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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.’

#241

Post by valine »

lanstin wrote: post #140
valine wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don’t. I can feed images of crazy driving scenarios into LLaVA and get reasonable responses. That’s a general purpose LLM with $500 worth of fine tuning running locally on my PC. You should look into what can be done with the current state of the art LLMs. Your intuition for what’s possible is out of date. If I can do that with open source LLaMA variants, I can only imagine what’s possible if you have an actua…

You getting six nines of accuracy on that with good latency? Did you watch the “how our large driving model deals with stop signs” from Tesla AI department? Given the multiplicative effect of driving decisions and the weird real world out there, it has be extremely reliable and robust to be a good driver as the miles mount up.

The reason you would insert an LLM into the vision stack is to deal with the weird and unexpected. Tesla’s current stop sign approach is to train a classifier from scratch on thousands of stop signs images. It’s not surprising that architecture can’t deal with stop signs that fall outside the distribution.

LLMs with vision work completely differently. You’re leveraging the world model, built from a terabyte of text data, to aid your classification. The classic example of an image they handle well is a man ironing clothes on the back of a taxi. Where traditional image classifiers wouldn’t have a hope of handling that, vision LLMs describe it with ease.

https://llava.hliu.cc/

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

#242

Post by kelnos »

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…

The article includes a month-by-month graph of incident counts, broken down by company, that shows the "skyrocketing" behavior starting in March of this year.

The article notes that the data is incomplete, but that only means that there are more incidents than the graph shows.

And I'd also expect that part of the reason for the increase is that there are many more miles driven now by AVs than a year ago. But in a way that doesn't matter: an absolute increase in incidents is a problem, regardless of how much driving is going on.

This is especially the case when we're talking about things that human drivers are less likely to do, like driving through caution tape and snagging Muni wires. Not sure how often human drivers run over fire hoses or drive directly into active fire scenes, but I'd expect it's not often when compared with AV software that seems to just not know it's supposed to avoid those things.

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

#243

Post by nemo44x »

jrmg wrote: post #219
medellin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending where someone put a cone on my car i would possibly just run them over or drive off unsafely if i felt that it was an attempt to rob me or steal my car. Having things like that categorized differently makes sense because it’s caused by humans being dicks. But maybe you are right and that is the new reality we live in where none of us get to advance because of a small group of angry and stupid people.

Man, and further up this post there was someone talking about running over groups of cyclists if they maliciously surrounded their car. Try to remain calm. You’re generally not allowed to just _murder_ people who attempt to inconvenience, detain, or rob you, even though they are ‘being dicks’. That’s not how crime is dealt with in a stable society. It’s not a ‘new reality’. I really hope we’re not devolving into a pl…

Equally we seem to be devolving to a place where more people think doing things like this is ok. The solution isn’t to run them over - your advice to remain calm is good.

But we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic. Prison and life altering fines are a first step. This will absolutely deter this type of behavior.

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

#244

Post by jeffbee »

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…

The city assigned a guy to go around and document every time an AV does something. That's why the "skyrocketing". They didn't count them before and now they do.

If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all driver stupidity it would a significantly different report.

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

#245

Post by dmix »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #233
dekhn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the height of Critical Mass, bicyclists would surround minivans and keep them from leaving. Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist. I don't expect self-driving cars to deal any better with cones, or any hostile action towards a car.

I've participated and watched critical mass any number of times. I've never seen cyclists target cars randomly. The only time you will be surrounded in a minivan is if you try to drive through the cyclists, or otherwise act aggressively or unsafely. Critical mass is a protest movement. If you drive your vehicle into the middle of a protest against vehicles in a way that puts people in danger, don't be surprised when…

The two critical mass's I participated in blocking traffic was limited to everyone passing through an intersection and then continuing on. Annoying for drivers no doubt but never as egregious as locking someone in specifically for an extended amount of time.

The riders tend to move pretty quickly so it was at most a few minutes and never swarming vehicles to a standstill.

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

#246

Post by Retric »

barbazoo wrote: post #236
Retric wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I got 15,000 miles * 1.344 kWh/mile = 20,160 kWh or 55 kWh / day

Several ~4k lb EV’s get ~400 mile of range on a 100 kWh battery pack that’s 0.25 kWh/mile or 1 kWh / 4 miles.

The some EV’s like the Hummer EV are much worse, but that is also ~9,000 pounds fully loaded.

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

#247

Post by wheatzies »

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.

I live in SF and have experience taking cruise rides so I can provide some (obviously anecdotal) information. Overall I'm a big fan of the autonomous vehicles companies but there are downsides with their current abilities. Pros: - As mentioned in the article, the cars generally follow traffic laws. I see a lot of drivers run red lights around my apartment, but at this point I'm fairly confident that a Cruise won't accidentally run a light and hit me. The article starts with a story of a Cruise ignoring dangerous road conditions and caution tape, but that behavior could be hopefully be fixed by working with SDC companies to standardize how road hazards are marked. - They're electric. We've got some serious climate issues to deal with and if these companies can give people more non-ICE ride options, then I think we should be working to normalize them. I feel similarly about the electric scooters in the city. - There's no one in them but me. I definitely fall in the camp of people that prefer not to have to talk to my Uber/Lyft drivers so that's a plus in my book. I also like the tagline mentioned in the article that the cars never drive drunk, drowsy, or distracted. I don't have to worry about who my driver is or what state of mind they're in. - Cost. The rides are cheaper than equivalent Uber/Lyft rides in my experience. One could argue that they're going to make driving for ride-sharing companies unviable as a way to make a living, but that's true for most new automation in a given industry.

Cons: - I'm a cyclist, and I often make eye contact with drivers to ensure they're aware of me. Without a driver, there's not a good way to ensure the car knows I'm there. That being said, I've personally never had a close call with one on my bike. - As mentioned in the article, they can get in the way of first responders. I don't think that's justifiable and should be something that these companies prioritize before expanding their operating hours and range. So yeah, a couple anecdotes and thoughts from someone in the area. They're not perfect, but I think the upside potential is great and the city should be working to accommodate them and get human drivers off the roads as much as possible.

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

#248

Post by x86x87 »

what-no-tests wrote: post #208

I worked as a software engineering tech lead on the "Ground Truth" team at GM Cruise for a short period in 2018. During orientation, the founder (Kyle Vogt) told us all that the cars don't need to be better than a human driver, they only need to be "not worse" than a human driver. In fact, when questioned about it, he said that the sooner we could get robot cars on the streets of SF the sooner the software could impr…

The classic "some of you might dir but that's a risk I'm willong to take?"

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

#249

Post by adamkf »

In my experience living in SF, these cars are much safer than the typical drivers in my neighborhood for pedestrians. Most human drivers around here don't even bother to stop at stop signs, and instead just slow slightly. With the cruise and Waymo cars, I feel like the risk is a bit lower when I'm on my bike or walking.

I have witnessed a Cruise car stopping in the middle of the road when faced with an oncoming emergency vehicle, so I totally buy that they aren't ready for prime time yet.

Honestly, I'd prefer if we prioritized enforcing existing traffic laws for regular vehicles.

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

#250

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Everyone's complaining that the number of total incidents is still small, but the change in those mirrors my own experience driving near those cars, which does not show up in the small number of worst incidents. Meaning the small, but rapidly growing data in the article reflects just the tip of the iceberg.

About the time that the graph shows incidents blowing up, the cruise at least went from a cool thing to drive near to a very unpredictable thing that would act up every time I was near one (which was daily). For each of those ~100/mo reported incidents, there's surely a ton more going unreported, and even more non-'incident' nuisances. Which seem to be skyrocketing as well.

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