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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

391–400 of 1001 posts

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe of interest. There has been research by SwissRe on this topic. https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/paper-review-comparative-saf...

That's behind a paywall. Do you have a link to the SwissRe paper by chance? (Which might also behind a paywall, of course ; )

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#392

As a pedestrian I'm not a fan of being an unwitting part of a private company's beta testing. Before this devolves into whatboutism vs the safety of human drivers, my opposition is to adding yet another unknown safety layer to walking down the street. Usually when private companies are developing products that could kill, drugs for example, it is on the company to exhaustively prove the safety and effectiveness befor…

> It seems odd that self driving cars have been skipping this step.

[Citation needed]

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#393
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…

If humans aren't the baseline then what is?

The baseline should be other engineering we trust with our lives, like planes, trains, ships, skyscrapers, and bridges. Society expects more from technology than from humans... that's why we use technology! Deaths from self-driving cars should be very minimal, every crash analyzed and understood, and findings publicly communicated and mandated.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#394

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? Shou…

[dead]

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#395
post #271

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.

Waymos do stop between fares. They've gotten grief from people who don't like them parked in front of their house.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#396
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,…

To have the city planning work correctly you kind of need participation from the cars. I.e. if the traffic light infra structure knew the destination of every car it could do things more globally optimal. So in that sense, driverless cars will actually help because of kind of nuanced reason. My guess is that there will only be a small number of driverless car companies (tesla, waymo, cruise, apple, etc) and it'll be…

Waymo or Cruise cars on the road today aren't talking to any city infrastructure. The companies are not talking to each other. Heck even cars from the same company aren't communicating to try and coordinate some kind of traffic pattern or share data. The entire current approach to self driving has been a dead end from the start.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. The only thing that seems to get enforced around where I live is speeding, and very unevenly: one time a month or so you see them out giving tickets like gangbusters. On all other days and for all other laws, it seems like the highway is a free-for-all: Stop sign rolling, running red lights, playing with your phone while driving, weaving in…

> We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases. For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We sh…

We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#398
post #81

TxDMV needs to follow this. Fuck these companies. They are testing their garbage in dense urban areas. Too many times their vehicles just stop in the middle of the road. If it rains, vehicle stops. If the light is out, vehicle panics and stops. Somebody puts a cone on the hood, vehicle panics. If a single variable not accounted for in their algorithms shifts beyond expected range, it fucking panics. So much money dum…

Do you think the potential future where humans are freed from doing anything for their transportation (no driving, no pedaling, no steering, no danger, no waiting in traffic, etc) is worth some short term pain while we develop the tech? Was the pain and suffering during the industrial revolution days that have led to our current high tech world worth it? (I'm not just asking this rhetorically, I'm really interested i…

Do you think the patients who got incorrect blood test results from Theranos should suck it up and not complain because all progress is good progress, even if some people have to get sacrificed along the way?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Further, you kind of assume human drivers are going to do these dangerous things, so you can anticipate them. It's more important to be predictable than to be conservative/safe. Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.

Humans can stop dead as well, which is just as unpredictable. For example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emma-czornobaj-loses...

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#400
post #198
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…

So you observed 21 cars with issues out of the 1000 you saw, a marginal hit rate.

We don't know which over the other cars were also doing unsafe things that he didn't notice. He probably didn't see everyone talking on the phone, sending texts, and other unsafe things people do that are not always obvious.
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