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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
291–300 of 1001 posts
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#292Will California ban all human drivers next? After all, the pedestrian was first hit by a human driver, and was probably the but for cause.
No, because fixing all humans is impossible. Fixing all Cruise vehicles so that this doesn't happen might be hard, but it isn't impossible.
> fixing all humans is impossible
Sounds like a good argument to ban almost all human drivers.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#293From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably. They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far belo…
Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly? I realize I don’t have a real concrete sense of just how many of these there are. Like is this a whole thing already? Edit: thanks for the responses…. Good gravy…
We're an active market in Phoenix for Waymo, and I live in Central Phoenix and see Waymos every single trip I take now; they're nearly ubiquitous. But I've also taken them several times. They're safe, very capable drivers, and I have a lot of confidence in them, to be honest.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the whole point of AVs, like any other product of a for-profit business, is that they make the manufacturers money. A part of the sales pitch for AVs is that autonomy acts as a safety layer. As with any sales pitch, the interest of the manufacturer is often more in getting people to believe the pitch than in it being true, validating that it is true is a concern of outside parties. Insofar as AV adoption requires…
Profitability will be needed for companies to succeed but it's not the point. Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
> Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
Honest question: why do you think Google funded this?
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#295What's the ratio of humans back at headquarters ready to take over vs the number of cars active on the road? That's a really interesting number that I don't think I've ever seen reported anywhere. It does feel like a lot of these weird/longtail situations should be more quickly resolved with some better combination of letting a human override in person (like when a AV car blocks a firetruck) and/or quickly getting a…
I’d be interested in that stat as well, and love imagining a person sitting in front of dozens of screens showing video of automated cars
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This looks like Cruise's fault Imagine having to write the code that "detects" if a pedestrain is caught underneath the car
It's not clear to me that this is purely a software problem; it might be a "the car doesn't even have the sensors necessary to detect this kind of situation" problem. It could also be a "the software can't anticipate that this would be happening the way a human can because it doesn't have object permanence" problem. That's probably at least part of how a human would do it. But I have a suspicion that we're very, very…
yeah, another poster mentioned they would have heard the screaming.
audio is difficult because a human can differentiate a woman screaming from the sounds of construction, etc. And also can tell that it's someone in shock vs someone in pain.
I'm unsure if audio processing is good enough for that yet, but imagine if someone were to try and you could get these vehicles to stop by screaming near them.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the whole point of AVs, like any other product of a for-profit business, is that they make the manufacturers money. A part of the sales pitch for AVs is that autonomy acts as a safety layer. As with any sales pitch, the interest of the manufacturer is often more in getting people to believe the pitch than in it being true, validating that it is true is a concern of outside parties. Insofar as AV adoption requires…
Profitability will be needed for companies to succeed but it's not the point. Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
> Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
yes!!!
imagine if everyone that commutes could watch ads, sorry, use Google's valuable products and services for an extra 3 hours a day
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#298Vice has the details. Cruise tried to failed to disclose their video evidence of their vehicle nearly killing a pedestrian.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspen...
One wonders WTF they were thinking. Were they so sloppy they just forgot to show the video? Were they hoping DMV would never see it? Either way it's a terrible stupid and short sighted mistake. A major problem for Cruise is convincing governments their technology is safe and responsible. Hiding evidence is not going to help that case.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
This woman got dragged 20 feet by the car after the collision, and then the car rolled over her leg and left her pinned to the ground until the fire department came and removed the wheel to get her out. The cruise vehicle wasn't at fault for the initial accident, but the subsequent damage it caused was entirely the fault of the autonomous vehicle. A person would have stopped and helped the pedestrian.
“The woman got dragged 20feet” With respect this part is not clear. Only that the woman moved 20feet. The DMV has not made clear whether she moved 20feet from the location of original Collision (ie with the human driver) or she was dragged 20feet as the cruise car kept driving. They’ve let the audience fill in the blanks and we’ve collectively come to the more exciting conclusion.
The Cruise statement is what mentions "pulling the pedestrian forward 20 feet" so it's clear she was dragged for at least that distance.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#300The incident last month where that woman got dragged and pinned by the Cruise vehicle was pretty disconcerting. The initial collision wasn't the fault of the cruise vehicle (another vehicle hit her pushing her into the cruise vehicle and fled the scene), but the cruise vehicle then proceeded to try to "pull over" and just dragged this woman and rolled over her leg. Weird situation but definitely something made much m…
Aside from the other comments, pulling over when you detect a collision is definitely not best human practice on an ordinary city street for a human driver. If you detect a collision, you stop the vehicle, access the situation and maybe pull over based on your assessment of the situation.
And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop, this post-collision routine? Afaik, the overall program/system guiding a self-driving is some combination of trained neural-network routines and more standard robotic feedback loops. But "what to do after a collision" seems like one of those corner cases that neither programming approach would or could deal with so what development created this routine? It would have to be pure ad-hoc-ery and that suggests that in Cruise's approach to the last-mile/endless-corner-cases problem of self-driving cars is just that, a series of ad-hoc fixed. And this approach can neither be safe nor can it scale.
And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations. Why didn't the "you've just had a collision" signal not pull a human? (maybe it did and not saying that is their problem but otherwise..) The main explanation I can think of is ... the car's routines are already calling pilots a lot and the team is working feverishly to reduce this. An ad-hoc pull-over routine is intended to reduce those calls back to the pilots. Admittedly this is speculation but if true it reinforces my conclusion above.