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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

getcruise.com

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

#221

Post by jedberg »

desertraven wrote: post #139

The Cruise CEO is here, along with many grand stories of how good/safe their vehicles are. I can’t help but think this thread may be a marketing ploy. If this were the case, is it allowed on HN? Edit: In addition, any negative/challenging/sceptical comment is quickly downvoted.

Their CEO is here in part because he's been with YC nearly since the beginning (he was the cofounder of Twitch and JustinTV). He's one of the first users of HN, and is definitely a long standing member of the community.

It's a marketing ploy only in the sense that they just launched public signups and wanted to let us know about it.

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

#222

Post by ummonk »

comex wrote: post #60
gitfan86 wrote: post #32

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?

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…

What is the appropriate point of comparison though? All human drivers? Sober human drivers? Sober cautious human drivers? Sober cautious human drivers with driver assistance technology (e.g. auto-braking and blind spot warning, or potentially even more sophisticated LiDAR tech)?

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

#223

Post by ra7 »

LegitShady wrote: post #213
ra7 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lidar was expensive back then and would've added huge costs to the vehicles. Not to mention, it looked ugly on consumer cars. Elon conveniently used "humans use only vision" as an excuse and promised every Tesla has "sufficient" hardware for full autonomy. It's that premature promise that doesn't let them add sensors even now (and perhaps Elon's ego) without breaking trust and/or eating big costs for retrofitting. In…

Tesla pivoted to video only. They originally tried with radar as well. So any such statements by musk are already a pivot.

Their radar removal was baffling. There were rumors (perhaps Musk's tweets?) of Tesla investigating 4D imaging radars to replace their really old Continental radars, but they suddenly decided to remove it altogether. Many have attributed it to chip shortage and yet again Musk using vision-only as an excuse for removal.

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

#224

Post by snotrockets »

mlindner wrote: post #163

I'm not interested in cars I can't own. This idea that we'll turn cars into some kind of service and convert roads into places filled with company-owned vehicles is completely foreign. At that point it'd be cheaper to have self-driving buses and subways. I can only think this viewpoint comes from people who have only ever lived in cities where car ownership is inconvenient given the lack of personal garages. At the m…

Even cheaper: don't have computer driven transit, but human driven transit. The current money sunk on the automated driving tech startups could pay drivers for years to come.

What I would like to see is companies and people working towrds eliminating as many vehciles from the road. It is untainable, if we want an habitable planet, to have have a dependency on cars.

This means we have to move back to a denser environment (for the US, think pre WW2 suburbs, vs the current car-dependent sprawl). Either that, or boil the planet. We don't have any other way right now – and as such, Tesla is working towards the idea of heating the planet. Musk is very amandmanet on that, with his constant efforts to destroy public transit with his other companies.

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

#225

Post by snotrockets »

punnerud wrote: post #128

The next thing is a driverless car and a driverless bus “docking” at speed, so you can change vehicle without affecting your trip time. Economics will outcompete 50 self-driving cars going in the same direction for 30min when you could have one driverless-bus doing the same. If this transition is smooth and fast, think what this will do to traveling time, car prices and property prices. How far can you travel without…

We have public transit right now. All we need to do is to not stigmatize its users.

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

#226

Post by panabee »

kvogt wrote: post #93
walrus01 wrote: 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…

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…

thanks for pushing the frontier of self-driving cars and articulating this strategy.

historically, the pattern in tech is to succeed with strategy 2 -- that is, ride moore's law and achieve exceptional performance by combining commodities into super systems. google server farms are the canonical example.

obviously, this is only a pattern and not a law.

tesla's pathway represents strategy 1: start with super machines then drive costs down.

for non-SDC experts like me, could you share why it felt more compelling to start with super machines then drive costs down?

excited to see cruise help lead society into the future!

thanks again.

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

#227

Post by bduerst »

mlindner wrote: post #163

I'm not interested in cars I can't own. This idea that we'll turn cars into some kind of service and convert roads into places filled with company-owned vehicles is completely foreign. At that point it'd be cheaper to have self-driving buses and subways. I can only think this viewpoint comes from people who have only ever lived in cities where car ownership is inconvenient given the lack of personal garages. At the m…

Cars are large, depreciating assets that spend the vast majority of their product lifecycle doing nothing. Conversely, metropolitan areas have to dedicate up to half their available space to empty blacktop storing these unused assets that sit around doing nothing.

The sooner we solve on-demand transportation at scale without requiring a human driver the sooner we can move away from this colossal degree of waste.

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

#228

Post by somethoughts »

kvogt wrote: post #93
walrus01 wrote: 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…

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…

In addition to going into highly dense cities and inserting autonomous cars into existing driver regulation; an interesting auxiliary strategy could be to partner with a master planned community that was designed from the ground up (physically and regulation wise) to be an autonomous first town where the majority of vehicles were autonomous and the majority of home owners were pro-autonomous cars.

The roads and pedestrian crossings could be much clearly marked with RF transceivers, etc. and the inclement weather could be pre-considered. HOA agreement could have a "I agree to co-exist with autonomous cars" TOS clause and perhaps a built in monthly subscription.

I think a ton of home builders (Lennar, etc.) and senior community developers (Ventas) would be interested if only as a PR concept. I also think a lot of remote Techies/senior citizens would be interested [1]. Sort of like this but replace golf carts with autonomous cars.[2]

[1] https://news.voyage.auto/why-retirement-communities-are-perf...

[2] Tom Scott - City of Golf Carts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM

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

#229

Post by spiderice »

RIMR wrote: post #116

"Today we are opening up our driverless cars in San Francisco to the public - I’m still surprised I can even write those words" 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.

Oh please. This is so pedantic. Clearly he is emphasizing that this is a dream come true, and a few years ago he might not have believed they could do it. He's not saying "I'm shocked that San Francisco is dumb enough to let us do this".

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

#230

Post by [deleted] »

gitfan86 wrote: post #32
walrus01 wrote: 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…

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?

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