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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

#211

Post by mistercheph »

antli35 wrote: post #91
ajross wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driver behavior after collisions isn't remotely that rational. People do all kind of crazy things in extremis (secondary collisions caused by post-collision drivers mistakenly hitting the accelerator instead of brake are a whole category of accident!). And in any case (again, as I understand the accident) this was stopped traffic and the Cruise vehicle was hit by another vehicle. In that kind of situation I think a h…

From Cruise's statements and news reports, it does not sound like the Cruise car was hit by another vehicle. A nearby vehicle flung a pedestrian in front of a Cruise. The Cruise car stopped on top of the pedestrian, then dragged them as it pulled over. Even accounting for post-crash panic, I find it unlikely that a decent human driver wouldn't have realized that the pedestrian ended up underneath their car. https://g…

But what if I belligerently insist that the average human driver would react in the worst possible way? I am trying to appeal to your angriest moments while behind the wheel of a car and get you to believe that your impression of other drivers then is true of most human drivers everywhere, all the time

Then the robot look quite Good, No?

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

#212

Post by londons_explore »

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.

Waymo suffers organisational bloat, and won't make any progress without a competitor.

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

#213

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

It's the same hubris that saw efforts in the 2010's at automating all sorts of manual labor because it was considered "easy work" by those who didn't have to do it.

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

#214

Post by IshKebab »

mrastro wrote: post #54
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.

If we (North America) had more walkable streets a lot of these problems would be solved: grocery stores are easier to place in population centers a short distance with less car and more foot traffic and you can rent a car for occasional "off-road" recreational driving. In terms of transportation and city design, the US could learn a lot from Europe if it weren't so addicted to cars. It's better for the environment, m…

I hate to break it to you but all European cities have walkable streets and yet most still have shit public transport, even on the continent.

It simply isn't economically feasible to have London or NY style underground networks in most cities.

I don't really get why public transport extremists are so against driverless cars. It would be a huge improvement to transport. Just think of them as small buses that aren't shit if you like.

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

#215

Post by kredd »

newswasboring wrote: post #192
melling wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?” 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000 it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. Let’s start by having trains take you to the…

> it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. I don't buy this. Specially in cities. You have roads, buy some buses and hire and train good bus drivers. Put some poles as bus stops. Lots of countries have done it in less than a decade.

The problem is, unless the government forcefully does it, the people sue the hell out of the city. “Bus lane lawsuits nyc” google search will result in bunch of results. Also doesn’t help how it would be a political suicide for anyone to be pro-mass transit during local elections. Sometimes they even oppose bus routes to go through their neighbourhoods as well, becoming some sort of an inverted “tragedy of commons” issue.

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

#216

Post by danjac »

melling wrote: post #64
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.

“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?” 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000 it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. Let’s start by having trains take you to the…

Mass transit in the US is a political problem. Political problems in the US are unsolvable by design. So driverless cars it is. Meanwhile countries where political problems are not unsolvable by design (either because they are dictatorships or they don't have broken political systems) will move ahead with mass transit.

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

#217

Post by defrost »

inglor_cz wrote: post #209
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…

"Mass transit is the solution." I spent most of my 45 years of age in public transport, I only had a car for a year and a half (and a total lemon, I don't miss that). Yet I say: beware of people who speak of THE solution . For mass transit to work, population density matters. At least in the EU, there is a trend of people being priced out of capital cities to the surrounding countryside, where the population density…

> Reliable self-driving would be a huge boon to public transport.

Public transport would also be a huge boost to reliable self driving .. some years of only having to follow already established routes is a perfect middle step to self driving everywhere.

Vehicles can be tuned to the specific trouble spots of specific routes, there is a reduced need to deal with unfamiliar routes, in a number of cities public buses have established right of way | dedicated bus lanes, there's a pool drivers who can be migrated from driving a single bus to remote over watch of several buses, etc.

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

#218

Post by mistercheph »

sp332 wrote: post #83
uejfiweun wrote: post #22

Are self-driving cars actually going to be lucrative? Yes, the progress is promising, but it seems to me (as an observer that knows nothing) that things aren't very scalable. - It seems like every city pretty much requires a custom-tailored solution, and they still haven't solved the "downtown" problem. - It's far more of a regulatory minefield than a pure software business model. - The cars themselves, in addition t…

They are lucrative in the sense that they divert energy from trains and other public transportation infrastructure, keeping demand for cars high.

Why try to engineer effective solutions to transport that have known benefits and costs when we have can burn billions of dollars in the hopes that someday in the glorious future, everything will be the same but you can check instagram while in the driver's seat?

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

#219

Post by 05 »

danjac wrote: post #216
melling wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?” 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000 it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. Let’s start by having trains take you to the…

Mass transit in the US is a political problem. Political problems in the US are unsolvable by design. So driverless cars it is. Meanwhile countries where political problems are not unsolvable by design (either because they are dictatorships or they don't have broken political systems) will move ahead with mass transit.

Yeah but China also has its own self driving cars, and Baidu already operates a taxi service without safety drivers in multiple cities. I guess it’s not a dichotomy between driverless and mass transit..
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