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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

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Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#51

Post by cultofmetatron »

numpad0 wrote: post #46
xyst wrote: post #10

all of this time and money wasted on driverless cars has been a complete failure. companies and cities should be investing their time into improving public transportation and designing our cities to be more walkable and make alternate modes of transportation more feasible. the US culture of using a car for everyday transportation is fucking insane, wasteful, and contributes to the rising cost of living across the US…

Public transportations and walking don’t replace a lot of use cases for cars, except for commuting for office works. You can’t board a train while soaked in mud, or pushing a Subaru seat, or carrying bag full of groceries. Actually I’ve done the latter two, but I haven’t seen anyone else doing it, and it had been extremely awkward. Everyone feels driving cars are wrong, perhaps because of emissions, but trains and bu…

we only have bags full of groceries because zoning prohibits grocery stores being near where people live in most place. So you need a car and since its a pain, you migt as well stock up on as much as you can while you're at it.

If it were, you'd probably just go on a 10 minute walk and pickup enough for two days of food.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#52

Post by munchenphile »

kiba wrote: post #23
cecilpl2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities cannot easily be "redesigned". Infrastructure exists and you can't just refactor neighborhoods like software. Autonomous vehicles are an enormous market and well worth the investment.

AI is an extremely difficult challenge imposed by the current constraint. Change the constraint, then you don't need an AI to drive cars.

Yep, this is the plain reality.

Self driving cars just feels like a bunch of engineers wanting to solve a really hard and really interesting problem. But is it really the right problem to solve? I don’t think so. Currently we have:

>other unpredictable human-driven vehicles on the road

>no sensors or passive/active guides in the physical infrastructure — guidance is completely determined onboard

>no signage designed for CV — everything written in plain English, so you have to waste compute on object detection and OCR. And, you have a constant and unending need to collect mapping data

>no vehicle-to-vehicle communication whatsoever

Design the roads and signage for self driving cars, enforce an industry-wide V2V standard with NHTSA, and start small in some test areas that only allow other vehicles that are part of the botnet (perhaps not necessarily self-driving, but at least part of the V2V network). That’s a reasonable problem space. The current one is unworkable — the models won’t converge and they’ll never make it out of “beta”.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#53

Post by hnov »

gvb wrote: post #3
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #2

Could this just be a simple case of GPS jamming?

Could be but a much more likely cause is a software update that went bad. Likely the cloud rained on them.

I don’t update any software I work on without canaries and a slow (order of days) roll-out, you think the bug manifested for a big chunk of the fleet?

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#55

Post by asah »

xyst wrote: post #10

all of this time and money wasted on driverless cars has been a complete failure. companies and cities should be investing their time into improving public transportation and designing our cities to be more walkable and make alternate modes of transportation more feasible. the US culture of using a car for everyday transportation is fucking insane, wasteful, and contributes to the rising cost of living across the US…

!RemindMe 10 years

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#56

Post by clpm4j »

anewpersonality wrote: post #42

Any industry insiders know how Cruise is doing compared to Waymo and Zoox in SF? It seems Cruise is hyperfocused on SF.

Not an industry insider, but as an SF resident I tend to see far more Waymo vehicles on the road. A decent number of Cruise vehicles (although maybe they cluster in FiDi/SoMA areas in which case I wouldn't see them). Very few Zoox.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#57

Post by Smerity »

I saw a version of this myself at Geary and Mason around midnight on June 20th[1]. That it happened again but at a larger scale ten days later is deeply concerning.

Given I had no clue what state the vehicles were in, and that they'd start moving without indication, it felt pretty damn worrying.

[1]: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/1539144641206882304

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#58

Post by Barrin92 »

robbrown451 wrote: post #43
xyst wrote: post #10

all of this time and money wasted on driverless cars has been a complete failure. companies and cities should be investing their time into improving public transportation and designing our cities to be more walkable and make alternate modes of transportation more feasible. the US culture of using a car for everyday transportation is fucking insane, wasteful, and contributes to the rising cost of living across the US…

"all of this time and money wasted on driverless cars has been a complete failure." That's quite a stretch. If you think the money would be better spent elsewhere, ok. But to call it a failure is silly. Personally, I think driverless taxis making car ownership less necessary will be a huge plus. It will also make life a lot better for those due to age (too young or too old) or other issues not being able to drive. I…

>but to get away from that you need gradual steps

Given that you bring up the space program in the same post I'll stick with the metaphor and point out that you can't go to the moon by climbing up trees, or as Russ Ackoff said, doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong, because making the wrong thing more efficient just makes things worse.

If you want fully automated, efficient transport this technology already exists, it's train and subway systems. We even know how to virtually automate them 100% already, 24/7. With the tens of bilions if not more spent on driverless cars you could have actually rebuilt a decent chunk of infrastructure.

Having individual people drive around in two tons of steel to buy a bag of groceries is fundamentally stupid and its destroying cities, whether the car is electric or automated doesn't matter that much and there's no gradual change away from it, only a disruptive one.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#59

Post by ben-schaaf »

bko wrote: post #41
ryukafalz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cities cannot easily be "redesigned". Tell that to Jersey City: https://youtu.be/1mC1l8L5aBA Transport infrastructure in cities absolutely can be redesigned quickly, if you’re willing to take a quick and dirty approach in the short term. Which is usually enough when it comes to influencing people’s behavior; it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be functional and feel safe.

You're talking about adding bike lanes. That's cool I guess but you still need a car for every day life. Not everyone is a young single person that can just go to a food co-op every few days, throw some organic produce in their backpack and ride home.

> Not everyone is a young single person that can just go to a food co-op every few days, throw some organic produce in their backpack and ride home.

In places with good bicycle infrastructure like the Netherlands pretty much everyone cycles (93% cycle at least once per week). In fact the mode share for bicycles is lowest in the 30-40 age range with the 2nd highest being 65 and up - highest is under 18. The biggest use for cycling is shopping (22%). http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/who-cycles-in-n...

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