Waymo is just a guy in India driving your car
GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
171–180 of 692 posts
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#172> GM said in a statement that “... an increasingly competitive robotaxi market” were the reasons for the change. Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow…
For reference:
"Ford BlueCruise is a hands-free driving assistance feature that allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel on certain preapproved roads"
"It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board."
No, because BlueCruise sounds like an asinine feature. To make me pay $2450 more for a car for some arbitrary selection roads for that feature to be available doesn't make sense to me.
Cruise really was on to something, well w/e GM's loss!
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no proof that tesla can make FSD work with the level of safety they would need for a robitaxi service. Especially with camera only. If they do pull that off, or are able pivot to a fused sensor architecture then I do think their hardware potential will make them a good competitor.
I'm not up to speed on the area of autonomous driving at all. Does anyone know if Tesla is basing its next moves off just what the cameras see at the current moment that gets fed into the model? Or is there also a "mapped" component, where it looks up previously mapped information from other Teslas that have traversed this area before? That is what I understand Waymo and GM Supercruise do at least some of the time. T…
They have non-heuristic training. Maybe the AI model is making those connections on the hyper graph if it’s part of the training data, but it would have a decay function as roads get constructed.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair to GM, Tesla basically had to be a brand new auto company and work through a whole bunch of legal loopholes and battles just to have their direct sales model. GM and the rest of the legacy automakers are essentially bound to the dealership system and the dealerships represent a much larger lobbying base than the automakers themselves. We are seeing this play out with VW’s attempt to direct-sell Scout vehic…
GM and the other automakers should be lobbying to change the dealership laws then.
They do.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#175Waymo is just a guy in India driving your car
It really isn't - it isn't even remotely possible
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Supercruise might be comparable to Tesla's "Autosteer" product but its incomparable to Tesla's paid "FSD Supervised" product. The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist.
> The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist. It depends how you look at it, but in the (super limited) cases where you can use Mercedes Drive Pilot you can legally and safely read a book, watch a movie, or work while in the driver's seat. [1] That's not the case with any Tesla product. [1] https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot
Yes there are actual "legal" notions of driver assistance "levels," but out of those 3 companies Tesla seems to be taking it the most seriously. Elon has a high conviction in the product and has continued to pour billions of dollars in GPUs, talent, supply chains, etc to make it happen. Other manufacturers don't take it nearly as seriously, unfortunately.
Sure you might not be able to legally claim that a Tesla is totally "autonomous," but the fact of the matter (to me, at least) is that they are putting in way more effort to solve the problem than legacy auto manufacturers are.
I can step into a Tesla today, press a destination, and go there without touching the wheel or pedals. Sure it won't be flawless but the fact is, I can. I can't do the same in any other consumer car, and the closest thing is a Waymo. The effort is there, I think its just a matter of time before we start seeing the legal stuff play out.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#177I'm not sure I want autonomous vehicles to work. It would, inevitably, lead to more cars in cities. Probably faster cars. Both are the opposite of what we need; it isn't just about safety.
I do if it kills fewer and makes streets safer for pedestrians.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#178Frankly, I think Tesla is going to win this. The new self-driving is remarkably good. Based on this alone, I estimate (actual) level 5 self driving in 2-3 years. I'm convinced that the lidar sensors are essentially unnecessary and the vision-only strategy is basically going to work and be much cheaper in the process.
How does vision work at night?! RGB Cameras dont see anything...
Apparently they have been surprised at how few photons are required to see for these sensors. They are skipping the image computer vision step and going from photons to car control in as few layers as possible.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah and neither of them is close to FSD in capabilities lol. Super Cruise/Ultra Cruise is a brittle highway-only thing, only available in a handful of $200k+ GM cars, that works by localizing to a detailed lidar map of some interstate routes.
This was also available on the Chevy Bolt EUV as an add-on for $2,200. The Bolt EUV started at $28,795, so with the add-on it could be had for ~$31k before tax, title, etc. Not sure where you got the $200k+ number.
The parent post is talking about the Cruise vehicles made by the company this article is covering, a completely separate thing from the supercruise feature that consumers could actually buy. At one point many years ago, the Cruise vehicles cost >200k to manufacture.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#180GM stock up 2.5% since the announcement, so it doesn't look like investors attributed that much of GM's future value to Cruise (or that shutting down the robotaxi development was already assumed)
Stonks go up. No need to invest in the future since retirement is a few years away! (More holes in the life raft?)