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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

#321

Post by jcgrillo »

nradov wrote: post #310
jcgrillo wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When will it be profitable? The carmakers are betting that L3 autonomy is a profitable investment, but robotaxis aren't. Regardless of what Waymo can or can't demonstrate technically. So either the carmakers are wrong or Waymo is. I guess we'll wait and see.

Well now you're asking a different question. Robotaxis clearly work today and are rapidly improving. Waymo is past the technical demonstration stage and has paying customers. Alphabet doesn't report profitability for that unit but it will probably take a number of years until they can drive down costs and achieve economies of scale. The senior leadership seems to be willing to fund this initiative indefinitely. Sever…

It's not a different question. Passion projects that aren't profitable don't last. It doesn't matter what a technology can do if there's no reason to use it.

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

#322

Post by sib »

root_axis wrote: post #309
porphyra wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Tesla were to artificially set up limitations like highway only, daytime, clearly visible lanes, good weather, car in front, no construction zones, no lane changes, etc, then they would easily have been able to offer full L3 and take full liability for it. Tesla FSD is practically perfected, with no accidents whatsoever, under such conditions already. But Elon wouldn't want to release this kind of gimped system as…

> Tesla FSD is practically perfected Absolutely untrue. It's not even close to perfect. I use it a few times a week and while it's seen some significant improvements over the last year, it still makes pretty dangerous mistakes, especially on left turns, right-turn slip lanes, intersections with flashing yellow lights, streets with very worn road lines or where the positioning of the road lines shift from one side of…

You seem to have (accidentally?) left off the rest of the comment:

"Tesla FSD is practically perfected, with no accidents whatsoever, under such conditions"

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

#323

Post by mulmen »

rgovostes wrote: post #3

> GM said in a statement that “... an increasingly competitive robotaxi market” were the reasons for the change. Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow…

GM hasn’t been a car company since the 1980s. It’s a finance operation. Leadership only cares about developing products that are good enough to sell financing.

They really don’t know how to develop a compelling product, even though they have an enormous amount of experience and engineering talent.

It’s very similar to the failure of Boeing but GM doesn’t make anything that can kill 200 people at once so we don’t notice.

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

#324

Post by datadrivenangel »

delabay wrote: post #296
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…

"Tesla has a software problem, Waymo has a hardware problem" - Andrej Karpathi Is it easier to ramp to 1M vehicles a year and cut BOM costs by 80%, OR, install more GPUs and collect more data?

If you have to install the GPUs in each car, then you also have a hardware problem.

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

#325

Post by datadrivenangel »

oceanplexian wrote: post #238
jjfoooo4 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet waymo appears to be ahead commercially?

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

#326

Post by ls612 »

danans wrote: post #250
upbeat_general wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something but are there any current regulations that make it difficult to operate? My understanding was that in many states, it's mostly just paper requirements and not any strict testing, etc.

Most states and communities aren't ok with unproven AVs on their streets causing accidents and injuries, even if they are superficially politically aligned with the AV manufacturer's CEO. That's a good thing, we shouldn't be lowering the bar for AVs.

There’s a chicken and egg issue with this in that to become proven the AV needs to drive somewhere for a while.

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

#327

Post by whoitwas »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #116
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.

I think it will be Tesla. Regulatory pressures for them just lifted, and they move faster than all the other driverless companies, courtesy of Elon's fairly hardcore mode of operation. It may not be a perfect driving solution (probably 1:1 teleoperator to car in the beginning), but their go to market speed is undeniably better than Waymo et al. Waymo, Cruise, etc have to map out an entire region and have long rollout…

If each car has someone piloting it because the tech can't do it, maybe the tech is the problem? I don't see how cameras can succeed. Sunlight and fog are constant and not practical to work around with visual data. I'm glad there's regulation keeping those lithium incendiaries piloted by people. People are bad enough at driving.

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

#328

Post by danans »

bushbaba wrote: post #295
danans wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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://elect…

Regardless we are probably about 10-50x the disengagement rate needed. It’s about 1 accidents every 500k miles for a human driver.

Your 1 accident per 500k miles stat is an average across urban and rural areas. But accident rates in urban areas are likely significantly higher than in non-urban areas, due to higher vehicle density/congestion, despite the fact that vehicle accident fatality rates are higher in rural areas[1]. Urban areas tend to have a lot more low-speed no-injury or mild-injury collisions. When you account for all of those, AVs are in shooting distance of human driver accident rates in urban areas. Also, the accident rates are much higher for drunk, sleepy, or distracted drivers, so to the extent AVs reduce those types of driving, they bring the overall accident rates down much further.

1. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8135....

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

#329

Post by ytpete »

master_crab wrote: post #32
mfkhalil wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoox (Amazon Subsidiary) should be rolling out soon. They've already done successful test rides and should be launching in Las Vegas next year.

Saw at least one zoox scooting around Vegas last week at Reinvent

Saw one driving around SF recently too. Not the SUVs they've been testing here for years – but the full custom-built cube-shaped passenger taxi.

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

#330

Post by ytpete »

avree wrote: post #156
upbeat_general wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something but are there any current regulations that make it difficult to operate? My understanding was that in many states, it's mostly just paper requirements and not any strict testing, etc.

Nov 18 (Reuters) - Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab shares rose more than 5% on Monday after Bloomberg News reported that President-elect Donald Trump's transition team was planning to set up federal regulations for autonomous vehicles. The report comes days after Trump named the automaker's CEO, Elon Musk, as a co-head of the incoming administration's government efficiency department. Trump's team is looking for policy…

Interesting... so Musk may be angling to get a federal law passed that would force all states to accept autonomous vehicles with less testing or data sharing than say, California currently requires.
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