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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

thelastdriverlicenseholder.com

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Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#391

Post by ClumsyPilot »

al_borland wrote: post #132
ra7 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the list of things that could go horribly wrong with self driving vehicles, incidents like these are only a minor, harmless inconvenience. The more immediate concern is self driving vehicles that are clearly not ready to be on public roads being allowed to test (or not being pulled off the roads).

I'd be curious on the statistics related to new under-developed FSD software vs a new teenage driver. The only way for either of these things to get better is through real-world experience.

> The only way for either of these things to get better is through real-world experience

if you are going to make that argument, you have to explain why we are socialising losses and privatising profits (again)

so some number of people will be injured of killed while self driving cars gain experience, and then private corporations will extract profit from it?

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#392

Post by belter »

jerlam wrote: post #45

There is currently some kind of geomagnetic storm which is causing a lot of GPS tracks to be offset over the past few days. It's all over the running/cycling forums. Could be related, here's an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic...

Are you telling me all these fleet of vehicles can be defeated with a GPS Jammer?

https://www.jammer-store.com/gj6-all-civil-gps-signal-jammer...

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#393

Post by AbrahamParangi »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #388

I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traf…

Even without knowing when AGI will get here, I know it will be faster than solving the collective action problem.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#394

Post by zaroth »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #388

I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traf…

> I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic.

I was going to say about 30,000 per year in the US, but it’s actually up above 40,000 per year now.

[1] - https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#395

Post by carlmr »

elpescado wrote: post #352
Flankk wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously there is no failsafe that pulls the car over, otherwise you would see that the cars had pulled over. This might be annoying on city streets but imagine if it were on the highway. An almost guaranteed 50 car pileup. If history is any guide, this will actually happen in the next few years and be followed by a lawsuit and regulation.

That's assuming that there's a space to pull over, which is often not the case on city streets. Especially, when every AV wants to pull over.

Also the assumption that the fail-safe _works_. Any of these fail-safes are much more complex than a classical fail-safe.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#396

Post by ClumsyPilot »

walleeee wrote: post #219
jeshin wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like a lot of people have kind of wisened up about this hypothetical future anyway, now that we're seeing FSD in practice. Sure, some problems would be eliminated by all cars being self driving, and the roads being tailored to that use case. But then, at the same time, trains literally run on tracks and they still have conductors.

I hope we continue to wise up If a core goal is really to make thoroughfares safer and reduce traveler injuries/fatalities, we seem to be ignoring or discounting some pretty obvious options, like minimizing car traffic This vision where we all get around in low-passenger-count autonomous robot cages on existing roadways is just one possible future but we seem to fixate on it. At the end of the day the car is a tool b…

the ll$300 xiaomi electric scooter has beem a bigger improvement to piblic transport than the $50000 tesla.

Electric rideables are the future, and if we could give them storage on public transport and a lane of road, they would go a long way.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#397

Post by jakzurr »

gambiting wrote: post #386
jakzurr wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would I be incorrect to suppose that you don't use seatbelts?

I don't see why I wouldn't use them(or why would anyone), can you explain?

Yeah, I guess my comment was kind of off the cuff.

What I was thinking about, was that seatbelts are hardly "100% perfect in all scenarios." I mean, they can make it a more difficult to get out of a burning vehicle quickly, just as an example. Even ignoring the possibility of malfunction, or jamming and such, they're not perfect.

The fact is, even if seatbelts decrease your risk overall, they are nowhere near 100% perfect. Nevertheless, many of us choose to use seatbelts, and indeed even chose to do so before widespread legislation.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#398

Post by ClumsyPilot »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #393
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #388

I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traf…

Even without knowing when AGI will get here, I know it will be faster than solving the collective action problem.

I think eventually major car manufacturers will work with the regulator to bring on new standards, and it will happen withing 15 years. Infrastructure upgrades will take another 15. Most startups that aim to solve self driving will either find a niche in that ecosystem or go extinct.

So I expect reasonable self driving cars to be common in depeloped nations in 2050, while AGI will be just as elusive.

In a similar vein, the correct solution to electric trucks is not giant batteries, it's simply overhead wires:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-w...

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#399

Post by pembrook »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #389
pembrook wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve lived in and frequently traveled to cities with what is considered the best public transportation in the world (Paris, NYC, London, HK, Singapore, Zurich, etc etc). In almost all the above places, there have been frequent instances where I’ve had to use taxis and/or rent a car. And that was while living/staying in the core of these cities. 99.99% of places on earth aren’t nearly as densely populated as the ones…

"You ever wonder where the food you eat gets grown and how it gets delivered" the argument is strange, they don't exactly deliver 40 tons of wheat to the bakery with a taxi. Noone is arguing against cargo and utility vehicles unless they can be substituted by railway (which could be better designed, etc) https://www.tescoplc.com/updates/2021/how-tesco-is-turning-t...

When public-transport-as-panacea folks create laws to disincentivize vehicles, they typically don't make distinction between cargo/utility and personal travel. Gasoline and vehicle import taxes, and anti-vehicle urban design and laws hit all forms of vehicular travel equally.

But again we're still stuck talking about cities. In any area where food is grown (or literally anywhere on earth outside of the .0001% of land that constitutes megacities), there is no public transport.

Do you think the people who grow your food are living as indentured servants on the land they cultivate, and never need to go anywhere?

Again, public transport is a fantastic solution for dense areas (ie. city cores). But cars are also a fantastic solution for the 99.9999% of places on earth that aren't a city core.

A feel-good PR greenwashing campaign by Tesco doesn't change that.

There's 8 billion of us, all living in different areas with different constraints. We can have both!

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#400

Post by ecshafer »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #388

I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traf…

40k people are dying a year from cars, and the problem is that driverless electric cars are not the solution. They are the faster horse kind of innovation. If we were serious about reducing fatalities, improving health, and reducing pollution, the solution would be to drastically reduce the amount of miles driven per year and the number and the size of the cars. We need to encourage people to bike and walk and use public transportation. Autonomous trains would work extremely well and we don't have to worry about bicyclists. The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue.
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