Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

sfchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 1001 posts

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#161

Post by reaperducer »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #85
laweijfmvo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similar experiences (as a pedestrian) crossing in front of Cruise cars, especially at 4-way stops when there aren't crosswalks explicitly drawn. It's odd because the cars are generally excruciatingly cautious, but for some reason as I'm crossing they seem to calculate exactly how fast they can take off such that they pass me right as I'm clear of their path -- whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian…

> whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the sidewalk before passing. You're joking right? No one wait for you to clear the street. Hell most driving start advancing when you're going to be clear by the time they make it to you. > What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up? Same thing a human would; hit you or slam on the brakes. They'll just do it faster and harde…

> whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the sidewalk before passing.

You're joking right? No one wait for you to clear the street. Hell most driving start advancing when you're going to be clear by the time they make it to you.

> What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up?

Same thing a human would; hit you or slam on the brakes. They'll just do it faster and harder.

The real world isn't like a Mad Max film.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#162

Post by reaperducer »

gonehome wrote: post #25
jconley wrote: post #12

@garry did a rebuttal video to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc

Yeah - none of this reporting can be trusted from the chronicle, the SF politics are crazy and there’s a lot of bullshit/bad-faith. I hope cruise overcomes this and the people putting traffic comes and such on the cars are stopped.

none of this reporting can be trusted from the chronicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#164

Post by jb12 »

fishtoaster wrote: post #150
DragonStrength wrote: post #14

I left SF a year ago but had Cruise and Waymo cars in my neighborhood constantly. They were a total nuisance. They'd jerk towards pedestrians in crosswalks leading to this uncomfortable standoff where no one in the neighborhood would ever step in front of one. I'd wager any stats here are way lower than real incidences as I was nearly hit multiple times and never got to the "report it" stage as there are so many barr…

For what it's worth, my own anecdata is the opposite. My neighborhood (alamo square / wester addition) is rife with Cruise cars and I usually pass 2-3 every night while walking my dog for 30 minutes. They've been, without fail, polite and normal "drivers." I've not felt any concern walking in front of them in crosswalks or biking alongside them when leaving the neighborhood.

I live in the same neighborhood and saw one driving on the sidewalk a few weeks ago.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#165

Post by hosh »

dekhn wrote: post #115

"Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as possible. When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents. Remember: reality is banal. Things are far bette…

There may not be data to support this, but on the other hand, informal perceptions -- even if unsupported by data -- matters a great deal with products and systems.

But I would ask the people living there what they perceive, not just relying on a news reporter.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#166

Post by Zetice »

dekhn wrote: post #160
Zetice wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I reading the graph wrong? a 3x increase over one month that sustains into the next month qualifies as "skyrocketing" to me...

I've commented elsewhere I don't think the chart is informative (and listed several good reasons why). But all you're describing is a 300% increase, not several orders of magnitude increase. If you look at Google's QPS chart (maintained in crayon by the original engineers!) you will see that they frequently had to rescale the chart by factors of ten because their growth rate in the early days was exponential. The cha…

Exponential growth, several orders of magnitude... these are not what "skyrocketing" means, in actuality. So you are correct, none of those phrases describe the graph here, but none of those phrases matter.

It's a sudden, alarming, and seemingly sustained trend, and it's worth writing an article over.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#167

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway9274 wrote: post #145
dekhn wrote: post #115

"Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as possible. When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents. Remember: reality is banal. Things are far bette…

Absolutely right. To situate in terms of recent events, there have been three stages of trying to delay / influence the California CPUC robotaxi expansion approval vote: 1. Tried a politician scare campaign. Failed because it was too transparent it was an attempted distraction from their terrible public safety record. 2. Tried coning and disabling the vehicles. Failed because it was too transparently astroturfed, leg…

[deleted]

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#168

Post by dekhn »

hosh wrote: post #165
dekhn wrote: post #115

"Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as possible. When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents. Remember: reality is banal. Things are far bette…

There may not be data to support this, but on the other hand, informal perceptions -- even if unsupported by data -- matters a great deal with products and systems. But I would ask the people living there what they perceive, not just relying on a news reporter.

informal perceptions are about the last thing you want when making decisions about large-scale technology roll-outs. Instead, people should be informed with the highest quality data, and need to be reminded that informal perceptions are often biased and skewed.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#169

Post by kwhitefoot »

NickM wrote: post #142
dekhn wrote: post #115

"Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as possible. When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents. Remember: reality is banal. Things are far bette…

When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". The article actually has quantitative data that shows reports of "incidents where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit and emergency responders" rising by a couple orders of magnitude in a year. Yeah, the city officials have to cover their asses and make disclaimers about what they can and cannot conclude, because all they know is…

> they don't have access to Waymo's data.

That seems odd. Surely the authority that licenses this sort of activity should have access to all the data that allows proper evaluation of its safety?

Access to such data should be a prerequisite for the agreement.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#170

Post by Eisenstein »

tlb wrote: post #118
Eisenstein wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on driverless taxis instead of having emotional people who need parking all the time seems to be a win, as long as they are safe and someone is held accountable when they mess up . I am very unwilling to change 'people are flawed but (mostly) held accountable' to 'a corporation owned robot car ran someone over because of a software glitch and it is nobody's fault'. The problems with 'oops we got hacked or l…

Suppose it's the near future and driverless cars are causing 5x fewer injuries per mile than human drivers. (5x fewer != 0, so some injuries and deaths still occur) What accountability would you like to see in that situation? Or a table of | relative death rate | accountability | would cover the widest range of future scenarios.

If there is an investigation and if it is found that someone said 'don't bother with those tests just push to market' or 'let's fire the legacy system patching team because they make no money even though the cars are still driving around' and that caused directly or indirectly a car to glitch and run someone over or to get hacked and used for a crime then someone goes to prison and/or the company gets liquidated or something in between that is reasonable to ensure that it is not tempting for another company to do it again.

I am not a lawyer or a legislator and I cannot come with a regulation or law or something that would do this, but I am sure someone can.

Post reply on HN