111–120 of 652 posts
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We can do anecdotes back and forth, but many people would absolutely love “Uber but there’s not a stranger in the front seat.”
They will love it until they are leaving from the bar and the last bar attendee left them a big wet bile-smelling present all over the seat. At least when this sort of thing happens on a bus there are other seats you could use.
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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
Covid transmission via surfaces is basically non-existent, as far as we can tell.
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…
Cruise CEO here. Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win. In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensin…
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The $250,000 SF taxi medallions?
Assuming it is $250k one time purchase, it seems cheaper than annual pay for a person to drive around SF, and the overhead to manage the person.
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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?
The human accident rate is about one per 500K miles, so if they were able to get in that range, then yes, they would have succeeded; drivers would be able to stop paying attention to the road without putting themselves and others in danger. But the current FSD beta's intervention rate is more like one per 10 miles, judging from some quick googling. I see no particular reason to assume that incremental improvement can…
I, uh, don't know if I like a CEO who is surprised that he's being allowed to do the thing he is doing.
What is the benefit of a taxi being driverless, for the passenger? Is it cheaper?
No forced chitchat, no chance I’ll be rated badly, (eventually) safer than many of the drivers I’ve had. I’d use it daily if it were an appliance rather than an interaction. Right now I have a car.
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The benefit, one day, is if you're a criminal whose face is detected, the car doors will lock, and you'll be driven directly to law enforcement who will be ready and waiting to apprehend you.
Although possible. I suspect and hope there will be some push back. Imagine a counterpoint in either a bug or malicious attack where innocent person is locked in and then driven into a lake or something. I dont think autonomous cars should be able to lock people in. The car can report to police silently, that's fine.
I’m concerned about the timing of this. Former CEO Dan Ammann, fired in December, was a big champion of the robotaxi business model. It is speculated he was fired because GM CEO Mary Barra disagrees with this strategy and wants them to focus more on integration with existing GM vehicles. I am afraid that the robotaxi timeline was pulled in so that the rest of the believers inside Cruise can get supporting data to pro…
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What makes you say Tesla is imitating humans? Their motion planning is all traditional robotics logic, not anything learned.
Vision-based driving. Humans don't have lidar sensors.