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We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

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Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#101

Post by adrr »

comte7092 wrote: post #75
melling wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?” 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000 it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. Let’s start by having trains take you to the…

> 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents Somehow, after a decade of hype, it doesn’t seem like driverless cars are the most direct path to solving that problem. > Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly I feel like that exists in a lot of places? Not sure what you mean.

Driverless cars are significantly safer than human drivers.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.01206.pdf

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#102

Post by dontwearitout »

xnx wrote: post #12

This is a good move on Cruise's part. Cruise is still nowhere near the maturity level that Waymo was at when Waymo first started driving on public roads. On the other hand, we definitely need a real competitor to Waymo. It doesn't seem likely, but hopefully some combination of Cruise, Apple(?), Tesla, or another player will be able to have a feasible alternative to Waymo's Driver.

There is Zoox

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#103

Post by lmm »

melling wrote: post #64
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?” 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000 it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. Let’s start by having trains take you to the…

> Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly…

I thought the US had legalised those now, so they'll happen as new systems come online.

> In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win.

Why? They're still going to take up as much road space (maybe even more, since they'll be moving around empty half the time). They'll still be spewing particulate pollution around our city centres - maybe more since they'll be heavier. They'll be consuming vast amounts of rare earths that could deliver much more benefit if used for electric bikes.

Self-driving electric cars will deliver at best a marginal safety improvement and a marginal reduction in whole-life emissions. There are much better ways to improve cities, transport, and lives: road-use pricing, bicycle priority at junctions, better parking laws, building more transit...

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#104

Post by kredd »

dangus wrote: post #97
melling wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?” 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000 it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. Let’s start by having trains take you to the…

It won’t take a century if there’s political will. China built a network larger than the rest of the world combined in less than 20 years. Yes, you heard that right, in 2007 there was only one high speed passenger rail service in the entire country.

I don’t like being a defeatist, but being anti-public transit, infrastructure investments, and inability to build public infrastructure is very well ingrained into American culture at this point. Countries like China and India call pull it off because government makes the decision for people. Would be a political suicide for any level of government to get up and say “we will take over the land as we see it useful and build useful shit”. And I don’t even want to talk how in North America, our easiest path would be to hire people who can build that stuff very well (engineers from the said countries), which also won’t sell well with the public.

Admittedly I live in Canada, and in my city we have a fairly functional subway and bus system. But nowhere near as good as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan and etc. It’s such a bummer every time I visit those countries and see how they’re ran, and then travel somewhere like California or Washington to see the opposite when it comes to transit. I know not everything is the best, but I also don’t know how we can fix this problem when majority of people are against the fix.

Oh well, sorry for the rant.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#105

Post by npunt »

polalavik wrote: post #17
xnx wrote: post #12

This is a good move on Cruise's part. Cruise is still nowhere near the maturity level that Waymo was at when Waymo first started driving on public roads. On the other hand, we definitely need a real competitor to Waymo. It doesn't seem likely, but hopefully some combination of Cruise, Apple(?), Tesla, or another player will be able to have a feasible alternative to Waymo's Driver.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

Think bigger.

"Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable benefits to moving the right atoms to the right places at the right time.

There are many form factors that moving atoms can take, only one of which looks like a car. The car is a good place to start for many reasons, including everyone needing transportation, existing infrastructure, existing culture, wasted time commuting, etc.

Now think about what comes after all "cars" are driverless. Their form factors change, roads change, infrastructure changes, proximity between people changes, life changes. Roads are like arteries that feed population centers, and if we can reconfigure them without worry about whether humans can keep up, we unlock whole new ways of living, almost like unlocking new organs with vastly different structures in the super-organism that is society.

The very story of life itself is evolving to move atoms around in new and more complex ways. This is one of the most fundamental and important techs we can invest in.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#106

Post by tayo42 »

flatline wrote: post #37
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

What do you mean? Cars are a marvelous solution to traveling a medium distance rapidly. They are ubiquitous as a result. I doubt we will ever have effective public transit across the US. It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective. And the price of convenience would be high. I used to be bullish about autonomous driving but no longer am. Ten years ago it felt like a m…

We should frame public transportation as a defense issue and use that obscene budget to fund and subsidize it

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#107

Post by bigmattystyles »

freeopinion wrote: post #87
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

Fixed rail is not a perfect solution, either. Nor are millions of mopeds. Same goes for articulated buses, or hang gliders. But be patient. Let more pieces emerge. Let things evolve. Maybe driverless cars will evolve into passengerless engines. Then people own their own passenger cars that are engineless and just hop from one conga line to another to get to their destination. Once you have driverless solved, you migh…

about nothing, I always thought it was hand gliding, but now that I think about it, hang makes wayyy more sense. Anyways, TIL.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#108

Post by TheDong »

kdmccormick wrote: post #70
minwcnt5 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If public transit can't be solved in SF, the second densest city in the US, there's no hope for the rest of America outside NYC. On average it takes close to twice as long to get from point A to B in SF using public transit than with Waymo. And for the walking portions you're likely dealing with either hills or sketchy areas.

Public transit can be solved in the US. Plenty of other countries have done it. That's why it's so exhausting that so many of our brightest minds AND the public's imagination of the future are dedicated to turning our unsustainably-car-centric cities into possibly-safer-but-still-unsustainably-car-centric cities instead of, you know, modern cities with good transit.

the fact that it's solved outside of the US is irrelevant here.

the American Dream requires that each successful American owns a Car (and House, which is another reason American Cities can't be like other country's cities). they don't have to drive it, but since you have to own one, you might as well drive it, right?

places like the uk, germany, china, japan, etc all have working public transit, but they don't have the American Dream, so it's not a valid comparison.

the only people in America who will trade in their Car are the same people who might trade in their American Flag or Gun, which is to say the immigrants, poors, and other false-americans. no true American would ever give up their Car.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#109

Post by mattmaroon »

dmix wrote: post #36
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

Do we have to have this conversation in every single thread that mentions driverless cars? We get it, an extremely vocal subset of reddit/HN who lives` in downtown cities likes public transit more than cars.

And bikes. My first thought was “oh god here comes the pro-bike bullshit again”.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#110

Post by jackvalentine »

npunt wrote: post #105
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

Think bigger. "Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable benefits to moving the right atoms to the right places at the right time. There are many form factors that moving atoms can take, only one of which looks like a car. The car is a good place to start for many reasons, including everyone needing transportation, e…

> we unlock whole new ways of living

Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.

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