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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

#231
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are plenty of FSD videos on YouTube where the driver didn't have to intervene at all on long trips, where the car isn't just following the car in front.

You hit it on the nail, the driver didn't have to intervene but they had to be ready to take over at any time. If FSD could safely operate where you had 10 seconds to take over for level 3, why doesn't Tesla go get it certified for L3 driving. FSD isn't even approved for being a drivers aid(hands off, eyes on) in EU and China because Tesla has not demonstrated that it is safe. Even Blue cruise is approved in EU for comparison. And it isn't because Tesla isn't trying to get ADAS certification in these markets.

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

#232
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is nowhere close to being true. The latest numbers I could find for 2022 are 17,060 miles per disengagement[1] for Waymo

Tesla doesn't reveal it's miles/disengagement stats, but according to crowdsourced data it's 690-828 miles between critical disengagement [1], which is 2 orders of magnitude worse than the Waymo number you posted, and far below their goal of besting human drivers' abilities.

1. https://electrek.co/2024/10/24/elon-musk-just-said-some-wild...

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

#233
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good connections: "In its announcement this week, the White House said Levandowski's full pardon was supported by the billionaire pro-Trump tech businessman Peter Thiel."[1]

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/anthony-levandowski-donald-trump-fu...

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

#234
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They have showrooms.

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

#235
post #37
post #13

GM believed Kyle Vogt when he was hyping up their tech by having small, meaningless deployments in a dozen cities and promising $1B revenue by 2025. Then they had that incident and GM found out exactly how far behind Waymo they are. Waymo is now giving 175k rides every week and expanding to new markets every year. No other robotaxi company in the entire country giving rides to the public. Now they've gone back to wha…

Cruise started as "fake it til you make it", with a drive down the Great Highway in San Francisco. The ideal public road - several miles of straight road with no cross streets. They managed to parlay that into an acquisition by GM and board seats on GM's board. Then they didn't deliver. Waymo hasn't left blood on the pavement. Cruise and Tesla have.

Wildly misleading comment. Like none of this is true. Cruise started as a retrofit kit for audis similar to comma.ai then they pivoted to l4.

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

#236
Pretty bad news for the space as a whole. A decade and a half ago there were a dozen+ companies and tens of billions of VC dollars in the space. People were proudly proclaiming the end of driving. Now all but one of them have folded.

My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other.

Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.

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

#237

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

>either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not

This doesn't seem obvious to me. My impression is that the rate of improvement on autonomous systems is at least somewhat gradual. You've seen this in Waymo's slow roll out, moving from offering the service in initially less complicated settings (suburbs of Phoenix) and progressing to more challenging terrain (San Francisco). If that's the case, then a competitor could provide a worse product but, due to the fact that accidents are somewhat rare in general, have this go undetected for a while. In the intervening time, the worse performing company would benefit from collecting additional training data that they couldn't have been able to collect under a more strict regulatory regime.

Definitely possible that Waymo would benefit even more though! They definitely seem well prepared (except for the unfortunate hiccup of working with a Chinese OEM right before a bunch of EV tariffs got put in place)

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

#238

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

Tesla has data from 5 million vehicles in real world conditions.

What does Waymo have, a few hundred cars in San Francisco and Phoenix? In a field where data matters more than anything else, Tesla has an insane advantage.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good connections: "In its announcement this week, the White House said Levandowski's full pardon was supported by the billionaire pro-Trump tech businessman Peter Thiel."[1] [1] https://www.newsweek.com/anthony-levandowski-donald-trump-fu...

Makes sense.

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

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, Tesls's FSD and Autopilot as well as GM's Supercruise are all classified as SAEJ3016 Automation Level 2.

Which tells approximately nothing about their relative capabilities. The fallback system is the driver (who needs to be ready to take over immediately) and the range of conditions for autonomous operation is better than Level 1.

> the range of conditions for autonomous operation is better than Level 1.

It better be, because Level 1 is satisfied with just cruise control with automatic braking.

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