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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

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Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#351

Post by olex »

gcampos wrote: post #320
fhub wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all. * Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a b…

That is actually an interesting question. We track how many accidents the automated cars cause, but I'm not sure how many accidents they prevent are tracked.

That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#353

Post by ccooffee »

tczMUFlmoNk wrote: post #155
LegitShady wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A Cruise AV named Panini This sort of nonsense where you take a serious statement and tell me the cutesy "name" of the autonomous vehicle really detracts from the seriousness of the issue. Also, the last paragraph where they try to talk about how their vehicle wouldn't have made the same mistake as the human driver, glosses over the actual issues the cruise car had which a human driver would have known not to do.

I had the same thought about the name. They also didn't refer to the name again in the rest of the article, so it wasn't even setting up a convenient name to refer to the vehicle and distinguish it from other AVs; it was entirely superfluous.

"Cruise gives the cars cutesy names" is typical of fast turnaround journalism. The reporter doesn't have the time or resources to investigate the details to determine if this is indicative of a casual culture at Cruise. Instead, they can drop the easily verified vehicle name and let the readers fill-in-the-gaps. It doesn't exactly line up with CA DMV suspending the AV permit, but it adds so-called depth to the story.

I wouldn't expect this offhanded fact in long-form, slower journalism. But I expect this from Reuters.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#354

Post by choppaface »

fhub wrote: post #277
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…

From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all. * Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a b…

I’ve been nearly hit by a Waymo as a pedestrian when the thing could see me well before it passed.

I hate that they use giant SUVs, really inappropriate car for small city streets even if people love SUVs.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#355

Post by aseipp »

Waterluvian wrote: post #208
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…

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…

Weekly? Now, this is nowhere near SF levels, but I live in South Austin, and I probably see at least 1-2 autonomous cars every single day I go driving in town.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#356

Post by alooPotato »

bluGill wrote: post #327
fragmede wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is limited to San Francisco, rather than the whole of California, but they do just drive around the city, especially after 9pm. As a rider, the future is here. Instead of just checking Uber and Lyft for prices to get somewhere, now I check the Cruise and Waymo app for prices too. (Well, not Cruise anymore.) But yes, it's a thing . I call a car, sometimes it doesn't have a driver, and it takes me to where I need to…

Those sound like trips where you shouldn't call a car at all, but get on the local transit service. Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option. Self driving cars are useful to replace various maintenance or delivery trucks in cities, and farm transport. However mass transit is better for most things people are thinking about them for.

this is satire right?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#357

Post by dilyevsky »

dkarl wrote: post #232
elteto wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably this is why the permit is being suspended: "The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet." First of all, I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large. I'm sure the Cruise car recorded the plate and they passed this to the police. Second, the corporate spe…

> I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large Ironic but completely expected. We have normalized and accepted the awfulness of human drivers to a degree that people just don't comprehend. Human would be terrible drivers even if you ignored the fact that many of them are chemically impaired, even if you ignored the fact that they are prone to rage and aggression. As we consider the safety of self-driving…

“We” have done nothing of this sort. SF is its own trashfire and they just gave up on enforcing any traffic violations except parking which brings revenue. You can look this up in their own stats for this year

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#358

Post by natch »

r00fus wrote: post #76
colordrops wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why so many people hate Tesla, but they aren't allowed to drive fully automated without a human monitoring them, so not the same situation.

Yes, but the quality of the self-driving Tesla has is 10x less capable than Cruise - I don't know anyone who actually uses "self-driving" with any degree of confidence.

What are you intending to compare here?

Two points:

Try using Cruise outside its tiny comfort zones.

There is no such thing as the “self driving Tesla” you mention. There is a beta which requires human supervision at all times.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#359

Post by scythe »

paxys wrote: post #310

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,…

>but tech will never ever be able to solve a social problem

I don't know where this mantra came from but it definitely falls in the risible category of leftist rhetoric. Technology has already solved multiple social problems, most obviously the advent of telecommunications itself solving the problem of coordinating actions at a distance. But more embarrassingly, the solutions you propose in the following paragraph are mostly technological.

People just need to drop this line.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#360

Post by lkbm »

Lonestar1440 wrote: post #202
RC_ITR wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have o…

Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse. I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car. I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. Th…

I definitely agree with your point here.

That said, I don't know if the average human drives acceptably, and I'm very skeptical of a "99%" estimate, but I will say that I would prefer a fleet that consistently drove at the 40%ile of human quality vs. the current human fleet that follows the normal distribution.

If self-driving cars reach 40%ile quality, and enable us to stop the 20% worst drivers from driving (or average drivers when operating at 20%ile due to being drunk or tired), that'd be a huge win for safety.

Right now it's socially unacceptable to increase the difficulty of getting your license, or to take it away for poor performance, because cars are a necessity or near-necessity in most places. If we could provide self-driving vehicles as a fallback, perhaps we could make it easier to permanently lose your license than—checks local laws—repeatedly killing people by driving while intoxicated[0].

[0] https://www.idrivesafely.com/dmv/indiana/laws/dui-and-dwi-la...

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