure the cars behind them aren't going around them in the same lane.
I guess I'm not understanding the scenario. A car was stopped in your lane waiting to turn. Presumably you should wait until they have turned, or make a safe lane change to another lane to move around them?
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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 crim…
Sure you can imagine some class action / criminal legal disaster but the auto industry has survived repeated scandals. Corporate criminal negligence is extremely rare.
In five or ten years this technology could be saving 100,000 lives every year. I hope we are not so risk adverse that these benefits are needlessly delayed.
http://www.insurance.com/auto-insurance/auto-insurance-basic...
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.