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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

#471

The idea that human drivers can create cars that are somehow better drivers than them...has got to be some kind of bunk.

Robots are better at plenty of things than humans.

Specialized things, sure. Agree. But driving has to be almost AGI: an almost entirely open and unrestrained field of endeavor.

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

#472
post #462
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we’re already making concessions about the car’s abilities. There are 10 MPH speed limit signs on Market Street in SF that specify in incredibly small text “when behind trolleys”. Assuming we take your approach, the car will just always go down market at 10 MPH. Imagine if it’s a negative turn restriction - IE, it’s permitting turns except for during certain hours and conditions. Now the car is treating it as…

And now your moving the goalposts. We are talking extreme edge cases in some random small town not common signs in a major city. They can always get updates on what some random sign in some random location means as long as their safe and don’t block traffic that’s all that’s needed. Also, negative restrictions can again default to full restrictions. Permitting a car to say park in a snow lane doesn’t require a car to…

I don’t think I’m moving the goalposts - we were discussing whether autonomous driving (which I take to mean L4-L5 driving without the need for a human in the loop) is possible without geofences or HD maps. “Edge cases in some random small town” are exactly the sort of thing you need to worry about without a geofence.

Not to mention these sorts of edge cases are way more common in large cities than small towns - one of the examples I gave was down a central avenue in San Francisco.

>They can always get updates on what some random sign in some random location means as long as their safe and don’t block traffic that’s all that’s needed.

What if it truly fails to parse the sign accurately and does something illegal or dangerous? What does sending an update out look like? Does a human take a look at a crop of the sign and review it? Why not just map it in that case?

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

rumble strips are amazing in whiteouts. its a relief when you hear it because you now know where the side of the road is...

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

#474

I got hired for my dream job at Cruise, and then was offered near-as-makes-no-difference 3x the TC to work with a friend a week later. I basically completed the new-hire onboarding and then quit. It fucking hurt to do that. What I saw there made me a believer. Cruise is doing amazing shit.

You've got to do what you've got to do. As cool as the company is, they failed to compensate you well enough and lost you.

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

#475

Can we just call out how incredibly awesome this is? We might stumble along the way but this is as big as moving from horse carts to cars. Respect to all of you working on self driving cars!

> Can we just call out how incredibly awesome this is? We might stumble along the way but this is as big as moving from horse carts to cars.

I find it a bit hard to believe that people aren't more concerned about calling out what exact legal framework this operation is being allowed under. Having a car without a driver in it driving around seems like a massive risk for the drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists sharing the streets of San Francisco; they should be entitled to know why they are test cases for these car-driving programs.

The most I could find was that it seems to be this permit [1], and the link in it states:

> Cruise’s permit is available at www.cpuc.ca.gov/avcissued.

...which is a 404.

It also states:

> More information on the CPUC’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service Pilot Programs is available at www.cpuc.ca.gov/avcpilotinfo.

...which is also a 404.

This does not...inspire confidence, to say the least.

Given that official information about this seems to be a bit thin on the ground, I guess I'll ask the obvious question – if the cars hit and injure someone, is Cruise's CEO going to be held personally liable? The engineers who worked on the tech? The passengers in the car (who are the nearest thing to drivers)?

It's not like this is an unexpected scenario, we have preexisting example of this happening [2]. Or is the plan to sweep real-life consequences under the carpet with euphemisms like "stumble along the way"?

----------------------------------------

[1] https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M387/K...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

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

#476
post #204
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As it can't solve this in 2022 (video at correct time): https://youtu.be/wTybjJj0ptw?t=238 Or even worst, just managing an empty intersection (video at correct time): https://youtu.be/wTybjJj0ptw?t=280 At which point releasing software so bad, becomes a criminal liability? Another one at correct time: https://youtu.be/wTybjJj0ptw?t=652 There are simply no words...Correct time: https://youtu.be/wTybjJj0ptw?t=722 Shoul…

After watching your linked videos I'm actually really impressed with it.

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

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I was once in the passenger seat in a downpour. My father was driving to the nav, and it seemed like we were traversing Mekong underwater. It was a complete instrument driving condition, except at most a feet of road markings were visible. The car was on local roads. He made cautious turns and drove slow, because it was obviously scary. Suddenly the nav said "Ding! you have reached your destination" in what seems to be middle of a road, and we immediately started making noises at the nav.

Then a person knocked on a window through the brown wall. It was someone we were to meet at the destination. He greeted us, and told us to come out. We tried to explain we can't just walk all perhaps a quarter mile to the place in this heavy rain, leaving the car left at a roadside. He insisted it'll be a short walk, and gave us no choice. Only when we stepped out, we realized that the car is right in the middle of the premise we were looking for, just couple feet from the main door.

This memory surfaces to my mind in the context of human drivers and inclement weathers; I'm still one piece, but maybe that has more to do with my luck, not necessarily due to myself playing every games extra safe.

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

#479
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even cheaper: don't have computer driven transit, but human driven transit Cheaper on what time frame? Obviously the upfront R&D costs start out as more expensive, but the marginal cost goes toward 0 while human cost is flat/increases. Also cheaper isn't the only axis, safety is a big reason to invest in not having humans drive.

Paying humans have better utility, for society in whole, than cheap machines.

If that was a universal good why do we keep inventing machines to replace labour? Would it be better to hire servants to wash dishes and fetch water to scrub clothing in the tub, or is this labour that we can largely get machines to do, and free humans from?

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

#480
post #93
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…

From personal experiences I do not see how they are ready. They actively avoid the rules of the road and engage in dangerous driving actions because the car “sees” and obstacle or warning.for example when a car is double parked the self driving vehicles will swerve into the opposite lane, and in some cases almost hit another car, bike rider, or person.

When at stop signs they will sit back and wait even thought it is their turn. At times they will slam on brakes causing rear end accidents because the car saw a bird or reacted to steam from the ground.

Please talk with your legal team about embellishments made in insurance claims against other drivers.

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