Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 692 posts

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

#211

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

Animats wrote: post #35
standardUser wrote: post #19

Waymo needs competition. Who else is even close to being able to provide it? I'd hate to think Tesla is next in line because they haven't even started a commercial pilot program yet.

> Who else is even close to being able to provide it? Baidu/Apollo, maybe. There are deployed robo-taxis in China. Reviews of driving quality indicate "meh", they are sometimes directly teleoperated to get out of problems, and difficult intersections have fixed cameras the cars can see through.

Reading from intersection-mounted fixed cameras seems like a valid solution.

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

#212

Post by tristan957 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #157
mensetmanusman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business model enforced by the government.

And for good reason. The whole point of the regulation is to assure that there is someone nearby for the owner to get a vehicle repaired and be able to buy parts. ahem Guess what Tesla has a ton of problems with? Edit: there are a whole lot of people replying who seem unaware that I was referring to new car customers who have a vehicle which is broken under government-mandated warranties, but also that: - The majorit…

I buy my parts online generally. Doesn't matter if there is a Chevrolet dealer in my area

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

#213

Post by zrobotics »

stogot wrote: post #196
mingus88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What tesla salespeople? They're pretty well known for flaunting the dealer model. I've never bought a tesla, but from the friends that have bought one one of the big plusses is you don't talk to a salesperson at all, you buy the car at a fixed retail price online. Has this changed recently?

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

#214

Post by adrr »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #159
adrr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSD isn't driving though, you're driving. 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.

> 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…

Compare it to FSD which can't self drive on any road in any condition. Thats the real facts.

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

#215

Post by ivewonyoung »

llamaimperative wrote: post #200
ivewonyoung wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What evidence do you have for your argument?

The fact that their software is written only to just follow the car in front, and completely and immediately give up if there's no car in front or one cannot be seen due to it being dark or bad weather, on premapped roads.

Meanwhile FSD has repeatedly shown that's it's capable of driving without a car in front.

You can watch YouTube videos of FSD driving without a car in front for thousands of miles on non-premapped roads.

What makes you think Mercedes would be better at doing that?

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

#216

Post by fastball »

kevindamm wrote: post #123
ketzo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it kinda the other way around? I feel like the clock starts the first time a CyberCab gives a paid passenger ride, and that seems like quite a ways out — potentially much more than 2 years. And Waymo has that whole time to bring down their costs of construction, learn how to solve problems of scale, and so on. I agree that a CyberCab would have structural advantages if the service were at parity w/ Waymo, but t…

More than that, even -- Waymo is already transitioning to having partners that do the operations & maintenance work while they focus on the tech. I read this as a confidence in the tech timeline, strategy, and maturity. Meanwhile, Tesla's strategy is "hype, ???, deal with it." I know which one I'd back.

So I assume you've put your money where your mouth is and own GOOG and not TSLA.

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

#217

Post by fastball »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #189
derektank wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely with everything you've said, but it's worth keeping in mind that if legal/compliance requirements were to be loosened, a company could expand their offerings with a less robust safety record. And someone close to the incoming presidential administration would be in a position to influence what those requirements are.

Why would this help Tesla more than Waymo? Even supposing slanted regulatory rule making, Tesla’s autonomous capabilities are vastly inferior to Waymo. The rules can’t be that complicated, either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not. FWIW I’m a Tesla owner who rides Waymos whenever they are available for a cab ride, and won’t turn on FSD despite a number of free trials

If you won't turn on FSD how do you know Waymo is vastly superior?

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

#218

Post by renewiltord »

Animats wrote: post #38
throwaway48476 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So stupid. If something has proved to be possible then you as number 2 can hire people from 1 to replicate it. China is built on this principle.

Remember what happened to the Google employee who tried to leave and take some of the technology with him.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski

He was pardoned by the President. I enjoyed that. Pretty random one to pardon.

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

#219

Post by bluGill »

makestuff wrote: post #194
dangus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oil changes are a minority ofincome and the rest is far cars old enough that the owner is going to a third party mechanic.

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

#220

Post by paxys »

eappleby wrote: post #44

GM 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)

Well yeah they just cut $1B/yr of spending from their books.
Post reply on HN