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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

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Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#201

Post by macintux »

astrange wrote: post #173
robbrown451 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains and subways don't get you from anywhere to anywhere. They are incredibly expensive and take many years to add new lines, disrupting all kinds of things in the meantime. And they often take way longer to get you places. My time has value. There's a million things I'd rather be doing than waiting for a train, or waiting while a train makes tons of stops along the way that a car wouldn't. And are you expecting me…

The thing you want is micromobility (ebikes and scooters). A car isn't a good way to get groceries, it's a money pit that makes you out of shape while also being entirely capable of killing you or someone else's children. It's designed for the highway and not good for anything slower than that.

There’s a significant percentage of the population for whom ebikes and scooters are an impossibility, but who can still drive or be driven.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#202

Post by nhf »

brown9-2 wrote: post #143
paulpauper wrote: post #109

It's amazing how driverless taxies are a reality now . It shows how there is progress being made as much as there is talk about stagnation.

It also shows how none of our governments seem to care to prevent companies from testing dangerous products on the street with other unwilling drivers

That's not true with most of the prominent examples you see. All autonomous vehicle fleets in California operate under the approval of the state DMV, and do things like publicize crash reports: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#203

Post by bee_rider »

jerlam wrote: post #45

There is currently some kind of geomagnetic storm which is causing a lot of GPS tracks to be offset over the past few days. It's all over the running/cycling forums. Could be related, here's an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic...

It couldn't possibly be GPS, right? Networks are unreliable, the cars must be able to reach a safe state if the network drops out. They appear to have stopped in the road. If these cars can't safely navigate their way to the side of the road using local sensors, they are wildly, hilariously unsuited for autonomous operation.

> at least a dozen autonomous Chevrolet Bolts from GM Cruise Automation were spotted blocking the intersection at Gough Street and Fulton Street for a couple of hours, according to reddit user seansinha.

There must be something weird about that intersection that is causing a bug.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#204

Post by robbrown451 »

jen20 wrote: post #144
robbrown451 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains and subways don't get you from anywhere to anywhere. They are incredibly expensive and take many years to add new lines, disrupting all kinds of things in the meantime. And they often take way longer to get you places. My time has value. There's a million things I'd rather be doing than waiting for a train, or waiting while a train makes tons of stops along the way that a car wouldn't. And are you expecting me…

> And are you expecting me to carry bags of groceries on the train? How's that work? What exactly do you think people without cars do, or people who live in London? Or New York City? It works perfectly fine. Or you get can groceries delivered pretty easily and cheaply.

Sure. I mean, you can. I live in San Francisco and as often as not, walk to the grocery store. But it's a pain carrying bags around. Not everyone in the world is going to be ok with that when they are used to just packing a bunch of bags in a car. It's ridiculously unrealistic to think that everyone... including the elderly, etc ... will be happy to just use a train that might be a many block walk on each end.

Yes you can get groceries delivered fairly cheaply, but it will be cheaper with self driving vehicles and robot loading and delivery.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#205

Post by BurningFrog »

jjulius wrote: post #96

With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario? I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill.…

This standstill is bad, but it seems perfectly safe.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#206

Post by sorenjan »

jerlam wrote: post #45

There is currently some kind of geomagnetic storm which is causing a lot of GPS tracks to be offset over the past few days. It's all over the running/cycling forums. Could be related, here's an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic...

I doubt it has anything to do with any geomagnetic storm, the issue seems to only affect Garmin devices.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#207

Post by [deleted] »

sorenjan wrote: post #206
jerlam wrote: post #45

There is currently some kind of geomagnetic storm which is causing a lot of GPS tracks to be offset over the past few days. It's all over the running/cycling forums. Could be related, here's an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic...

I doubt it has anything to do with any geomagnetic storm, the issue seems to only affect Garmin devices.

[deleted]

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#208

Post by bee_rider »

BurningFrog wrote: post #205
jjulius wrote: post #96

With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario? I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill.…

This standstill is bad, but it seems perfectly safe.

Stopping in the middle of the road might be dangerous depending on the situation.

If there's something weird about the location where they are stuck -- maybe somebody is jamming GPS or whatever -- then they should at least be able to pull over using local sensors, right?

On the other hand, if there's some effect that is tripping up their sensors -- maybe some odd geometry that, for whatever bizarre reason, looks like a wall to them -- this pretty embarassing, but probably an inevitable growing pain for this technology.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#209

Post by jjulius »

BurningFrog wrote: post #205
jjulius wrote: post #96

With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario? I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill.…

This standstill is bad, but it seems perfectly safe.

I suppose I could've clarified, I'm not necessarily looking at it from the perspective of the safety of people in the vehicles.

Right now it's just a small fleet of driverless taxis. Doesn't this demonstrate the potential for it to be, say, every single Honda in the city? Why even limit it to a city? A single manufacturer's critical infrastructure has some kind of fault (malice, shit code, hardware failure - dealer's choice!) and suddenly Fords stop running nationwide, or internationally.

Then I start thinking of the impact to emergency vehicles caused by a cavalcade of stopped cars, and other similar issues.

Again, I need to point out that I'm not trying to be sensationalist or hyperbolic. I'm ignorant here and am genuinely curious how viable these types of scenarios could be. It's clear that it can happen, I'm just curious to what extent.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#210

Post by koreth1 »

Gigachad wrote: post #195
13of40 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not totally on topic, but what's your take on being able to roll out autonomous vehicles in places with more "fluid" driving habits? I've driven in some crazy environments in the past, but I just came back from a very large country (let's call it an eighth of the world's population) where I can't imagine renting a car and driving there because of the near complete disregard they have for official traffic rules. Obvio…

The problem is much more widespread than just self driving cars. The US follows the model of making driving as predictable and event free as possible. Which results in people driving as fast as possible while paying the least attention. When someone does something unpredictable in the usually predicable environment, it results in death. While its quite proven that slow, chaotic, and unpredictable environments are so…

> While its quite proven that slow, chaotic, and unpredictable environments are so much safer.

The "slow" part, for sure. Harm in a collision is largely a matter of kinetic energy.

The "chaotic and unpredictable" part, maybe not. From the statistics I've seen over the years, traffic-related death rates seem to be much higher in places with highly chaotic driving environments. For example, 140 annual traffic deaths per 100,000 vehicles in India vs. 14 in the USA.

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