611–620 of 1001 posts
Hmm. I always thought these self-driving taxis were competing with regular taxis. But Cruise is saying "They also never drive distracted, drowsy or drunk," which makes me think they don't think they're competing with taxis, but with random drivers coming home from the bar at 2AM. I'm not sure I quite understand their argument here.
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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…
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Yes, a few people will die. More than a few. But I would bet anything that even in the short-term, and especially in the long-term, far fewer will die than if there were human drivers in those cars.
I’d still much rather be killed by a fellow human than a corporation controlled entity. “Greater good” has been the excuse for some astonishingly bad ideas.
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That's the "AI Alignment" problem we've heard so much about recently.
The AI alignment problem for a decade used to be that AGI doesn't end humanity as a side effect. Now that the mainstream has caught on, it's been diluted.
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Maybe. I'm not sure that's a bad goal for the average SF resident.
The average SF resident probably works for a tech company considering how many natives have been driven out by high housing costs. Tech companies are an enormous source of tax revenue for the city and many public services quite literally depend on that revenue. One of the major issues in the city now is the city government's obstinate refusal to approve more housing development. The idea that tech workers are gentrif…
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Self driving cars will share roads with regular cars for possibly decades.
Human driven cars have been "sharing" space with pedestrians and cyclists with gory results. AVs mildly annoy human drivers, but are much better behaved. In fact they annoy drivers BECAUSE they are much better behaved.
That's why in places with good infrastructure, the infrastructure is separated.
Pedestrians are on tall sidewalks with few ingress points for cars (unlike in the US where every corner has a lowered curb for 20m just in case some random truck needs to go on the sidewalk??). Sidewalks are on streets with traffic calming, frequently separated from the actual road by a nice hedge or trees or a patch of grass.
Bike lanes are completely separated from roads and intersections are also traffic calmed (no slip lanes, roundabouts, multiple lanes separated so that the intersection doesn't require crossing 6-8 dangerous lanes at once).
Etc, etc.
Do you think it's realistic to maintain 2 sets of road infra for cars (human vs AI)? We can barely maintain 1 set and it's already forcing many places into deeper and deeper debt or even bankruptcy.
I am on my 3rd Tesla- been driving them since 2015- and frequently use FSD beta. I’ve watched autopilot develop into FSD. The thing that baffles me about all current autonomous vehicle efforts is how resistant they are to having any sort of environmental feedback engineered specifically to help driverless cars. For instance, in addition to flashing lights, what if fire trucks broadcast a “keep away” radio signal? Per…
Having transponders is just another thing to do fail, or to forget to turn on, or to be impacted by other things, or to give false positives, or to be abused by drivers, etc. Really nothing can be relied upon other than what you see.
>Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit. This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the m…
I think you would likely lose that wager. In the information Waymo has published about their safety methodology, they benchmark themselves against an always-attentive driver (this already rules out most accidents), which they still outperform by a large margin. Even a driver who is never distracted doesn't have constant 360 degree vision or near-instant reaction times.
These companies cannot be trusted to be honest about incidents or near incidents. They like to crow about safety, but the safety they want credit for is entirely hypothetical. There is no good reason to believe that autonomous vehicles are actually safer. They haven’t yet been tested enough, and the testing that has been done cannot be generalized to new situations. I believe they would be safer if all roads were ful…
They are already required to report every accident to a public agency in California. And the safety is not hypothetical. Waymo is driving millions of miles a month in places like Phoenix. They have a ton of data to support the fact that their cars are significantly safer than human drivers.
"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…
Data appears to be freely available here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto... . I reviewed a couple dozen incidents and in every case human drivers are to blame. The most extreme example of this was an incident in which a manually operated vehicle repeatedly rear-ended an autonomous vehicle out of spite, then followed it back to the dispatch lot and made a variety of verbal threats.