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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

#281

Post by justapassenger »

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…

> 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.

Tesla's approach is a textbook case of premature optimization.

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

#282

Post by pavon »

dnissley wrote: post #257
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…

I always assumed that cruise technology is behind self driving functionality like "super cruise" ( https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/super-cruise ), if only because of the name and based on the fact that gm owns cruise. Can anyone clarify?

The naming is confusing, but the "super cruise" feature of GM vehicles predates the founding of Cruise. I have no knowledge of whether there has been cross-pollination between the two teams since GM acquired Cruise.

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

#283

Post by pvsnp »

mchusma wrote: post #279

I have 3 thoughts: (1) Amazing to see progress, lets make self driving cars a reality! (2) Oh, its another limited private beta like Waymo has been doing. I'd like to actually use these, and this doesn't seem that much closer. (3) What the heck does Cruise's cap table look like anymore? Acquired by GM, then almost immediately spun back out?

Parent organization is still General Motors, they just operate independently

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

#284

Post by olivermarks »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #131
asdff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who knows how long that will take? In some places it takes long enough just to request a single uber trip much less two in a row. Imagine how livid you'd get when a half hour after you first intended to leave the bar, the second self driving car arrives, and it to is soiled.

Hey, with a huge fleet of self driving cars that aren’t taking Saturday night off and only have mostly bar traffic to consider, I think you’ll manage. And the robot won’t take offense.

'Your ride request has been refused due to your social credit score, spare the air day and your recent equity transgressions. Here is a 5% off coupon for sensible walking shoes'.

It's not the robot that might take offense, it's the folks in the panopticon and their databases.

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

#285

Post by amacneil »

sam1234apter wrote: post #218

Why is this considered a big stride when Waymo is doing it for 6 months already? https://blog.waymo.com/2021/08/welcoming-our-first-riders-in...

From your Waymo link:

> All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now

Cruise is the first to do driverless (zero humans in the front seat) testing in SF. Waymo have been doing this for a couple years in Phoenix, but have not yet tested driverless in SF as far as I'm aware.

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

#286

Post by postmeta »

silverlake wrote: post #260
kvogt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tesla limited themselves to cameras because Musk said “humans can do it with two eyes”. He also didn’t like the look of LiDAR on cars. Such an idiotic decision. Good to see Cruise is not lead by a mega-maniacal CEO.

No post body was provided.

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

#287

Post by AussieWog93 »

NationalPark wrote: post #160
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper, you don’t have to tip (in the USA where that is required), availability (driver doesn’t need to sleep), and safety (you don’t have to worry about your driver trying to cheat or rob you). People aren’t getting cheaper. Indeed, this pandemic is showing us just how fragile the labor market is and automation that was too expensive to consider before (like fry robots at caliburger) are now very reasonable upgrade…

Where are Uber drivers considered full time employees?

The UK, for a start.

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

#289

Post by kibwen »

ironrabbit wrote: post #275
silverlake wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla limited themselves to cameras because Musk said “humans can do it with two eyes”. He also didn’t like the look of LiDAR on cars. Such an idiotic decision. Good to see Cruise is not lead by a mega-maniacal CEO.

As of a few years ago, lidar added at least $7500 to the cost of a car. That's a huge price difference for a consumer.

Currently Tesla is charging $12,000 for access to their self-driving package. Even if we assume that the price would increase to $19,500 if they included a lidar (I'm skeptical), it would be the difference between paying $12,000 for a feature that doesn't work versus $19,500 for a feature that might work. This is a luxury option no matter which way you swing it.

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

#290

Post by leetcrew »

potatolicious wrote: post #259
abeppu wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though ... how good a job are humans actually doing in heavy precipitation? I know that under normal circumstances our brains constantly do a bunch of work to create the illusion of a comprehensive high res visual field even though we really only have detail at the fovea. When it's raining heavily, and we think we can see "enough" to drive ... are we right? Or are we just lucky and pedestrians and cyclists are more l…

Agreed - I think the "but can it drive in a whiteout blizzard" question is best redirected to: "can a human?" I suspect there are operating conditions the AVs won't solve acceptably - some of those conditions IMO are also conditions where we should not accept a human to solve acceptably. In general I feel we have a lackadaisical culture around driving that encourages/excuses unsafe behavior, and is overoptimistic abo…

people are actually pretty good at driving in blizzards in locales where they happen often. snow tires (and possibly chains), good clearance, and great caution can get you a long way.

obviously you try to avoid driving in these conditions when possible, but sometimes a moderate storm is much more intense than forecast and you get caught out. pulling off to the side of a snowy mountain pass doesn't guarantee your survival either.

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