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

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

#221

Post by YetAnotherNick »

NickM wrote: post #186
dekhn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dojn't think that chart represents anything informative. It's at least partly based on "social media reports" and they say it's "incomplete". Any number of alternative explanations for that chart (which isn't a "skyrocket") explain the results better, such as increased awareness of the cars, increased numbers of miles driven (so the complaint rate per mile is roughly constant), and negative press coverage of incide…

so the complaint rate per mile is roughly constant Sure, if the complaint rate per mile is constant, but the number of driverless cars increases exponentially, then yeah we might expect the number of complaints to increase exponentially. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem. they say it's "incomplete" Okay, so maybe there are more problems than are represented in the chart, but that doesn't seem to paint any pretti…

By that definition, it is expected to skyrocket. That's like saying people who trip and fall while browsing instsagram shorts is skyrocketing.

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

#222

Post by sroussey »

dekhn wrote: post #205
Vecr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an ambush, are the self defense laws there that bad?

Uhhh... if you're surrounding by multiple layers of cyclists and try to drive your way out hitting a few cyclists, the cyclists are going to swarm your car and kill you. To be fair, I think this only happened a few times and it was caused by a small number of bad players, while the majority of Critical Mass participants were ethically (if somewhat inconveniently) demonstrating their collective power.

What happens when you cross an autonomous car and stand-your-ground gun laws? Through in some citizens united where a corporation is a person, and you might have cars that fight back...

8)

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

#223

Post by dghlsakjg »

dekhn wrote: post #177
Zetice wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you ever looked at the chart of the velocity of a rocket? Rockets accelerate from 0 to 17,000 mph in ~5-6 minutes. the initial phase is exponential. (it's not useful being pedantic here, I think I've captured what people think when they hear the word "skyrocket"; it's intentionally used to frame the discussion)

I looked for one, here's what I found: https://www.google.com/search?q=rocket+velocity+time+graph

Mostly they look pretty linear.

Solid rockets are pretty much binary in terms of thrust (they are either 100% or 0%), so they would accelerate fastest at low speeds, and accelerate slower as they encounter air resistance, and then begin to accelerate faster as they move into thinner air. But the rate of acceleration is, to my understanding, going to be highest in the first few seconds when air resistance is negligible, and about the same when they reach space where air resistance is 0. Exponential velocity increases mean that the rate of acceleration has to increase, which isn't something that is happening with rockets.

A "skyrocket" implies something different than a "spacerocket". Anything going 17,000 miles per hour is in LEO and no longer in the sky. Using this definition we should look at "fox 3" class missiles as they are launched from the sky at targets in the sky. Hypersonic missiles are actually air-breathing, and not rocket powered so they are excluded. Those missiles have an acceleration graph that is basically linear, but they start out already travelling several hundred miles per hour at a minimum, they then accelerate using a solid rocket motor (providing roughly equal thrust throughout its burn) up to a top speed of Mach 4 or so. After that they then use momentum to reach their target, but generally only lose speed after the engine cuts off.

So I posit that "skyrocketing" is starting from a fixed base, rapid linear increase, followed by a gradual decrease.

How's that for pedantic?

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

#224

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

floren wrote: post #105
Tempest1981 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds risky. I thought California law was to let the pedestrian fully cross, but apparently not: > In California, the law does not state that a driver must wait for the pedestrian to fully exit the crosswalk or the street before they proceed on their way in their lane. A pedestrian must be safely out of the driver's path of travel for them to begin driving again.

If you had to wait for all pedestrians to be out of the crosswalk, there's plenty of places where turning would be essentially impossible -- and there's an argument to be made that anywhere with that much foot traffic ought to be turned into a pedestrian-only zone, well, right now there are both cars and pedestrians and requiring the crosswalk be clear before going would make things even worse.

NY prohibits driving in the occupied half of a crosswalk. i.e. from center line to the curb. This is almost impossible to obey in NYC with heavy ped flows but it is a sensible way to combat drivers clipping you from behind.

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

#225

Post by arebop »

Loughla wrote: post #204
throwaway9274 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My take is that this isn't so much about privately owned cars and/or taxis, but the real politics is in over the road trucking, and these incremental steps are just part of that. If self driving over the road trucking happens (and that's sort of inevitable), politicians seem to legitimately believe it will collapse our economy. It seems like all self-driving anything gets lumped in with that.

I suspect this is why the road trucking divisions have been deprioritized at companies such as Waymo. The truck-drivers are better organized than the cabbies+ridesharing drivers, so even if highway driving is technically easier it is politically less feasible. I suppose it could just be that intrastate trucking is too small of an opportunity and interstate trucking obviously requires lobbying in multiple contiguous states.

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

#226

Post by Retric »

cashsterling wrote: post #206
throwaway9274 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know why the other reply to this post got downvoted to hell. THe person has a point. Fully autonomous cars are cool... don't get me wrong. But electric cars and autonomous electric/gas cars are probably not the right solution to our person transport needs. using energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle to transport one or two 200 lb humans is not energy-efficient... most of the energy is spent just moving the vehicle…

It doesn’t actually take that much energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle. 15,000 miles per year * 1 kWh / 4 miles ~= 10.3 kWh per day ~= 430 watts 24/7. Few loads are 24/7 but a single crypto mining PC can easily use several times that.

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

#227

Post by AlbertCory »

sroussey wrote: post #218
II2II wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers they gave is more than a doubling, while they were quite clear about the limitations of their data. That includes not knowing how many AVs are on the road, which is something that the companies should be able to provide. Also look at the claims that AVs have not caused death or serious injury. (I noticed that they did not claim that AVs have not caused injury.) That is great, except I would not expect any…

In February they hit 1,000,000 miles cumulative for all previous years. Last week they hit 3,000,000 miles. Cars kill about as many Americans as the Vietnam War, but every year. Aside from guns, I can't think of anything else so deadly that we give to our children as they enter adulthood. It is common, it is not part of the news cycle. We care more about the unlikely terrorist. People are bad with numbers. Personally…

Anyone quoting "miles driven" is being disingenuous. How many of those miles were in the Bay Area plus Arizona?

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

#228

Post by II2II »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #193
II2II wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers they gave is more than a doubling, while they were quite clear about the limitations of their data. That includes not knowing how many AVs are on the road, which is something that the companies should be able to provide. Also look at the claims that AVs have not caused death or serious injury. (I noticed that they did not claim that AVs have not caused injury.) That is great, except I would not expect any…

Anyone seen the rushing dash cam videos where pedestrians are throwing themselves at cars in order to get legal liability payouts. Not that I'm accusing all of the reports here of being something like that, but I wonder if robotaxis are going to result in something like that and actually make the entire driving world a lot less ethical. Then again it'll all be on camera so maybe not

You will always have opportunists. This article is not about that. The specific incident described by the article is about a car going through caution tape and getting caught up in a fallen overhead powerline. There's very little chance of payouts there, though there probably should be if considerable damage was caused. When it comes to interference with emergency responders, I also doubt it being a case of people looking for payouts.

A lot of AV enthusiasts seem to be painting the world as against them, when the reality is that people don't like being unwilling experimental subjects. If there was proof that AVs were safe, I could imagine people jumping on them in droves. Why would one reject having a vehicle where you have the option to drive yourself or have the driving being done for you? (I realize this article isn't about that scenario.) On the other hand, the tech industry's mantra of moving fast and breaking things - something that existed in practice long before the likes of Facebook - has bred an incredible amount of distrust. That distrust has only grown as it has shifted from the technology itself into grand social experiments.

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

#229

Post by ipaddr »

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…

3 to 91 a year later is skyrocketing.

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

#230

Post by jacquesm »

dekhn wrote: post #146
LispSporks22 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with ya normally, but literally a few paragraphs in they have the chart source: the TA, going from 3 to 91 "incidents" over a year. If you turn it on its side, it kinda looks like rocket blasting off.

That's not a rocket blasting off, it's a rocket failing to reach orbit by barely clearing the launch platform. More importantly: that chart isn't normalized by miles driven. As the companies have been ramping up, you'd expect (under a random model) that incidents would go up. It could also be explained by greater knowledge of SDCs, increased news coverage, and more awareness of how to report incidents. More important…

You can normalize the report by miles driven, but if the number of miles driven by those services increases rapidly then you can expect the number of incidents to increase just as rapidly, and that is what appears to be happening. There is a level at which this becomes untenable and that level is a direct function of the number of miles driven.

So unless you see some kind of cap to the number of miles driven (which given the ambition to scale up is not something I would subscribe to) I believe this is an early indication of something that may well develop into an actual problem in a relatively short amount of time.

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