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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

#181

Post by jvolkman »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #117
piffey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are over 30 US cities with trains to the airport. Another half dozen on the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airport_rail_link_syst... US also has almost 350 miles of high speed rail, not 0. The Northeast is where it’s all concentrated with Acela being the fastest. If you live in a major city in the States it’s often way easier and faster to take rail. In Seattle for instance you can beat a driver to…

In Seattle, you can beat a driver to the airport using the train…unless you live in Ballard, or any other place not on the I5 corridor. I never bothered with taking the train to the Beijing airport either, even though it existed for much of time there. Taxi was still more convenient. If we are talking Tokyo or Paris, ok, no problem, but it doesn’t make sense in a lot of cities for a lot of connections to be made.

Hah, looking forward to our 2039 light rail presence in Ballard.

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

#182

Post by mikeshi42 »

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.

I was curious about this from the purely monetary perspective - building good public transit is unfortunately very expensive here in the US and probably even more so in California, but how expensive is it relative to self driving cars?

Supposedly Google has spent $1.1bn between 2009 and 2015 [0], and Waymo has raised $5.5bn in outside funding, supposedly last valuing it at around $30bn. Cruise is apparently on track to burn ~$2bn/yr. Getting reliable figures on actual dollars invested to date on projects is much harder unfortunately. However, it seems like overall it's in the range of billions and likely less than $10bn for any individual project. [1]

As a few benchmarks, I was curious about the cost of the California HSR, Caltrain electrification, and the recent SFMTA Central Subway project.

The SFMTA Central Subway project was a 1.7 mile extension of an existing T line, and cost $1.95bn.

The California HSR's initial 171 mile segment is estimated to cost $35 billion with the final system estimated to be well north of $100bn.

The Caltrain electrification electrified 51 miles of the Caltrain network and introduces new EMU trains at the cost of $2.44bn.

From a bay area resident/layman perspective, the R&D cost for any self driving car project doesn't seem to be out of proportion compared to public transit. Even if we took the information's estimate of the whole industry burning $16bn so far, that'd only buy you half of the initial segment of the Cailfornia HSR, which doesn't make it seem like self-driving car research is that outlandish. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if full autonomous vehicles land before the HSR fulfills its full mission of LA SF in under 3 hours.

Bloated local projects like the central subway make self driving car investments a steal, with 1.7 miles of subway in SF costing the same ballpark as a semi-mature self driving car program.

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-has-spent-over-11-billion-o... [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/money-pit-self-drivi...

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

#183

Post by gruez »

djrobstep wrote: post #134
huytersd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit is no good. I don’t want to walk to a station and then share the space with other people. I don’t want to lug grocery bags around. I want to make pit stops. I want to go off road. I want to live in the suburbs or semi rural areas so I can have a lot of land.

What's wrong with sharing space with other people? Do you have some kind of phobia? You don't need to lug groceries around - just get them delivered.

>You don't need to lug groceries around - just get them delivered.

And pay markup + delivery fee + service fee + tip? No thanks

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

#184

Post by jjallen »

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.

Millions of humans driving cars around and getting in countless wrecks and killing tens of thousands of people isn’t an inconvenience?

Not to mention the very fact that humans have to own cars anyways. That is a huge inconvenience.

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

#185

Post by mcmoor »

mathieuh wrote: post #39
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.

You’re not the only one. It seems to me we should be trying to get rid of cars in favour of mass transport or two-wheel personal transport. Having personal transport in the form of cars makes little sense in cities where space is at a premium. Where I live, to get across the city on public transport takes 40 minutes and a bus change. I can cycle it in 20. Replacing human-driven cars with driverless cars is going to m…

Ah this is first comment on HN I see that ever acknowledged two-wheel personal transport. In Asian countries which have even denser community and worse infrastructure, it's practically the miracle answer. I'm actually a bit surprised when I discover that western countries just, doesn't use it at all, or if they do it's the big variant that's almost as space-filling as a car anyway. It's the densest we can pack people together on the road while still caring about human dignity...

If we ignore the question about safety anyway

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

#186

Post by janalsncm »

selcuka wrote: post #173
janalsncm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This misses the point. It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem. I’m a fan of bullet trains myself. I think it’s way smoother than flying and I wish the US could build some high speed rail. But the reality is, even in places with great public transit like Singapore, people still use cars. What matters is that cars ki…

> It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem. This sounds like the Nirvana fallacy [1]. The dilemma is not about eliminating all cars . It is whether we should invest in public transit which would also reduce noise, pollution, energy usage, or in self driving cars, which won't fix any of those. [1] https://en.wikipedia…

Suggesting that we completely replace cars with public transportation is indeed the Nirvana fallacy. It’s not going to happen in any reasonable time frame, nor is it politically viable or practical. Instead, we should focus on making cars safer.

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

#187

Post by einr »

janalsncm wrote: post #164
selcuka wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China accounted for a third of the cars sold in 2022 Yet they have almost the same number of cars as the US, with 4 times the population.

This misses the point. It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem. I’m a fan of bullet trains myself. I think it’s way smoother than flying and I wish the US could build some high speed rail. But the reality is, even in places with great public transit like Singapore, people still use cars. What matters is that cars ki…

This misses the point. It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem.

Eliminate, no -- but alleviate, definitely. Fewer cars on the roads means safer roads. By offering viable public transportation it does not really matter if everyone has or needs a car -- people will choose to use it less on average.

Finland has a comparable number of vehicles per capita to the US and is a sparsely populated country where large portions of the population need cars to get where they need to go. Yet Finland has 5 traffic-related deaths per 100,000 motor vehicles per year while USA has 16.5 -- over three times as many. I would wager this is both because of better road quality with safety built in (like pedestrian safety features and roundabouts, etc.) as well as less use of those vehicles thanks to functional public transport.

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

#188

Post by npunt »

tuatoru wrote: post #178
npunt wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rebuilding the tribe. We have divided ourselves into neat little nuclear family boxes and thrown ourselves together with a bunch of other randos in neat little boxes, with the unstated assumption that the family unit is the end all be all of human lived experience. This has separated us from our physical (atom-based) communities, to many ill effects including our friends and extended family being further away. This m…

This reads like utterly history-blind fantasy. You need to explain why all the other times and ways we have tried what you propose did not work, and what will be different this time. Start, perhaps, with "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".

Sorry can you be more specific? Humans have lived on and off in community structures throughout history, we evolved as social creatures in these structures. We're proximally further away from these structures in the present time, which has brought up the issues I mentioned.

Among other things, a means of allowing proximity to be less of a factor allows us to explore different sized dwellings due to a greater area of possible land within proximity to us, which allow for a broader range of different sized social units, which allows for some relief of those issues as people can choose to live in more ways according to their preference (e.g. community/kibbutz, loose structure of friends nearby, big family nearby, nuclear family, anonymous in city).

You can literally break it down to a tradeoff of cubic meters of space for a social unit vs time/effort it takes to get to things you want. If you want a commune of X families and a convenience store within Y mins, more efficient transport makes those numbers, on average, work better for people. Maybe it's 60 minutes out of town for 5 families to get together, but only 15 minutes for 3 families, based on ease of getting shared property at a reasonable cost. Do you see where I'm going with this?

If you wanted to go further you could say ease of moving atoms lets you even rethink aspects of dwellings (why we cache food in a fridge, instead of having what we need dropped off to us in a few minutes) and notions of community property (a 'tool/whatever share' program among an opt-in group), and ultimately how we pick what infrastructure serves whom. Lots and lots of implications to unpack when we move atoms around more cheaply, and many of these ideas unlock with small changes. See apps/services that only work economically in cities but not suburbs for a modern example.

Not sure how this relates to The Tyranny of Structurelessness, maybe you're assuming I meant something that I didn't?

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

#189

Post by pcchristie »

seadan83 wrote: post #145
pcchristie wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got a lot of answers already but ... wow... Allow me to say first of all that I agree we should have denser cities/towns, better public transport to get around, and we should all use it more. But some stats (no citation, these are rattling around in my memory, feel free to fact check). 90% of cars are not utilised 90% of the time. That is insane wastage for energy intensively manufactured, expensive pieces of…

> Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed. And now imagine one of those cars hitting a large pothole Beyond this, how will there ever be 100% adoption to support that dream? There will always be a desire to have a steering wheel on some cars to go off road. It's really hard to see how that 2x2x2 dream could ever happen.

We will get to a point where it becomes unethical to let humans drive cars (outside hobbyist places). A Sam Harris says, "the ape behind the wheel" just causes issues.

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

#190

Post by sitkack »

enraged_camel wrote: post #14
cj wrote: post #5

Cruise, taking the high road to build public trust. For now. I respect that. Edit: yeah, I get they don’t have a perfect track record. But most tech companies don’t stop even when faced with issues like Cruise. Getting their cars off the road entirely is a major acknowledgment that their tech needs improvement, which is something I never expected from cruise.

Nope. They lied to the DMV and withheld footage. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspen... >> The day after the incident, DMV representatives met with Cruise to “discuss the incident.” During that meeting, Cruise only showed footage up to the first complete stop, according to the Order of Suspension. No one at Cruise told the officers or showed any footage of the subsequent pullover maneuver and…

What else aren't you telling me?
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