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Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

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Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#111

Post by [deleted] »

hef19898 wrote: post #105
gruez wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the OP seems to be skipping that part entirely. The only metric we should care about is overall accident rates (controlling for reasonable variables of course), not "safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with".

Given that driverless cars are slim minority on our roads, if they exist at all, failure modes actually do matter a lot. Human drivwr failure modes are what everybody is used to, and trained by everyday life to cope with. The radom, unpredictable stuff driverless cars do is in itsrlf dangerous from that perspective.

[deleted]

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#112

Post by bluGill »

chaboud wrote: post #53
whimsicalism wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because they have weird failure cases does not mean they fail more often than human drivers. FWIW as a biker in SF i feel much more comfortable around driverless than actual drivers, especially in areas like the Mission where people don’t check their right before turning onto streets like Guerrero or Valencia. The self driving ones always do

An unlicensed driver in the Mission plowed into me on my motorcycle because he panicked and slammed on the gas. Cruise cars, conversely, generally result in close calls due to aborted lane changes, cutting me off, or absurd double parking, but I can safely assume that a Cruise car will sit at a stop sign for minutes on end of other drivers don't give it a turn. Cruise vehicles operate like over-cautious student drive…

Assertiveness is a bad thing in drivers. Sure you wait longer for others to do the right thing, but you also don't force crashes because of your bad driving.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#113

Post by Retric »

hef19898 wrote: post #105
gruez wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the OP seems to be skipping that part entirely. The only metric we should care about is overall accident rates (controlling for reasonable variables of course), not "safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with".

Given that driverless cars are slim minority on our roads, if they exist at all, failure modes actually do matter a lot. Human drivwr failure modes are what everybody is used to, and trained by everyday life to cope with. The radom, unpredictable stuff driverless cars do is in itsrlf dangerous from that perspective.

This isn’t the kind of thing you need to theorize about when there’s real world data to look at. American drivers have 13.5 deaths per billion vehicle miles, you can try and adjust that for conditions etc but people still fuck up driving good cars in nearly perfect conditions.

The fully autonomous cars without safety drivers haven’t yet crossed the threshold to compare fatalities, but you can compare vs the 5 million car accidents in the U.S. each year 43% of which resulted in injuries. So there’s enough data to know they aren’t wildly dangerous.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#114

Post by bombcar »

chaboud wrote: post #53
whimsicalism wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because they have weird failure cases does not mean they fail more often than human drivers. FWIW as a biker in SF i feel much more comfortable around driverless than actual drivers, especially in areas like the Mission where people don’t check their right before turning onto streets like Guerrero or Valencia. The self driving ones always do

An unlicensed driver in the Mission plowed into me on my motorcycle because he panicked and slammed on the gas. Cruise cars, conversely, generally result in close calls due to aborted lane changes, cutting me off, or absurd double parking, but I can safely assume that a Cruise car will sit at a stop sign for minutes on end of other drivers don't give it a turn. Cruise vehicles operate like over-cautious student drive…

You also have the situation where an assumed perfect car that drives exactly as you expect, but once in a million goes just kills you - is likely to be much less annoying (unless you’re dead) than a car that every single time you interact with it does weird things, even though it never kills you at all

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#115

Post by bombcar »

bluGill wrote: post #112
chaboud wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An unlicensed driver in the Mission plowed into me on my motorcycle because he panicked and slammed on the gas. Cruise cars, conversely, generally result in close calls due to aborted lane changes, cutting me off, or absurd double parking, but I can safely assume that a Cruise car will sit at a stop sign for minutes on end of other drivers don't give it a turn. Cruise vehicles operate like over-cautious student drive…

Assertiveness is a bad thing in drivers. Sure you wait longer for others to do the right thing, but you also don't force crashes because of your bad driving.

It’s more expectedness.

I find CA drivers to be very assertive, meaning they will accelerate to pass you while joining the freeway; in the Midwest people will slow down when merging to be polite, which causes many more issues.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#116

Post by mdorazio »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #25
YeBanKo wrote: post #19

> The latest Cruise incident occurred Thursday night when a Cruise robotaxi and an emergency vehicle crashed and left a passenger injured. Cruise said in a social media post that one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene. It sounds serious. But more impor…

It would be interesting to see, but emergency vehicles responding to a call (and with lights and sirens going) clearly have right of way. That said, every emergency driver I know and have seen slows to a near stop at intersections to make sure it's clear before proceeding. But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.

You and others here are conflating right of way with responsibility at red lights. Those are two separate things. While emergency vehicles have right of way, that only means you must pull over to let them pass you. But emergency vehicles also have intersection responsibilities. For example, here's the law excerpt in Texas:

> In operating an authorized emergency vehicle the operator may: ... (2) proceed past a red or stop signal or stop sign, after slowing as necessary for safe operation; ...

And in California the relevant law is in vehicle code section 20156 [1], which clearly states that emergency vehicle drivers cannot do whatever they want without regard to the safety of other drivers just because their sirens are on:

> Section 21055 does not relieve the driver of a vehicle from the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of all persons using the highway, nor protect him from the consequences of an arbitrary exercise of the privileges granted in that section.

It's quite likely that the emergency vehicle driver is at fault in this interaction, not the Cruise vehicle.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#117

Post by bombcar »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #90
lumost wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good are those sensors relative to human ears? Human ears are still freakishly effective at filtering out background noise.

I don't think you need freakishly good filtering to find something as pure as a siren.

It’s almost a harder problem - I can regularly hear sirens in my town the moment they leave the fire station until they arrive at their destination - more than a mile away in each case.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#118

Post by Gabrys1 »

gruez wrote: post #35
fsckboy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but just because they have weird failure cases does not mean they fail less often than human drivers either.

Right, but the OP seems to be skipping that part entirely. The only metric we should care about is overall accident rates (controlling for reasonable variables of course), not "safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with".

I don't think that IS a fair metric. Be it for Tesla or for robotaxi and let me explain why.

Tesla vehicles should be compared to similar vehicles driven by people that can afford a Tesla. (Not to a national average that includes lots of small, cheap or old cars).

Robotaxis incident rates should be compared to taxi incident rates in the specific areas.

There should be some way of factoring in the overly-cautious driving causing other drivers to do stupid shit because they got annoyed by the cars in question. (Not sure how exactly though)

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#119

Post by jaclaz »

8bitsrule wrote: post #87

Good idea. Let's extend that to all gasoline vehicles. They can only be driven (or robo-ride) every other day. Cuts congestion and gas consumption. Makes parking easier. Every driver can still get to all of things they have to. They just have to learn to schedule things better. Car pool, transit, whatever. Most cars aren't driven many hours a day anyways.

When there was the "petrol crisis" in the 1970's in some countries there were "alternate plate numbers" circulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd%E2%80%93even_rationing

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#120

Post by bombcar »

Kamq wrote: post #69
jfoster wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cone blocking isn't hacking. It's simple criminal behavior.

Understanding a system well enough to manipulate it in ways that the owner doesn't want seems at least in the same category of phone phreaker behavior. Which was also criminal behavior, but the point is that I don't think it automatically disqualifies it from the category.

Exactly. Some criminal acts are so simple even an animal could do them - destroy something.

Others are so complex or use the software against itself that they clearly are hacking; even if they remain criminal.

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