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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

#151

Post by KekDemaga »

vkou wrote: post #129
richardwhiuk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers are pretty terrible. I'd imagine if it breaks down, then the same breakdown cover everyone has at the moment will kick in.

> Human drivers are pretty terrible. I beg to differ. The average sober human driver has 1 fatal accident in 120-300 million miles traveled, depending on where they live in North America. Given that we are bags of meat and water, have reaction times measured in hundreds of milliseconds, were never designed to operate heavy machinery, and manage to achieve all that on a mere 100 watts, that's pretty amazing.

Agreed if human drivers were actually terrible nobody would ever drive. The risk would simply be too high.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] »

vkou wrote: post #129
richardwhiuk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers are pretty terrible. I'd imagine if it breaks down, then the same breakdown cover everyone has at the moment will kick in.

> Human drivers are pretty terrible. I beg to differ. The average sober human driver has 1 fatal accident in 120-300 million miles traveled, depending on where they live in North America. Given that we are bags of meat and water, have reaction times measured in hundreds of milliseconds, were never designed to operate heavy machinery, and manage to achieve all that on a mere 100 watts, that's pretty amazing.

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by Tossrock »

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…

I know you were asking rhetorically, but there are still reasons to own a vehicle, even in a world with L5 autonomy.

A pretty big thing you can do is keep stuff in there. This is perhaps a nice-to-have for many people, but for certain use-cases it's mandatory (ie a general contractor who keeps their tools in their truck.)

There's also the idea of doing clandestine things[1] in your car which you don't want some data vacuum to pick up.

Some people like racing, and/or doing work on their engines as well.

And of course, status symbols remain "in", this year and likely for the foreseeable future.

L5 autonomy does away the "typical" use-cases of personally owned vehicles (ie, move a person and maybe a few light goods a short to medium distance), which is great. Not everyone owns their vehicle purely as a point-to-point human transporter, though.

======

[1]: (Like planning surprise parties) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5b_jYWVcQ&feature=youtu.be

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

#154

Post by ghaff »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #85
dude3 wrote: post #73

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.

Their cars have trouble with left turns as well. I was walking to Rainbow a few weeks ago and heard a bunch of honking. Turns out the car wouldn't make a left on a green light (Folsom at 13th). 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…

Left hand turns are one of the tricky things (as experts like John Leonard have also pointed out). The appropriate behavior is VERY context-dependent. Ordinary prudent and conservative behavior in some circumstances is you're-never-going-to-make-a-turn and you'll cause road rage in other drivers under other circumstances.

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

#155

Post by dragonwriter »

aphextron wrote: post #142
bogomipz wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that hatchbacks were SUVs, it was simply a comp as the sedan market is giving way to the compact SUV in the US. $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-lea…

>$36K is pretty close to average car price in the US now: You have to keep in mind that $36k 'average' number is highly inflated by luxury purchases. Most people end up spending closer to $20k. I think when they hit below that magical $19,995 number we will see massive adoption.

Yeah, that's a mean not a median, and is therefore the wrong average to use for this purpose, which calls for median (or even mode in preference to mean.)

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

#156

Post by dragonwriter »

JshWright wrote: post #40
drawnwren wrote: post #9

I'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?

AFAICT, no; the requirement that passing on the right, where allowed, only be done when the maneuver can be executed safely would seem to require yielding to other traffic (CVC Sec 21755(a).)

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

#157

Post by calvinlh »

spikels wrote: post #146
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Humans quickly change your rider review from 5 stars to one when you do not tip.

Drivers have to rate you before they see your tip unless you give a cash tip.

There have been reports of drivers changing ratings retroactively after seeing their own rating drop, or if a customer doesn't tip.

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

#158

Post by calvinlh »

spikels wrote: post #146
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Humans quickly change your rider review from 5 stars to one when you do not tip.

Drivers have to rate you before they see your tip unless you give a cash tip.

There have been reports of drivers changing ratings retroactively after seeing their own rating drop, or if a customer doesn't tip.

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

#159

Post by ClassyJacket »

tim333 wrote: post #104
sdenton4 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would need incredibly low latency for that to be safe, I think. FPS games use a pile of tricks to send minimal data over the network which wouldn't be available to an autonomous car: we don't have access to the game engine, after all...

You wouldn't automatically need low latency. In a situation like the above one the car could pull over and wait for the control center to tell it whether the drive on through the water or not. Not quite the same problem but the Starship delivery vehicles work a bit like that - remote link to a control center. http://uk.businessinsider.com/doordash-delivery-robots-stars...

That would require the car to have the ability to override its tendency to not drive thru physical obstacles. Remote control to say "go into that lane", "turn left" is one thing, but remote control to drive thru what it perceives as a physical object is different.

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

#160

Post by abalone »

Retric wrote: post #147
abalone wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Medical errors kill on the order of 700 people per day in the US (high error bars on that number though). And yes, insurance is a major cost in the medical field, but even large scale negligent deaths are regularly dealt with by the US legal system. Yes, anyone putting out such a system is going to get sued, but so does every car company that exists today. It's just the cost of doing business and ultimately just get'…

You're correct. The question is what is the cost passed on to consumers. If it is something on the order of the cost of medical malpractice insurance and average settlements, well, wow. That would make AV prohibitively expensive.

More likely the bar for level 4 will just be significantly higher than parity with human error, if only for liability reasons.

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