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GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

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31–40 of 95 posts

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

Most of the US population lives on the coast, which is quite temperate generally.

I suspect large portions of North America will be easily serviceable by robotaxi.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#32
post #27

Self driving is going the way of fusion power. Always just a couple years away. I still believe divided highway trucking between major cities with last mile handoff to humans has legs, but I wonder how much the Tesla claims have poisoned the proverbial well of a more constrained system for the foreseeable future.

Waymo appears to be the real deal. Last night I saw one navigate a situation with a hesitant pedestrian better than most human drivers. And before people chime in with "ideal conditions," it was at night in the rain. I never trusted the Cruise cars, they would drive like a teenager that was afraid of the road. But Waymo seems a step up even from the Uber drivers.

How is waymo doing with snow covered roads?

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

Waymo seems to work the same in pretty heavy rain as a clear day in SF. They're testing snow a lot more now, no idea how good it is yet.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

I use Tesla FSD everyday. It is not a robotaxi yet, but it makes a big difference in day to day life. I can do most drives without disengagement. To be clear, it needs to get 100x better for robotaxi. But even with its beta flakiness, it is magical.

Its not self driving though. I have to pay attention when using it. Tesla doesn't have a Level 3 or higher cars on the road.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#35
post #5
post #2

Once again, George was right. Self driving will be solved with vision alone, or it will never be solved. And solving for vision means solving for AGI.

Vision-only is very very very far behind other techniques. Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF.

>Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF.

Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity.

Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles. The legacy manufacturers will end up licensing one or the other, a la Android/iOS.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

San Francisco seems pretty tricky: narrow streets, heavy pedestrian traffic, fog, hills, street cars, etc

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

SF doesn't seem like an ideal place, it rains and is foggy which both degrade lidar performance.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#38

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon…

The thing about machine learning is that it can fail very suddenly, in a very unhuman way.

So even if self driving works most of the time, it takes a lot of work to address weird edge cases even the most inebriated human would not mess up, that other drivers/pedestrians would not anticipate.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#39

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon…

It works most of the time but the issue is that "most of the time" is not good enough for these systems. Even if the failure rate is People often make arguments that "oh it will still be less accidents than human drivers", which is true, but, the problem is that human accuracy is a very poor benchmark for autonomous systems. Autonomous systems need to be held to a higher bar, and it's better if that accountability and expectation is held from the beginning.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

Yeah have fun when it's snowing so hard that all the sensors get covered if you stand still for too long at a light or something.

And I do wonder what hail would do to it. Could cause a lot of... interesting input data. And subsequently a lot of interesting driving.

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