Further proof that General Motors is run the finance types, not car guys. Wonder if they'd sell Cruise back to the founders for say a buck? Sure Cruise could then cut a deal with another auto maker. Maybe even get financing from one?
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GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
361–370 of 692 posts
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#362Sad news IMO. "We're not cut out for the future. We're all in on the dying business." Dunder Mifflin level stuff. Cruise cars were way more numerous around SF, although the service was worse than Waymo's. That stupid October 2023 accident really snowballed, and it wasn't even their (primary) fault.
my understanding is they lied to regulators. telling the truth is easy. lying is their fault.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being just behind #1 (Waymo) and deciding the market isn't big enough is not a good sign for the robo-taxi market.
Are we forgetting that this only happened because they got in huge trouble with regulators and had to withdraw their cars from the street for like a year? I wouldn't take their statement at complete face value and don't see any reason for pessimism for Waymo.
Yup, there is zero chance that the market is too small. The only issues are whether a company can the technology to work and obtain regulatory approval.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes there are actual "legal" notions of driver assistance "levels," but out of those 3 companies Tesla seems to be taking it the most seriously. Elon has a high conviction in the product and has continued to pour billions of dollars in GPUs, talent, supply chains, etc to make it happen. Other manufacturers don't take it nearly as seriously, unfortunately. Sure you might not be able to legally claim that a Tesla is to…
I think there's some chance that Tesla's approach will work out for them, but I'm not optimistic. Getting self-driving software to "impressively good" happened pretty quickly, and even systems from 2016 would usually pass your "go there without touching the wheel or pedals" test. But from there to "as safe as a human" let alone "as safe as we require human-replacing machines to be" turns out to be quite a hard gap to…
> systems from 2016 would usually pass your "go there without touching the wheel or pedals" test
Can you give an example? I'm not aware of anything in 2016 that would consistently pass this test.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I say "we" do - ie, if people want to buy autonomous cars, then that's what's going to happen. Baked in to this is the assumption that the operation of markets are democratic, but they are not. A very small number of people decide where investments go, what tech to design, and what to buy. The alternative - public transit focused infrastructure, is not available to buy in small quantities. Huge investments have to…
> A very small number of people decide where investments go, what tech to design, and what to buy. Baked into this is a certain kind of economic unrealism that you frequently see online. Rich people aren't endless fountains of capital. They fund things that work, ie, things that sell, ie, things the public likes. Rich people who have some other investment strategy than this go broke. > Fifty percent of the people in…
> Rich people aren't endless fountains of capital. They fund things that work, ie, things that sell, ie, things the public likes. Rich people who have some other investment strategy than this go broke.
Rich people fund a certain kind of thing, but that is a subset of the class of all things which could be built. Free universal healthcare is very popular in the US, but rich people aren't building it. They have perverse incentives to build a healthcare system which becomes a good long term investment while using government protection to exclude all competition.
There are things that can be build by collectives of regular people, like libraries, which are conceptually overlapping but also distinct concepts from "things rich people build to sell to regular people." Not all good things are products which are sold to us.
> The US consumer rules the world.
Yes to the detriment and suffering of a sizable portion of the world's population.
> And all this is just academic. Countless poor and middle class families buy cars every day because it's a way better option than living in an urban zone and taking a bus.
Yes, in a world where we vote with our dollars, a car and a bus are going to be the only options for poor and middle class families. But in Japan, China, Spain, France, and countless other places countless poor and middle class families ride bullet trains. How come we didn't vote with our dollars in to bullet trains in the USA?
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Streetcar rails are terrible for bikes and pedestrians. Dedicated bus lanes are a lot more flexible. A rail car is probably more efficient than a bus, but a bus is a lot less expensive.
As a cyclist I’d rather take my chances with streetcar rails than with cars. Rails don’t appear from nowhere and hit me.
Street car rails probably won't appear from nowhere, but if your tire falls into the gap for the rail, you're very likely to crash.
Seattle has a tiny amount of street car rail, but regularly pays out large damages to people injured by the rails.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist. It depends how you look at it, but in the (super limited) cases where you can use Mercedes Drive Pilot you can legally and safely read a book, watch a movie, or work while in the driver's seat. [1] That's not the case with any Tesla product. [1] https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot
Yes there are actual "legal" notions of driver assistance "levels," but out of those 3 companies Tesla seems to be taking it the most seriously. Elon has a high conviction in the product and has continued to pour billions of dollars in GPUs, talent, supply chains, etc to make it happen. Other manufacturers don't take it nearly as seriously, unfortunately. Sure you might not be able to legally claim that a Tesla is to…
From what I've seen, Tesla FSD would fail a driving test here in the EU within the 1st minute. Even the latest and greatest version behaves like a drunk teenager.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pray tell how the robot kicks passengers out Why not just keep the meter running? Then it ceases to be a problem.
Exactly. Easy solution.
Sounds like a dystopian hell to me. Best of luck contacting the robo help support for the robo taxi trying to explain your unique human scenario that it’s never seen I guess.
You bled all over the car because you were shot and then crawled out looking for help because the AI had no clue wtf to do? Ok good luck sir, you owe us 10 days of metered fairs. No there’s no human to get help from.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
Umm, yeah. Maybe I wasn't clear. MB Drive Pilot is designed not to attempt to operate outside of a well-defined domain. It will, by design, not operate in a way that is unsafe or in a context in which it's unsafe. You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts). What evidence do you have for your argument…
> What evidence do you have for your argument? The fact that their software is written only to just follow the car in front, and completely and immediately give up if there's no car in front or one cannot be seen due to it being dark or bad weather, on premapped roads. Meanwhile FSD has repeatedly shown that's it's capable of driving without a car in front. You can watch YouTube videos of FSD driving without a car in…
I've worked on competitors to the mb system from legacy auto; generally the way we work is make the best possible system for the long term, then limit the odd to meet safety, regulatory, and brand risk requirements.
So there will be a system happily running producing target driving paths, but some monitoring system disables in the case with no car in front.
I would guess that the mb system is in fact ok without a car in front, but didn't hit their appetite for risk yet.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist. It depends how you look at it, but in the (super limited) cases where you can use Mercedes Drive Pilot you can legally and safely read a book, watch a movie, or work while in the driver's seat. [1] That's not the case with any Tesla product. [1] https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot
Yes there are actual "legal" notions of driver assistance "levels," but out of those 3 companies Tesla seems to be taking it the most seriously. Elon has a high conviction in the product and has continued to pour billions of dollars in GPUs, talent, supply chains, etc to make it happen. Other manufacturers don't take it nearly as seriously, unfortunately. Sure you might not be able to legally claim that a Tesla is to…
> of those 3 companies Tesla seems to be taking it the most seriously.
You call lying about it endlessly, misleading marketing, beta-testing on public roads, and not even having L3 properly in production "taking it the most seriously"?