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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
331–340 of 652 posts
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sensor cost is a lame excuse, especially coming from a company that's one of the leaders of EV world. Battery prices are decreasing, but sensors wouldn't? Tesla put constrain on themselves, because they wanted to sell product years before they existed, and they were super cheap on HW, to optimize their costs. They optimized their solution, before they even had a slightest idea what's needed to make it work.
core to tesla's strategy is to do massive data collection from consumer-owned cars using beta software (and hardware, that the consumer pays for). that model is not compatible with expensive lidars, which contrary to some other comments in this thread, are still very expensive (just because the entry-level pucks are cheap, does not mean full lidar coverage is cheap). there is no way they could push $100k of sensors on consumers to build out their data collection pipeline. when tesla was first starting out, affordable lidar did not even exist so it's hard to call that a lame excuse.
all that said, I'm still pessimistic about tesla's chances at making camera-only L4 work in any short time horizon. we will see if they pull it off, but it's such a severe disadvantage compared to fully-kitted competitors.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are betting that hardware combination is the fastest to market, given the constraints of today software. When the ml stack is capable of leveraging purely camera sensors, Cruise and others like them, own the fleet and can swap out the hardware. Tesla does not "own" the fleet per se. So perhaps its different bets on which cars will still be on the road when the ML threshold is crossed.
> when the ML threshold is crossed If, not when. Even the most cutting edge research today still pales in comparison to LiDAR.
Is it really an "if"? I think it would be pretty safe bet that in 100 years human-quality CV object detection will be solved (note, we both know that it is possible AND this doesn't require AGI). So then it's really a question of when (presumably you don't need the full 100 years).
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#334The 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…
In-transit transfers is a fascinating idea, but there probably more practical solutions to the problem you're trying to solve.
More realistic I think is finding the right size for vehicles somewhere in between the size of a car and a bus: A bus gets you somewhere at maximum efficiency while sacrificing accuracy (walking to and from bus stops) while a taxi gets you somewhere at maximum accuracy while sacrificing efficiency (roads full of single-passenger vehicles). Something like 6-10-passenger vans are probably the right middle ground to maximize both efficiency and accuracy.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> while these demo companies are doing if statements around the block. [citation needed] I only ever see Tesla fanbase making outrageous claims like this without any supporting evidence.
Well, you are ignoring the point. The whole differentiating strategy between Tesla and everyone else is the incrementally improvement of large amounts of vehicles versus the magic “hey, we came out of nowhere and now just drive ourselves”. This has been repeated though out tech history and the incrementally improving real life one always wins.
And Tesla will just ingest large amounts of data from their fleet and magically dump an L5 solution one day? That's believable?
Elon Musk has been promising imminent L5 self driving every year for the past 7 years; that requires more than incremental improvement. The ones actually doing incremental improvements are companies like Cruise and Waymo, making it work one geography at a time.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#336Earlier 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…
My conclusion from years of self-driving, LIDAR, etc. research is that managing medium to heavy precipitation reliably might be impossible. Visual algorithms run into the same problem as human brains, and the size of e.g. rain drops interferes with the frequencies employed by radio techniques. Is anyone aware of any strategies that give us hope in solving this problem?
Airplanes couldn't fly in inclement weather for decades. Took a while but we solved it.
"Oops it's pouring, can't get a Cruise, gotta fall back to an Uber" doesn't sound that terrible to me, for now.
Cruise could even offer a product that compensates/insures you for that eventuality, if for example Cruise was your primary vehicle.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#337Based 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…
The question is do the economics of self-driving cars work when you have to add and integrate all these additional equipment. Correct me, if I am wrong but aren't LIDAR cars supposed to cost you $200K+ ? Tesla is imitating humans in a way that removing LIDAR and relying on the compute to make up for them and build more accurate picture. Also, isn't Cruise owned by GM - who are the VCs here?
I recall a few years ago, GM/Cruise acquired a LIDAR manufacturer in 2017. Not sure if it has worked out, but their rationale for the acquisition for vertical integration makes sense.
Strobe’s solution will reduce the cost of making these sensors by 99 percent, Vogt says. “The idea that lidar is too costly or exotic to use in a commercial product is now a thing of the past.”
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do expect at least some companies will hit L4 within the decade(?) but it's going to be under limited conditions that won't include urban driving. Which could actually be a very useful capability but isn't the "don't own a car" future that some really are focused on. ------ Level 4 _ High Automation System capability: The car can operate without human input or oversight but only under select conditions defined by f…
> "driver might manage all driving duties on surface streets then become a passenger as the car enters a highway." This is the kind of setup I can't wrap my head around. The car might "require" you to take over when you exit the highway, but it can't exactly "make" you. If you fall asleep on the freeway and the car isn't willing/able to drive at the end of your journey, or in edge cases if you were to pass out, etc.…
Pull into breakdown lane.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The software could require a trip to the dealer for a visual inspection of the tires at set intervals. Hopefully free of charge for something so simple. A quick hookup to the computer and the interval is reset.
That seems like bad value when you can look at your own tires. (And should in case they get a sidewall bubble.)
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#340[deleted]