California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment • Hacker News Board

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#301

Post by Solvency » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

mint2 wrote: post #271

Waterluvian wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They aren’t littered through CA, in CA they are exclusively in SF. In SF they are common and as they seem to drive nonstop, take more road time than a comparable number of normal cars. They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.

Why would they keep driving at all times with no passengers? How is that ecologically smart or sensible from a business perspective?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#302

Post by KennyBlanken » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #160

mips_avatar wrote: post #96

The 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…

Did Cruise release the video, its not clear to me a human driver would be better (other than some textual descriptions of the event)? The (human) person who actually caused the crash is still at large, and the bay area (SF + Oakland) still continues to one of the municipalities with negligble traffic enforcement [1] and massively dangerous (human) driving behavior [2]. So the city and DMV focussing their efforts on t…

Pretty sure a human driver would have done more than what Cruise did, which was...nothing. They didn't even respond to anyone until firefighters covered the vehicle's sensors.

> Firefighters obstructed the sensors of the driverless car to alert the Cruise control center. He said representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters and “immediately disabled the car remotely.”

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#303

Post by mjg59 » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

labrador wrote: post #163

carbocation wrote: post #79

This is just anecdote, but having taken trips in both Waymo and Cruise in SF, I feel very comfortable in Waymo: it drives carefully but confidently. It alerts me when cyclists are near when I'm getting out. It navigates coned-off work areas. Cruise required a lot of (remote) human intervention during my trips.

I have a friend who interviewed at Waymo to be a safety driver. He told me they have a human at command central monitoring the car and the safety driver, talking back and forth. I see no reason why they would remove the human monitor after no longer using safety drivers. For liability reasons at least. My point is I'm not sure Waymo cars can actually be considered self- driving since they have a remote human standing…

I don't think any operator has a 1:1 correspondence between vehicles and remote operators. Remote operation is intended to be used when a vehicle has realised it can't handle the current situation it's in and needs external assistance.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#304

Post by spaced-out » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:53 PM UTC

kelipso wrote: post #269

annexrichmond wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of those deaths per year are human drivers driving the same routes at the same hours in the same weather as Cruise vehicles? Without any normalization this comparison seems moot.

And how many are DUIs. They should really be comparing accident rates for sober drivers.

Why? Allow enough humans to drive and inevitably some of them will start doing so drunk. It's in our collective nature.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#305

Post by dopamean » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:53 PM UTC

_2d30 wrote: post #245

Lonestar1440 wrote: post #120

From 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…

My day-to-day experience with Cruises on the road is much better, mile for mile, than with human drivers. Cruise's failures, in my view, have come broadly at the long tail where their cars stall out entirely in the road due and it cascades to other Cruises.

There's literally no way you know this for a fact.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#306

Post by robswc » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

cp9 wrote: post #122

if people weren't VC brained they would realize that the way to prevent traffic deaths isn't to build fancy self driving cars, it's to invest in safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities

Nobody will want to take public transit if the option of quick and efficient private transport becomes a reality.

You can be taken exactly where you need to go in much more comfortable conditions with much less risk of running into anti-social behavior.

That's why Uber has a market even in cities like NYC or DC.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#307

Post by rurp » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

tschellenbach wrote: post #107

43k deaths per year due to human drivers. DMV should stop sticking their heads in the sand. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state... .

I don't know why something like this gets trotted out in every self driving thread as if it's some sort of clever point. One thing being dangerous does not automatically make the shiny new alternative safer. General purpose self driving literally doesn't exist yet, and when it does it might be even less safe than human driving. Assuming that it will definitely be safer because of some highly constrained testing doesn't track, regardless of how interesting the tech is or how much money investors hope to make from it.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#308

Post by wannacboatmovie » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

Lonestar1440 wrote: post #120

From 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…

> 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 [...] They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways.

You've just described the average Subaru driver in the Seattle area. How is this notably different? Should they be banned from the roads as well?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#309

Post by cp9 » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

bdamm wrote: post #188

cp9 wrote: post #122

if people weren't VC brained they would realize that the way to prevent traffic deaths isn't to build fancy self driving cars, it's to invest in safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities

Ignoring reality 101. Cars were here yesterday, people loved them for their freedom. Cars are here today, people love them and build communities around them. Cars will be here tomorrow, and people will still love them.

freedom is not "everyone has a car". freedom is no one has to have a car to get where they need to go and do what needs done. for example, my favorite bar in my city is like .75 miles away. I would love to walk there, but functionally you can't because the two roads you need to take to get there are dangerous with limited or no sidewalks and extremely dangerous intersections (one is a blind corner where the cars are regularly doing 60 off of an expressway). if I could walk there (or even better, if I could bike there!) then I would be much much much freer to move about my home.

I don't hate cars! I just don't want to have to jump in a car to go somewhere I could easily walk

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#310

Post by paxys » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

I had an epiphany about self driving recently late at night on the streets of San Francisco. It was a somewhat deserted part of town, and the roads were empty. There was a lone Cruise car chugging along and constantly stopping at red lights. The signals were so badly optimized that the car would be the only one waiting at a completely empty intersection for minutes at a time, only to be stopped again at the next one, and the one after that. A single mile of empty road must have taken this car 15+ minutes to traverse. All the top engineering, sensors and ML algorithms in the world and the car was still at the mercy of a basic city planning failure.

We have been conditioned to think of autonomous driving as the answer to the traffic nightmares in every city, but tech will never ever be able to solve a social problem (just like how building a wider road will never ease congestion). Had even a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into self driving so far been spent towards, say, improving sidewalk quality, making traffic lights smarter, putting sensors along roads, coming up with a standard communication protocol for these sensors, building out public transit, improving urban planning etc. over the last 15 years, we would all be living better lives today. But a VC would rather set that money on fire to have a small chance at a 100x return.