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GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

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Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#191

Post by makestuff »

rgovostes wrote: post #3

> 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…

Super cruise started out as high definition maps of US highways that GM made themselves. At the time (around 2018/19) they were using mobile eye’s technology/SOCs and integrating it into their vehicles. Cruise was operating as a completely separate unit and nothing was shared.

GM later had a PR release for UltraCruise which was supposedly developed in house and maybe that uses Cruise technology. However, AFAIK it was never released and is rumored to be shelved.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#192

Post by xnx »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #155
xnx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind Yes. I think GM leadership has finally learned enough to realize how far behind they are.

Maybe in some small parts of the country. Tesla is dominating most everywhere else in the US. I definitely have no access to a Waymo but have been driven by FSD in heavy construction. (Do not own a Tesla myself).

It's possible that Tesla will have a massive jump in capability of their system, but currently it doesn't do any self-driving anywhere (e.g. you can't sit in the back seat).

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#193

Post by minhazm »

adrr wrote: post #148
jaimex2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even close between Tesla and Waymo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv9HtWUf27s Arguably this is Waymo in its "home turf"

Tesla can't self drive in any condition on any street. Hard to compare that to a level 4 company where the car can go hundreds of thousands of miles without disengagement. Being a owner FSD, its no where near being able to drive itself without supervision, it tries to run reds, misses people in cross walks and can't understand signs like "Do Not Enter".

> Hard to compare that to a level 4 company where the car can go hundreds of thousands of miles without disengagement

This is nowhere close to being true. The latest numbers I could find for 2022 are 17,060 miles per disengagement[1] for Waymo. And even then the definition is not quite clear, because these are safety disengagements from what I can tell, and not disengagements for things like getting stuck because the road is closed or something else.

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/waymo-cruise-dominate-av-testing/

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#194

Post by makestuff »

dangus wrote: post #187
lotsofpulp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM and the other automakers should be lobbying to change the dealership laws then.

Automakers started out with direct sales. Anti-trust issues quickly arose with that business model and that’s where we got dealership laws, as imperfect as they may be. The document is rather one-sided and slanted, but I think it’s interesting to see how a dealership association explains their perspective: https://www.nada.org/media/3267/download?inline Of particular interest is warranty issues. Tesla has an extra-st…

Dealerships also make most of their profit from the service departments which is why they don’t really like EVs. No longer do you need to go in every 3-6 months to get an oil change, belt replacement, spark plugs, etc.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#195

Post by udkl »

Filligree wrote: post #139

I'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.

Here is a hour long video exploring the topic that I watched today and found interesting https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=RSiymNzmpWD7cOeW

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#196

Post by stogot »

mingus88 wrote: post #10
com2kid wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy. Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales…

Based on my anecdotal experience, another issue is that salespeople are not trained on the tech I worked on a feature for new vehicles and the company failed in part because buyers simply didn’t know those features were part of the vehicle. Dealers never set it up for the buyer and it wasn’t something many people would think to do on their own A salesperson isn’t going to jeopardize an easy sale by bungling some fanc…

Tesla salespeople can explain this well though. And the cars come equipped and they let you FSD without them in the vehicle. The confidence exhudes

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#197

Post by [deleted] »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #165
llamaimperative wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you assuming MB Drive Pilot couldn’t also work pretty well outside of its design domain? This argument is always so silly because it’s just an argument about the correct way to build a safe control system (i.e. with guaranteed performance characteristics in a defined operational domain) versus the incorrect way to do it (just kinda work over an ambiguously defined set of conditions and hope you don’t kill too man…

> Are you assuming MB Drive Pilot couldn’t also work pretty well outside of its design domain? Yes,that's a suppressed fact, not an assumption. It just follows the car in front. Check my other comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384114

[deleted]

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#198

Post by ivewonyoung »

jefftk wrote: post #186
ivewonyoung wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mercedes is driving itself and you have 10 seconds to takeover. Huge difference between level 3 and level 2. One is self driving and one is just a drivers aid. None of that is true, it just follows the car in front in slow moving traffic during daytime in good weather on premapped roads and cannot even change lanes. No car in front anymore? It completely fails to "self"-drive. These limitations are taboo to talk ab…

I'm very much aware of how Drive Pilot doesn't handle most cases: in my comment I described it as "super limited" and linked to where Mercedes describes the details. But within the range of cases where the Mercedes system is applicable (which recently went up to 59mph in Germany [1]) it's solidly better than the Tesla system because Mercedes did the engineering to make it reliable enough that you don't have to superv…

> If I had a highway commute in stop-and go traffic I'd be comfortable reading in a Mercedes

It gets dark at 4:45PM in a good chunk of the western world in winter so it won't be useful then.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#199

Post by Terr_ »

rgovostes wrote: post #3

> 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…

> Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.

My pet theory is that it really took off because a bunch of investors were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.

So it might be interesting to somehow plot total "self driving" investment against that kind of customer base projection over time.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#200

Post by llamaimperative »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #165
llamaimperative wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you assuming MB Drive Pilot couldn’t also work pretty well outside of its design domain? This argument is always so silly because it’s just an argument about the correct way to build a safe control system (i.e. with guaranteed performance characteristics in a defined operational domain) versus the incorrect way to do it (just kinda work over an ambiguously defined set of conditions and hope you don’t kill too man…

> Are you assuming MB Drive Pilot couldn’t also work pretty well outside of its design domain? Yes,that's a suppressed fact, not an assumption. It just follows the car in front. Check my other comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384114

Umm, yeah. Maybe I wasn't clear.

MB Drive Pilot is designed not to attempt to operate outside of a well-defined domain.

It will, by design, not operate in a way that is unsafe or in a context in which it's unsafe.

You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts).

What evidence do you have for your argument?

Restated: You are assuming that if Mercedes engineers had a similar appetite for putting millions of innocent people at risk by operating in unreliable contexts, that their system would perform far worse than FSD does. On what basis do you make that assumption?

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