do Cruise and Waymo do rolling stops?
Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#292What is the benefit of a taxi being driverless, for the passenger? Is it cheaper?
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.
That won't ever happen. If it did, it would disproportionately affect people of color, be declared a racist "feature," and be banned.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#293Earlier 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.
Problem isn't how much LIDAR used to cost or costs now. Problem is that customers paid for a product, and they still don't have it, many years later. And what is being showed nowadays is nowhere close to what was advertised.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
This problem should be solvable in software. The car can simply refuse to operate in a situation where maintenance is required.
I wonder about that. The top maintenance issue that comes to my mind is sufficient tread on tires. Bald tires will still work great on dry streets but as soon as it starts raining, you start skidding. I honestly don’t know if software could intervene quickly and reliably enough there.
This is what service intervals are for - your car likely requires an service every 12 months or XXXX kilometers whichever comes first. The service doesn't just include actual work on the car it includes an inspection of the lights, tyres, etc and a report to the owner saying "tyres need replacing in the next couple of thousand Ks they're almost at the wear indicator".
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#295Earlier 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…
No, the different strategies are that Tesla has a vehicle actually being used by hundreds of thousands of people and is slowly incrementally improving their self driving with massive amounts of feedback and data, while these demo companies are doing if statements around the block.
> vehicle actually being used by hundreds of thousands of people and is slowly incrementally improving their self driving with massive amounts of feedback and data
Throwing data at the problem isn't going to solve it. Only people without expertise in AI think that's how it works.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#296What is the benefit of a taxi being driverless, for the passenger? Is it cheaper?
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.
There's a story to that account: https://www.vice.com/en/article/xygzvz/one-star
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
All this tech we have is large, depreciating assets yet it still keeps happening. Humans are a large depreciating asset to the elite, lets hope they don't get tired of us anytime soon and replace us with AI and robotic servants...
Automation breeds new job creation and QoL improvements.
Coming closer to a post-scarcity society with little waste would be considered a boon, not dystopia. The capitalist idea that your worth is tied to how many hours you work is fading; the newer generations are already calling for work reform.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
This problem should be solvable in software. The car can simply refuse to operate in a situation where maintenance is required.
In the general case it's impractical for electronic sensors to accurately measure the mechanical state of the vehicle. How do they tell us the suspension is rusted out and about to break? (In theory you can play some clever tricks with eddy currents or something but that's not going to be feasible for real world sensing.)
That is not much of a problem in practice. A 'rusted out' suspension doesn't happen overnight. There could be regulatory requirements for self-driving cars to be considered 'streetworthy'. Out of compliance, robotaxi disabled.
The tricks you mentioned are already used for some aircraft inspections.
What the software needs to worry about would be other types of failures. Software is much more likely to detect issues before the driver. Say, brake performance is outside the expected range, or appears to be degrading too quickly.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#299Earlier 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.
> 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.
But they do relay on maps. You cannot use FSD without latest, high resolution maps.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#300Based 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.
Tesla's approach is a textbook case of differing constraints.
Despite Elon's commentary, the reason Tesla does not use lidar is sensor cost (waymo/cruise cars probably have 250k+ worth of sensors on them), and reason Tesla does not use radar is supply chain.