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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

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Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#151

Post by _ea1k »

yegle wrote: post #109
eep_social wrote: post #82

But not Waymo. Which confirms all my personal biases. More seriously, the statement cites four specific clauses that caused the permit to be suspended. The second one seems really interesting as it implies that there was a lie of omission where the others are more or less what I’d expect regarding safety risks: > Today’s suspensions are based on the following: > 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of…

> "The AV braked aggressively before impact and because it detected a collision, it attempted to pull over to avoid further safety issues," Cruise added. "When the AV tried to pull over, it continued before coming to a final stop, pulling the pedestrian forward. Our thoughts continue to be with the victim as we hope for a rapid and complete recovery." This looks like Cruise's fault, dragging a pedestrian while pullin…

Yes, and it sounds like a fairly fundamental flaw. Does the car have sensors that can determine pulling over is the wrong thing to do in this situation?

In general, getting out of the way is the right course of action, but this clearly shows that there are exceptions. I'm not sure that the vehicles are currently equipped for differentiating to even be possible.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#152

Post by dangerwill »

tschellenbach wrote: post #107

43k deaths per year due to human drivers. DMV should stop sticking their heads in the sand. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state... .

There are already land based transport options that are two orders of magnitude safer than cars: buses and trains, with no AI necessary :)

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#153

Post by jowday »

tschellenbach wrote: post #110
tschellenbach wrote: post #107

43k deaths per year due to human drivers. DMV should stop sticking their heads in the sand. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state... .

Though maybe good to have a system where a human remote driver takes over in cases where it's confused?

They have that, and these cars completely depend on it for fundamental parts of the stack. If they detect that their understanding of the scene doesn't match their map, they (generally) have remote operators clarify the best course of action for the car. This isn't a remote takeover - they just plot a path for it or select from a number of different options the car presents to them, or give it the all clear to proceed.

I worked in the AV space for years - not at Cruise - but during one of my first driverless rides in a Cruise car, we ran into a few blocks of SF where the power was out. About 3 street lights in a row weren't functioning. At each one the Cruise stopped completely for about 45 seconds before crossing - even if there was no traffic coming from it's left or right. That delay was so that a remote operator could clear it to proceed after it detected that there wasn't a functioning street light where it expected there to be one. After the first street light we were getting honked at and swerved around by cars behind us while it paused and waited for clarification.

Comparisons between the safety of robotaxis and human drivers are strange to make when 'robotaxis' still depend on remote operators for fundamental parts of the driving task

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#154

Post by parshimers »

hindsightbias wrote: post #145
mips_avatar wrote: post #96

The incident last month where that woman got dragged and pinned by the Cruise vehicle was pretty disconcerting. The initial collision wasn't the fault of the cruise vehicle (another vehicle hit her pushing her into the cruise vehicle and fled the scene), but the cruise vehicle then proceeded to try to "pull over" and just dragged this woman and rolled over her leg. Weird situation but definitely something made much m…

[flagged]

stop and get out of the car because someone just got flung onto/underneath your car? or perhaps have enough situational awareness to see that someone is about to walk into oncoming traffic?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#155

Post by tczMUFlmoNk »

LegitShady wrote: post #128
wstrange wrote: post #71

Link to Cruise review of incident: https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-th...

>A Cruise AV named Panini This sort of nonsense where you take a serious statement and tell me the cutesy "name" of the autonomous vehicle really detracts from the seriousness of the issue. Also, the last paragraph where they try to talk about how their vehicle wouldn't have made the same mistake as the human driver, glosses over the actual issues the cruise car had which a human driver would have known not to do.

I had the same thought about the name. They also didn't refer to the name again in the rest of the article, so it wasn't even setting up a convenient name to refer to the vehicle and distinguish it from other AVs; it was entirely superfluous.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#156

Post by mips_avatar »

hindsightbias wrote: post #145
mips_avatar wrote: post #96

The incident last month where that woman got dragged and pinned by the Cruise vehicle was pretty disconcerting. The initial collision wasn't the fault of the cruise vehicle (another vehicle hit her pushing her into the cruise vehicle and fled the scene), but the cruise vehicle then proceeded to try to "pull over" and just dragged this woman and rolled over her leg. Weird situation but definitely something made much m…

[flagged]

This woman got dragged 20 feet and then the car rolled over her leg and stopped. The fire department had to come and remove the wheel of the car to get it off her leg. I don't know of a single person who would have done that.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#157

Post by ambicapter »

xyst wrote: post #81

TxDMV needs to follow this. Fuck these companies. They are testing their garbage in dense urban areas. Too many times their vehicles just stop in the middle of the road. If it rains, vehicle stops. If the light is out, vehicle panics and stops. Somebody puts a cone on the hood, vehicle panics. If a single variable not accounted for in their algorithms shifts beyond expected range, it fucking panics. So much money dum…

> Too many times their vehicles just stop in the middle of the road.

The problem in this case happens to be that the AV tried to pull over instead of stopping in the middle of the road, so not sure this is a great criticism to make.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#159

Post by nvy »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #126
nvy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Americans were serious about reducing car deaths they'd ban gigantic pickups and SUVs with blind spots big enough to fit a Volkswagen. They'd ban cars from city centers and build bicycle highways. They'd invest in convenient rail infrastructure. Instead we've got "it's a car but you can doomscroll while on your 45 minute commute and we harvest your data to sell ads". This has nothing to do with public safety.

This is the same mistake gun control advocates who want to take away guns make. Yes, Americans want to reduce death. But they want freedom more.

It's just so stereotypically American to say "here's a problem society faces" and then in the same breath pretend the solution is to enrich the CEOs of a handful of tech companies peddling solutions that may or may not even ever succeed.

>But they want freedom more.

Sure, it's a very individualistic society where one's personal convenience is more important than societal good. But let's call a spade a spade and not pretend that self driving car companies are selfless benefactors out to solve pedestrian deaths.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#160

Post by pj_mukh »

mips_avatar wrote: post #96

The incident last month where that woman got dragged and pinned by the Cruise vehicle was pretty disconcerting. The initial collision wasn't the fault of the cruise vehicle (another vehicle hit her pushing her into the cruise vehicle and fled the scene), but the cruise vehicle then proceeded to try to "pull over" and just dragged this woman and rolled over her leg. Weird situation but definitely something made much m…

Did Cruise release the video, its not clear to me a human driver would be better (other than some textual descriptions of the event)? The (human) person who actually caused the crash is still at large, and the bay area (SF + Oakland) still continues to one of the municipalities with negligble traffic enforcement [1] and massively dangerous (human) driving behavior [2].

So the city and DMV focussing their efforts on this corner case driving systems seems like dereliction of duty on the City attorney's and DoT's part.

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/07/01/ask-the-standard-san-franc...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUzc15BeAaE

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