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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

#311
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow...spot on! That was a fun read. I don’t think the scenario is that outlandish.

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

#312
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…

Congrats on your incredible accomplishment! Thanks for doing this the responsible way. Tesla's approach does not inspire confidence. Starting at the high end, with expensive, reliable tech and slowly bringing the costs (and bulkiness of the equipment) down is the right approach!

In my experience, expensive doesn’t necessarily mean more reliable, it could just mean higher fidelity, higher resolution (and possibly less reliable due to the utilization of parts ‘less’ produced on the global supply chain), etc.

This improved resolution don’t necessarily help an AI grok the situation in real time with >20 Hz response time though.

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

#313
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…

I grew up in a part of Ontario where total whiteouts can happen fairly frequently on both major highways leading in and out of my small town. It is in fact possible to drive dozens of km in near or total whiteout conditions simply by the hazard lights of the car ahead of you. You very frequently will see lines of cars km long, all going I don't think vision-based FSV will ever reliably handle winter conditions like this. The engineering and QA effort just isn't worth the cost-benefit when you factor in the very small amount of drivers who are consistently exposed to conditions like that. My father, who spent his career commuting to the city on that highway, was disappointed when I explained this to him.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A helpful link for your perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

But are you using confirmation bias to find a cognitive bias that fits here. But, In all seriousness we don't have access to the data across all 60k FSD users to know what the intervention rate is and how it has been changing over time.

Dirty Tesla used to track these stats in his testing and gave up because “it’s not changing”

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

#316

> Today we are opening up our driverless cars in San Francisco to the public I doubt that means what they hope we think it means. So your employees have been taking your carefully designed ride and now you've let a couple of non-employees ride the course. If it means more than that, especially allowing random rides with random passengers, I'd be very surprised.

It is not a "course", the employees request to be picked up and dropped off anywhere in the city, just like requesting an Uber/Lyft ride.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know next to nothing about lidar engineering but 60GHz band radars can still function out to several hundred meters in rain. It is significantly attenuated as the rain rate (in mm/hour) increases, but it takes a lot of rain to make it completely useless.

This depends on how powerful your antenna are, $200 wigig transmitters will struggle with much range over those distances.

And how directional and narrow the gain pattern is.

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem should be solvable in software. The car can simply refuse to operate in a situation where maintenance is required.

How do you know maintenance is required in a completely automated fashion?

My fear is that car manufacturers will turn cars into a totally dealer serviceable only thing (even more than they are now), like the car version of the glued shut Microsoft surface that gets a 1/10 on the ifixit repairability score.

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

#319
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely a luxury option for showing off at this point, as a status symbol, lots of people out there daily drive cars that don't have a bluebook value anywhere near $12k for the entire vehicle.
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