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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

getcruise.com

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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#131

Post by seanmcdirmid »

asdff wrote: post #126
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reject the ride due to cleanliness and request another one.

And who knows how long that will take? In some places it takes long enough just to request a single uber trip much less two in a row. Imagine how livid you'd get when a half hour after you first intended to leave the bar, the second self driving car arrives, and it to is soiled.

Hey, with a huge fleet of self driving cars that aren’t taking Saturday night off and only have mostly bar traffic to consider, I think you’ll manage.

And the robot won’t take offense.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#132

Post by ultrablack »

jeffbee wrote: post #56
walrus01 wrote: post #8

Based on this image: https://images.ctfassets.net/95kuvdv8zn1v/6h1C7lPC79OLOlddEE... They and their VC backers are clearly betting on the concept that radars + lidar + imaging will be the ultimate successful solution in full self driving cars, as a completely opposite design and engineering philosophy from Tesla attempting to do "full self driving" with camera sensors and categorical rejection of lidar. It is interes…

Why do we have to discuss Tesla whenever self-driving comes up? Cruise has this technology. Waymo has it. There are a smattering of niche players out there with various levels of self-driving. Tesla emphatically does not have it. They are not in the race.

Where can I buy one?

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#134

Post by walrus01 »

user3939382 wrote: post #127
kvogt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise CEO here. Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win. In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensin…

My conclusion from years of self-driving, LIDAR, etc. research is that managing medium to heavy precipitation reliably might be impossible. Visual algorithms run into the same problem as human brains, and the size of e.g. rain drops interferes with the frequencies employed by radio techniques. Is anyone aware of any strategies that give us hope in solving this problem?

I know next to nothing about lidar engineering but 60GHz band radars can still function out to several hundred meters in rain. It is significantly attenuated as the rain rate (in mm/hour) increases, but it takes a lot of rain to make it completely useless.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#135

Post by kabes »

comex wrote: post #60
gitfan86 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is success? Does 50 miles of geofenced and daily mapped streets mean Cruise won self driving? What if Waymo gets to 20k miles of geofenced roads and monthly mapped? What if Tesla gets to the point of one intervention/crash every 100k miles? 10M Miles?

The human accident rate is about one per 500K miles, so if they were able to get in that range, then yes, they would have succeeded; drivers would be able to stop paying attention to the road without putting themselves and others in danger. But the current FSD beta's intervention rate is more like one per 10 miles, judging from some quick googling. I see no particular reason to assume that incremental improvement can…

It also depends on what kind of miles. Are they running at the same speed? Only easy highways or complex urban intersections?

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#136

Post by spiderice »

modzu wrote: post #46
mertd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can reduce the cost of a car trip to fuel + maintenance + depreciation, you are providing a very compelling alternative to private car ownership. It will change everything.

nobody owns a car because its cheaper than other forms of transit. and if you want to be cheauferred around by an ai instead of taking a bus, you will pay for it.

You will pay more than the bus, yes.. but perhaps less than the cost of owning and maintaining your own car.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#137

Post by 988747 »

namrog84 wrote: post #76
itisit wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit, one day, is if you're a criminal whose face is detected, the car doors will lock, and you'll be driven directly to law enforcement who will be ready and waiting to apprehend you.

Although possible. I suspect and hope there will be some push back. Imagine a counterpoint in either a bug or malicious attack where innocent person is locked in and then driven into a lake or something. I dont think autonomous cars should be able to lock people in. The car can report to police silently, that's fine.

>> The car can report to police silently, that's fine.

No, it should not do even that. You are making an assumption here that police/government always have good intentions.

What society needs is kind of power balance: law enforcement being able to catch 98% of criminals is a noble goal, but pushing that number up to 100% is not possible in democratic society, it requires totalitarian control. That's why we need to make a choice here and oppose surveillance, event if it seems well intentioned.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#138

Post by thebean11 »

sremani wrote: post #51
walrus01 wrote: post #8

Based on this image: https://images.ctfassets.net/95kuvdv8zn1v/6h1C7lPC79OLOlddEE... They and their VC backers are clearly betting on the concept that radars + lidar + imaging will be the ultimate successful solution in full self driving cars, as a completely opposite design and engineering philosophy from Tesla attempting to do "full self driving" with camera sensors and categorical rejection of lidar. It is interes…

The question is do the economics of self-driving cars work when you have to add and integrate all these additional equipment. Correct me, if I am wrong but aren't LIDAR cars supposed to cost you $200K+ ? Tesla is imitating humans in a way that removing LIDAR and relying on the compute to make up for them and build more accurate picture. Also, isn't Cruise owned by GM - who are the VCs here?

200k isn't that much for certain use cases, like shared cars. NYC taxi medallions were significantly more expensive yet the revenue from taxi rides was high enough that people kept buying medallions.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#139

Post by desertraven »

The Cruise CEO is here, along with many grand stories of how good/safe their vehicles are.

I can’t help but think this thread may be a marketing ploy. If this were the case, is it allowed on HN?

Edit: In addition, any negative/challenging/sceptical comment is quickly downvoted.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#140

Post by zaptrem »

999900000999 wrote: post #55
polkadotmatrix wrote: post #30

Amazing considering that he said he wasn’t comfortable putting his own kid in them just a few months ago.

18+ is reasonable since it's still a dangerous experiment. I actually would love an automated version of this that goes at 200 or 300 miles an hour, the ultimate thrill ride. Have it run on something like the Autobahn. While it's impossible for a human being to drive at that speed, computers definitely could . It would be like sky diving but on land

The fastest passenger cars today can only make it to 200mph. Even a computer with perfect vision and 0ms reaction time would not be able to stop in time for a blocked road at that speed unless visibility/road were perfect.

Maybe on roads in the Mojave Desert/South Dakota I90/etc?

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