Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 236 posts

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#141

Post by bobsil1 »

irq11 wrote: post #90
bjtitus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always question whether humans are really any better at this calculation. In the gnome example, many people will probably stop to avoid damaging their property, not see the car behind them careening forward, and end up getting rear ended anyway. In an ideal world, ethical issues like the one you presented would be major hurdles but humans aren't going to be perfectly rational in the moment of many accidents, especi…

There's no ethical question here. You either see that it's a gnome, or you see that it's a child. Humans may or may not be less situationally aware overall, but we have the gnome question down cold. Cars don't. They see "obstacle in front of bumper radar." The OPs point is well-taken because it illustrates a technical risk that few are discussing: the "last 1%" of self-driving software may be equivalent to solving AG…

>the "last 1%" of self-driving software may be equivalent to solving AGI.

Exactly right. You need a semantic world model, reasoning and prediction. AGI bottlenecks self-driving, assistants, text understanding…

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#142

Post by inverse_pi »

dmode wrote: post #140

I read the whole blog post, but not sure what's the difference between this car and the Tesla with 2.5 Autopilot hardware. Isn't that a production ready car that will give you autonomous L4/L5 "some day" ? Or is there some fundamental difference that I am missing out on ?

AFAIK, tesla doesn't use lidars. This one has at least 2 lidars, so there's that.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#143

Post by tim333 »

byset wrote: post #47
soared wrote: post #16

Wow. FYI - This is how you mess up content marketing. If the author genuinely wanted me to read the article and get to know the brand, he shouldn't have used such a scummy title. Yes, the article is /technically/ true. But they are only talking about the hardware, and acknowledge in the second paragraph that they don't have the software. So while the title implies self-driving cars are a solved problem, they are real…

I didn't get that impression. Paragraph two says they have "the most advanced self-driving software ever demonstrated," which has been in use driving cars around in real city traffic on their prototypes or whatever (according to their youtube videos), but the article seems to be saying that they now have designed and built mass-producible cars that can run the software. (If I'm wrong, then yeah, not only the title bu…

Paragraph 2: "today, we’re unveiling the world’s first mass-producible car designed to operate without a driver"

Implies L5

Paragraph 3: "The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation self-driving car"

ie L3, you need a driver paying attention like in a Tesla(?)

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#144

Post by bjtitus »

irq11 wrote: post #90
bjtitus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always question whether humans are really any better at this calculation. In the gnome example, many people will probably stop to avoid damaging their property, not see the car behind them careening forward, and end up getting rear ended anyway. In an ideal world, ethical issues like the one you presented would be major hurdles but humans aren't going to be perfectly rational in the moment of many accidents, especi…

There's no ethical question here. You either see that it's a gnome, or you see that it's a child. Humans may or may not be less situationally aware overall, but we have the gnome question down cold. Cars don't. They see "obstacle in front of bumper radar." The OPs point is well-taken because it illustrates a technical risk that few are discussing: the "last 1%" of self-driving software may be equivalent to solving AG…

I do think the "last 1%" may be a very hard problem to solve, but the majority of crashes are simply people not seeing things or making bad decisions. "Recognition Error" and "Decision Error" are the two most frequent categories of accidents which basically boil down to not seeing obstacles while performing a maneuver (changing lanes and not seeing a vehicle in that lane, turning and failing to see an oncoming vehicle) and driving too fast respectively. ( see https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...)

I don't see why the "last 1%" problem needs to be solved when we have hundreds of thousands of accidents every year caused by people not paying attention, not reacting in a timely fashion, and driving unsafely; all problems that computers are likely to excel at.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#145

Post by jccooper »

tim333 wrote: post #143
byset wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get that impression. Paragraph two says they have "the most advanced self-driving software ever demonstrated," which has been in use driving cars around in real city traffic on their prototypes or whatever (according to their youtube videos), but the article seems to be saying that they now have designed and built mass-producible cars that can run the software. (If I'm wrong, then yeah, not only the title bu…

Paragraph 2: "today, we’re unveiling the world’s first mass-producible car designed to operate without a driver" Implies L5 Paragraph 3: "The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation self-driving car" ie L3, you need a driver paying attention like in a Tesla(?)

No, paragraph 3 means it's the third iteration of their hardware. That's unrelated to the self-driving "levels".

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#146

Post by tigershark »

Animats wrote: post #110

So GM engineering got the hardware integrated with the vehicle and engineered it for assembly line production. That's what GM engineering does. Whether the Cruise software is good enough for self-driving without driver attention remains to be seen. Volvo is doing well with their self-driving car, but admits the hardware cost is over $100K per car at present.

I don't really believe it is possible. Lidars were the most expensive part and are much, much cheaper now, I can't really imagine how can they spend more than 100k$ of self driving hardware per car.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#147

Post by tigershark »

aerovistae wrote: post #63

While I'm almost always bullish on new tech, self-driving cars are one where I frankly have a pretty hard time buying into the hype. I think when they really start to hit the streets, some issues are going to show up. Here's what I mean. Imagine this situation: You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids left a lawn gnome there, blocking it. The car won't go forward because there'…

Hopefully in a not too far future you and all the others that are convinced that are better drivers will be forcefully signed up so your scenario can't possibly occur given that the other car will be self driving and always paying attention.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#148

Post by Nagyman »

mholt wrote: post #132
maxerickson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers are so much better at detecting traction problems that electronic stability control is mandatory in most new vehicles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#R...

Cool. But sometimes the road is just plain impassable. And having grown up in many Iowa winter blizzards, I still don't trust even electronic systems. They help, but sometimes there's nothing you can do when there's basically no friction.

The safest thing might be for the car to pull over, put on hazard lights, and tell you to wait or call for assistance.

Humans deciding to go continue driving in such conditions is a mistake, leading to more collisions. Perhaps there will be a manual override, like "Unsafe conditions, voice password and waiver required to continue in manual mode; you might die or kill someone else."

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#149

Post by dclowd9901 »

cropsieboss wrote: post #102
antirez wrote: post #4

I don't know what to believe. A few days ago I spent some time checking publicly available data and the result is that the current state of art is extremely far from an autonomous car that, could like used to drive a taxi in a busy city like Rome. Not far as "still some effort needed" but potentially "not clear when this could be available" far. Now there are those claims made by multiple companies... Go figure.

The thing is, for car driving you need combinatorial search combined with a good model (statistical) of the world. Research I've seen does not incorporate any kind of meaningful search. Company that has all the roads and surroundings scanned and knows exactly where the car is at all times is at a huge advantage. Partially observed world gets your head hurting. Not modelling other cars practically makes everything use…

> Modelling and tracking other cars is a bigger issue

Aren't there very reliable ways to model other cars? Something as big as a car can't move very unpredictably in a millisecond-to-millisecond basis. And at the end of the day, all you need to do is be able to model the behavior of your car.

If car in front of me starts to swerve over on a collision course with my car, my car can note the probability of a collision a long (computer-long) time before it really needs to do anything about it. Knowing full-well its own braking, swerving and acceleration capabilities at any given speed, it should be able to know when it _must_ take action to avoid the actions of another, and it doesn't even have to rely on reaction time.

No, I think the real problem here is for cars to do things like understand _context_ of a situation, like, for instance, how can it tell that there's a bus in front of me turning around that's going to be clear of my way in a moment vs. a tree that's been felled? That's something that computers are and will probably continue to be terrible at until they can closely mimic the capabilities of the human brain.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#150

Post by grmarcil »

bryananderson wrote: post #79
icc97 wrote: post #72

Whether or not this car drives itself it's still damn ugly. Tesla is going about making electric cars sexy. So you won't find me interested even if it sings too. Never-the-less, for all the folks the that don't mind ugly cars it's good to have competition to gather all the data to prove that driverless cars are safer.

This is more important than one might think. At the end of the day, the mass market does not really care whether a car is gas or electric. The average Joe/Jane just has X dollars budgeted for a car and a mental model of what kind of amenities they ought to be able to get for X dollars. Most of the "mass-market" electric cars I've seen in the $35,000 range (i3, Leaf, Bolt) look like $18,000 subcompacts. They just have…

Not that anyone believes that this car is really going to production anytime soon, but as an additional datapoint: the car in the first image is sporting $40,000 worth of lidar on the roof (5 x Velodyne VLP-16).

I'm sure GM is getting a healthy discount off retail from Velodyne, but production-ready lidar is still eye-wateringly expensive by OEM standards. Some solid-state lidar units (Quanergy) out there in the hundreds of dollars (and one from Velodyne in the works for 2018 release), but the fact that Cruise is still using spinning Velodyne units suggests to me that solid-state lidar needs a few more generations to come up to par.

Post reply on HN