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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

getcruise.com

41–50 of 652 posts

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#41
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will likely be cheaper (maybe not initially), but more restrictive in pickup/drop-off and availability (ETA).

Don't you mean less restrictive? A human might have preferences against areas that a computer might not. Further if it's cheaper and less complex to operate (not dealing with employees is a significant decrease in complexity) I would expect more car owners to enter the market and provide services.

It will more restrictive because they haven't mapped all streets.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#43

What is the benefit of a taxi being driverless, for the passenger? Is it cheaper?

If you can reduce the cost of a car trip to fuel + maintenance + depreciation, you are providing a very compelling alternative to private car ownership. It will change everything.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#44

What is the benefit of a taxi being driverless, for the passenger? Is it cheaper?

no. a billion dollars wasnt invested to socialize transportation. ultimately it may be more, if there is value in not having to interact with the smell of a fleshbag

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is success? Does 50 miles of geofenced and daily mapped streets mean Cruise won self driving? What if Waymo gets to 20k miles of geofenced roads and monthly mapped? What if Tesla gets to the point of one intervention/crash every 100k miles? 10M Miles?

Yeah, they’re not trying to solve the same thing? I think Tesla is right that to solve it for real you need to solve the general case which can’t rely on high resolution maps. The city cab case is smaller and can, so the cruise approach makes sense for that use case. It’s just narrower.

Or you solve for a subset of highways in a subset of weather conditions. That would be more useful to a lot of people than city cabs which exist today (with human drivers).

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#46
post #43

What is the benefit of a taxi being driverless, for the passenger? Is it cheaper?

If you can reduce the cost of a car trip to fuel + maintenance + depreciation, you are providing a very compelling alternative to private car ownership. It will change everything.

nobody owns a car because its cheaper than other forms of transit. and if you want to be cheauferred around by an ai instead of taking a bus, you will pay for it.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#47
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would much rather prefer my own private car than one being driven by someone else. It'll be interesting to see if the level of cleanliness though as most drivers tend to take care of their car because it's their car. If someone throws up in one of these cars does it know or does it just show up to the next pickup?

That raises another question for me: I thought Uber and Lyft[0] had COVID-related cleaning protocols that require their drivers to disinfect some surfaces of the car after each ride. How can a driverless car do that? [0] https://www.lyft.com/driver/clean

Do they? I've ridden plenty of ubers in the past year and haven't noticed any such disinfecting.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#48

So is this just SF? How many people can actually sign up and use it? Wow thats a nice amount of funding? Is this going to be their last funding round before they IPO? Is there a VC who give more funding? Are employees gonna be rich or is this gonna be a wework scenario?

[deleted]

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#49
post #8

Based on this image: https://images.ctfassets.net/95kuvdv8zn1v/6h1C7lPC79OLOlddEE... They and their VC backers are clearly betting on the concept that radars + lidar + imaging will be the ultimate successful solution in full self driving cars, as a completely opposite design and engineering philosophy from Tesla attempting to do "full self driving" with camera sensors and categorical rejection of lidar. It is interes…

They are wholly owned by GM are they not? Starting this way doesn’t preclude them taking Tesla’s vision only approach in the future. Even Tesla initially had a radar vision combination approach before moving to pure vision. The real question with whatever technique being used is can they drive the hardware cost low enough that it can be widely deployed.
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