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GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

nytimes.com

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Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#141

Post by tcoff91 »

dventimi wrote: post #125
tcoff91 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.

> it [does not scale] in terms of people owning the vehicles Can you clarify what you mean here?

If you sell a ton of these cars, having employees controlling 2% of the time means your costs become enormous rather quickly. You would have to have a subscription business model for this to make any sense where the person buys the car and then has to keep paying monthly for self driving.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#142

Post by jakobson14 »

cheeselip420 wrote: post #26

Cruise is leveraging human-in-the-loop to expand faster than they otherwise would, with the hope that they will solve autonomy later to bring this down. I don't think this is a viable strategy though given the enormous costs and challenges involved. There doesn't exist a short-term timeline where Cruise makes money, and the window is rapidly closing. They needed to expand to show big revenues, even if they had to thr…

you don't need autonomy to be profitable.

Imagine a car rental service where someone in an office building drives the empty car to you, then drives it back when you're done with it. No taking public transportation just to get back to the garage to pick up the next drop-off. Imagine simply swapping the driver controlling a ling haul truck remotely when it's time for a shift change. With good handoff the truck can be driving 24/7 without ever slowing down.

Really the only autonomy you need in that situation is enough to pull the truck/car/whatever over and park it if the connection is lost.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#143

Post by nrclark »

tcoff91 wrote: post #141
dventimi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it [does not scale] in terms of people owning the vehicles Can you clarify what you mean here?

If you sell a ton of these cars, having employees controlling 2% of the time means your costs become enormous rather quickly. You would have to have a subscription business model for this to make any sense where the person buys the car and then has to keep paying monthly for self driving.

Cruise is aiming for a robotaxi market, not for consumer vehicles. In their business plan, they own and operate fleets. In that kind of model, it’s possible that they can get away with 4% human control. Another way to put that is that they would have one operator on duty for every 25 cars.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#144

Post by joshjob42 »

tcoff91 wrote: post #87
amluto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? 100% is scalable, and it’s the common case today. 2% scales just as linearly as 100% does.

That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.

They could spend $75/hr on employees and the cost per car-hour would be just $1.50. That's nothing.

3.5M people work as truck drivers in the US, enough, in principle, to drive ~175M cars at the same time assuming 2% of cars need help at any given moment, ie ~60% of all the cars and trucks in the entire country being driven simultaneously.

Presumably though they'd be able to shave that down a few fold between where they are and dominating transportation nationwide (should they ever do so). So, it's pretty scalable in practical terms.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps....

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#145

Post by genewitch »

AmigoCharlie wrote: post #139

Look, isn't remotely assisted driving something unbelievably stupid? Why should I rely, when I am on my "driverless" car, rely on someone else who is remote, need to be updated at all times about the situation (when things can go wrong in a matter of tenth of seconds, while driving), and needs to react, and it's not as much motivated as me (as I am risking my life, while he is sitting somewhere without having as much…

In my estimation, the 1/10th of a second thing isn't what the remote drivers are for. The car should just stop and avoid getting rear-ended, or dodge, or whatever. charitably, the remote drivers are aiding where a human would need assistance too, like "what hand signal is that cop making? do they mean go, or are they telling me to stop?" or "this light appears to be broken, is it safe to treat it as a 4 way stop?"

my subaru can avoid accidents, it can even avoid things that 100% would not be an accident, even on black ice; so i don't think this is what the remote drivers are doing.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#146

Post by joshjob42 »

batmansmk wrote: post #14

Having to be remotely operated every 2.5 to 5 miles seem to defeat most of the economics of self driving cars. Back of the napkin math, cars drive at an average of 18mph in cities, so every 10-20min. Let’s assume it takes over for 1min, and that you need remote drivers not too far for ping purposes, so at the same hourly rate. To guarantee you’ll be able to take over all demands immediately, due to the birthday parad…

Where do you get 30 drivers per 100 vehicles from?

Let's model it as every takeover is 1 min, and vehicles need help 5% of minutes. Then you'd model the # of vehicles needing help in any given minute as a binomial distribution with p=0.05 and N=100, and you find you get 99.99% of the time you need less than 15 drivers per 100 vehicles. By 20 drivers, you cover all but 2e-8 of the time (or once per century).

But that's a bit misleading. It's a small-size effect. With 10k cars, you get cover all but 4e-6 of all minute periods with just 600 drivers (0.06 per car).

By 100k cars, you have 44 9s of reliability with 0.06 drivers per car.

There's some more complicated things that arise since probably the distribution of how long vehicles need help will be Poisson distributed (with an average of 1min) most likley, etc. But the point will stand, for large fleets you only need a modest margin over the average rate to get effectively complete coverage under normal conditions. It would only be in really extreme situations, like a hurricane messing up badly a lot of the Eastern seaboard or something, that you'd maybe run into issues (which, admittedly, is a real potential problem).

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#147

Post by dventimi »

tcoff91 wrote: post #141
dventimi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it [does not scale] in terms of people owning the vehicles Can you clarify what you mean here?

If you sell a ton of these cars, having employees controlling 2% of the time means your costs become enormous rather quickly. You would have to have a subscription business model for this to make any sense where the person buys the car and then has to keep paying monthly for self driving.

Cruise is a subscription model.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#148

Post by silisili »

joshjob42 wrote: post #144
tcoff91 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.

They could spend $75/hr on employees and the cost per car-hour would be just $1.50. That's nothing. 3.5M people work as truck drivers in the US, enough, in principle, to drive ~175M cars at the same time assuming 2% of cars need help at any given moment, ie ~60% of all the cars and trucks in the entire country being driven simultaneously. Presumably though they'd be able to shave that down a few fold between where th…

This is true, but the numbers inflated even. There's no way they'll pay these people more than $15 or $20 an hour once it scales, which probably further helps your point.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#149

Post by rcxdude »

tcoff91 wrote: post #141
dventimi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it [does not scale] in terms of people owning the vehicles Can you clarify what you mean here?

If you sell a ton of these cars, having employees controlling 2% of the time means your costs become enormous rather quickly. You would have to have a subscription business model for this to make any sense where the person buys the car and then has to keep paying monthly for self driving.

No-one credible is talking about selling self-driving cars to consumers for a long time. Taxi services make much more economic sense and are all-around more comfortable from a liability perspective as well.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#150

Post by vlovich123 »

kvogt wrote: post #60

Cruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows. Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations. The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many ar…

Did NYT not reach out to you for comment? Curious why your reply is here instead of within the article itself.
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