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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

#521

Post by brtkdotse »

walrus01 wrote: post #399
ladon86 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but all of those quotes are by Elon Musk…

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…

Bracing myself for the downvotes, but I suspect any wins coming out of Tesla/SpaceX these days is despite Musk, not thanks to.

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

#522

Post by YZF »

jfoster wrote: post #512
YZF wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree it saves on cost and energy consumption. Not sure about latency. But it's an inferior sensing system [and] it remains to be seen whether it can do the job or not, so far seems like not. Even if it can do the job (by some measure) whether it can outperform the better sensing systems which seems unlikely. I'd pay a little more for better safety, we know the cost of "human safety" as it reflects in our insurance premiums...

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

#523

Post by mushbino »

hgomersall wrote: post #515
alex_sf wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not profitable, won't happen.

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

#524

Post by ithkuil »

birdyrooster wrote: post #489
dustintrex wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there are lots of other people out there who could run today's SpaceX as a space cargo trucking company. But Elon deserves the credit for creating two wildly successful companies that revolutionized their respective industries, both in the face of hugely entrenched competitors in highly regulated markets that hadn't seen successful new players in decades, and both as a side effect of his actual goal of getti…

The only people who were even competing were eccentric billionaires so let's be clear that he only beat a handful of other people who even had access to attempt the business. It's not that huge of an accomplishment because private space was theorized for a long time but NASA sucked up all the air in the room for the longest time but Elon's timing was just right. He out of the handful of billionaires working on this w…

Well, he was clearly competing with the faceless environment that allowed only eccentric billionaires to appear to be his only competition. If it was an open niche it would have been filled with others. Reading other threads here I learn that there have indeed been multiple failed attempts at space companies.

Maybe it's just a selection effect, but maybe they played their cards wisely and maybe some of the key choices can be attributed to the founder of the company that set the vision and picked the team carefully.

I'm personally not a fan of personality cults, but I don't think it's fair to swing too much on the other side. It doesn't strike me as plausible to think that Musk is just sitting on his ass and reaping the benefits of hard work of other people, and did that successfully with at least two companies.

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

#525

Post by kzrdude »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #273
catillac wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain whether there is a principled reason to not use all the sensors available and choose just cameras?

From public information it's a matter of price and "appearance." No one who's half serious about understanding how the system work would use cameras alone, but remember of all the companies who's serious about putting self driving cars on the road, Tesla is the only one who designs, manufactures and sells cars. Incidentally, Tesla is also the only car company pushing camera only as a "solution" which again, it is not…

It sounds very stupid from their side to be stubborn, at least, that just means they have an existential risk to the whole company, if they don't get their fav solution to work.

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

#526

Post by pm90 »

silentsea90 wrote: post #506
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…

I don't know the answers. They're definitely worth figuring out, but the legal questions do not take away from the sheer gall to dream and achieve. Figuring out liability is in the domain of law, which is easy compared to building such engineering marvels. I am sure we can figure it out. Self driving car companies take safety VERY VERY seriously not just for potential legal consequences but because a single incident…

None of the other situations you’ve mentioned are similar to a self driving car being unleashed on an unsuspecting dense urban area without setting clear rules for what’s to happen in the worst case. These are the frameworks which guide decision making. Without clear guidelines, I have a lot of reason to doubt that eg a product team that really wants to deliver a feature will ship something without the proper amount of testing.

If you’re letting autonomous multi ton vehicles roam around a dense city, I would expect them to go over and above in playing by the book.

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

#527

Post by pm90 »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #514
genewitch wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 passen…

They’ve always had a person in their cars though. So this is a big difference since they’re saying the vehicles will be fully autonomous (no human supervisor in the vehicle).

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

#528

Post by csomar »

Am I still asleep or is everybody here missing the "May Stop Quickly" printed out in the back of the car.

1. Is this even legal? Is this a legal requirement or some alert text they come up with?

2. If the car stops quickly, it'll eventually result in accidents and possibly not for itself (but other drivers). Did they think this is not risky and safe enough to put it out on the street.

3. The video demos are all at night when there is little traffic. How does it respond at day when you have more traffic?

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

#529

Post by pm90 »

georgeburdell wrote: post #72

I’m concerned about the timing of this. Former CEO Dan Ammann, fired in December, was a big champion of the robotaxi business model. It is speculated he was fired because GM CEO Mary Barra disagrees with this strategy and wants them to focus more on integration with existing GM vehicles. I am afraid that the robotaxi timeline was pulled in so that the rest of the believers inside Cruise can get supporting data to pro…

I fear this also. It seems like the former CEO wanted to go public so the employees would get liquidity but the GM CEO disagreed. This seems like a political effort (perhaps not fully) to show that Cruise can generate a lot of revenue, and then make the case to focus on its self driving taxi business rather than serving GM exclusively.

I guess time will tell. I only hope that the worst thing to happen would be lost money or ego and not lives.

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

#530

Post by XorNot »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #242
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…

An extremely wise set of decisions. I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions; nor to accept that only passive sensing (cameras) can be used, when Active Sensing (probing, if you will) that Radar and LiDAR use is clearly giving the control computers more information about Reality (tm). By using all (or almost all) available Active and Passive sensing technologies, fused w…

One argument would be that once you have many vehicles operating with LIDAR, it's unclear which systems are sufficiently robust against being disrupted by interference from other systems. Same with RADAR - while this is not new technology, we've never really had a regime with potentially dozens of systems operating in close proximity.

For all Tesla's problems, the automation-via-cameras solution is the one I find myself having the least problems with: using a single, obvious input (to humans), you don't wind up in a situation where you can have multiple differently-capable systems disagreeing on what they're seeing.

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