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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

#511

Post by olivermarks »

e4e78a06 wrote: post #123
olivermarks wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally illogical supposition. I'll bet a lot more taxi drivers have rescued people in trouble than assaulted them, a young female relative of mine was rescued by a passing taxi driver from a dicey situation outside Sheperds Bush tube station. The chances of thugs standing in front of future driverless vehicles like highway robbers to stop them is very high, especially if the predators can see their prey has somethin…

The scenario you described already happens in San Francisco and the Bay Area on a regular basis to regular human drivers. There are plenty of videos of peoples' back window being smashed while they're sitting in traffic and their expensive goods are taken. The solution to this is not having human drivers, it's cracking down on property crime and treating it as equally as important to violent crime.

Exactly, I'm in the bay area also. Not hard to see next generation highway robbers standing in the path of self driving vehicles, which will stop to avoid hurting the 'pedestrians' in the road

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

#512

Post by jfoster »

YZF wrote: post #500
LegitShady wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a discussion about how such a system must function with all the different inputs vs the vision only model. If you have radar and lidar and vision, then you have at least three different specialist machine learning models running, and then another model running that takes their outputs and decides what the car is going to do. You may have even more than that, some doing specific tasks like localization. Neural…

That argument doesn't make any sense though. Clearly radar + lidar + vision is a superset of vision only. It can perform as well as vision only if you disable the other two. So the claim is there is absolutely no scenario where the other systems can contribute which seems to be false. E.g. Tesla's cameras are blinded pointing straight on into the sun, the car even tells you the cameras are blinded. If the cameras are…

The real equation is closer to: Radar + LIDAR + Vision + Cost + Latency - Battery

Doing it with vision only saves on cost, latency & energy consumption.

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

#513

Post by mwattsun »

exhaze wrote: post #456
mwattsun wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

radar doesn't see around corners. At any rate, would have to see some evidence that it can handle the worst of The City before I took a ride, like the incessant construction, steel plates on the road covering new holes, taped off lane changes, resulting traffic jams where merging is happening and so on. It's a really difficult environment for a human and I've never heard the claim yet that self-driving was better tha…

Cruise publishes a lot of their AVs driving around SF for over an hour. In a video from their YouTube channel [1], at around 22:29, you can see exactly how they handle a steep 4-way intersection. You can also see on the above visualization what objects their system sees as it is performing the maneuver. The evidence is easily accessible - next time I suggest you just research a little bit first instead of going strai…

Where was I speculating? I expressed skepticism and said I'd have to see some evidence. You provided some and I'm still not convinced from this. Those are fairly mild hills on wider streets in bright sunshine. But now I know where to get more evidence, so thanks.

Edit: The Cruise CEO kvogt says it's geofenced. That's what I thought.

In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensing lands in these vehicles and our service area will be large enough that you forget there is even a geofence

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30169708

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

#514

Post by lovehashbrowns »

genewitch wrote: post #496
quadrifoliate wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah I'm not keen on that euphemism either. I know from experience and messing around with ml/ai that the tech is not there yet, so I wager they're going to cheat by having a remote driver. In a dense city that has a lot of weather. I'll stay out of SF until this ends in a huge lawsuit.

Cruise has been in SF for many years. It's actually hard to miss their cars if you're around the Sunset area a lot. Or it was when I lived there. I'm not sure if their area of operation has shifted out of there. So I hope you've been out of SF for a while.

That was probably what made me feel like I was in SF more than anything else in SF. Seeing their cars drive by with the LIDR, cameras, and the person in the passenger seat staring at a MacBook Pro.

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

#515

Post by hgomersall »

alex_sf wrote: post #434
walrus01 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I actually replied to the entirely wrong comment, should have been one up... I have a great deal more confidence in truly revolutionary things that have been factually delivered by SpaceX (such as 100+ re-uses of a rocket first stage now), and I question how much of that is really due to Musk at all. Maybe Musk as a figurehead. I wonder if all of the Elon fanboys know that much of what's been accomplished at Sp…

Does it really matter? If there's no Elon, there's no SpaceX. And I say this as someone that doesn't buy into the founder cult.

I'll be more impressed when he solves climate change.

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

#516

Post by seanmcdirmid »

defaultprimate wrote: post #468
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the driver is drunk, has malice, or willfully breaking a bunch of other rules, I don’t think they go to prison now.

Virtually all auto accidents in which a third-party fatality occurs result in criminal liability. It's extremely rare for a third-party fatality in an auto accident to be caused by something other than criminal negligence or intent.

Most auto accidents that cause death don’t involve third parties. And there are shockingly a lot of people killed in auto accidents, only a very small percentage of those result in prison time.

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

#517

Post by mikejb »

afterburner wrote: post #469
enjoylife wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

Also you can't sell sexy Teslas if they have ugly lidars on top.

I think it's not just that. When Tesla started to with their FSD journey, they had to determine what sensors they can add to the car. Lidars back then were way more expensive than they are now, and it wouldn't have been feasible to add them at that time.

They can't add them now to new vehicles because they promised the vehicles back then are only a software update away from full autonomy [1]. Building on Lidar now would mean developing on 2 heavily differentiating stacks. Going back on the promise of old Tesla's being "FSD capable" would introduce a huge liability.

Long story short, Tesla's stance on Lidar determined 8 years ago, without the option to revise the decision with future developments.

[1] Note this has turned into "we'll only have to replace the computer in the car", which is still doable, contrary to adding sensors to the existing vehicle.

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

#518

Post by hgomersall »

babyshake wrote: post #267
femto wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your view on whether self-driving cars should automatically be 100% liable for any accidents? I ask this in the context of machines being governed by classical deterministic physics, so there is an argument that there is no such thing as an accident involving a self-driving car: only a design flaw. This is a genuine question, as I can see that companies with self-driving systems that work, and who do serious f…

Of course, knowing that self-driving cars are 100% liable would incentivize some people to attempt to be hit by one of these vehicles for a payout. A more realistic level of liability would be for 100% liability for accidents resulting from an "unforced error".

I still think the cars should anticipate risks and behave accordingly. Out and out fraud aside, they should basically never injure anyone.

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

#519

Post by pm90 »

kgin wrote: post #408
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…

Been so impressed with the Cruise approach. No hype, no promises, just keeping quiet, working hard on a very hard problem until it’s ready to launch. Congrats to everybody who’s been a part of this.

Well to be fair they did get acquired and get access to a bunch of resources allowing them to fully execute. A lot of the hype machine is a result of the necessity of getting access to those resources. It’s just a difficult situation.

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

#520

Post by mikejb »

belter wrote: post #204
comex wrote: 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…

This is from from November 2021, but I'm still highlighting it because it is just terrifying (Correct time, though the video later on also exhibits inabilities of the system): https://youtu.be/9wRRClg_aM8?t=113
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