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GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

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Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#41
post #32
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo appears to be the real deal. Last night I saw one navigate a situation with a hesitant pedestrian better than most human drivers. And before people chime in with "ideal conditions," it was at night in the rain. I never trusted the Cruise cars, they would drive like a teenager that was afraid of the road. But Waymo seems a step up even from the Uber drivers.

How is waymo doing with snow covered roads?

They are testing, but don’t offer a service in snowy areas yet.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#42

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon…

One angle is to look at when we expect there to be data showing a new autopilot vehicle is at least equivalently safe to a new non-autopilot vehicle with modern ADAS. I don't think the performance is there yet, hard to tell when it will be.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#43
post #16

Self driving is going the way of fusion power. Always just a couple years away. I still believe divided highway trucking between major cities with last mile handoff to humans has legs, but I wonder how much the Tesla claims have poisoned the proverbial well of a more constrained system for the foreseeable future.

Is that "same direction travel divided between autonomous trucks and all other traffic"? Or "only on highways where traffic directions are separated by a median"? The former sounds like a massive (understating it probably) infrastructure investment. Trains sound better (as other comment while I was typing notes). The latter doesn't solve the issues noted in the recent article here: https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomou…

Interesting article, thanks.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#45
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vision-only is very very very far behind other techniques. Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF.

>Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF. Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity. Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of m…

You’re wrong on most counts.

1. Waymo costs around $120,000 and the cost is rapidly dropping with new hardware generations and vehicle platforms. They’re in LA, soon in Austin, airport rides in Phoenix and imminent highway driving.

2. Tesla and Comma are only L2, not even L3.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#46
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Tesla FSD everyday. It is not a robotaxi yet, but it makes a big difference in day to day life. I can do most drives without disengagement. To be clear, it needs to get 100x better for robotaxi. But even with its beta flakiness, it is magical.

Its not self driving though. I have to pay attention when using it. Tesla doesn't have a Level 3 or higher cars on the road.

Cruise has Teleoperators. Their snafu revealed an intervention every 4-5 miles, which is worse than Tesla's FSD. (Cruise vehicles were also subjectively bad at driving)

Leveling means nothing, and are determined by the company. Actual operations and range of operational capability matter.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#47

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon…

It works most of the time but the issue is that "most of the time" is not good enough for these systems. Even if the failure rate is People often make arguments that "oh it will still be less accidents than human drivers", which is true, but, the problem is that human accuracy is a very poor benchmark for autonomous systems. Autonomous systems need to be held to a higher bar, and it's better if that accountability an…

> People often make arguments that "oh it will still be less accidents than human drivers", which is true, but, the problem is that human accuracy is a very poor benchmark for autonomous systems.

Never let a good solution get in the way of a good problem.

“But this medicine, while it can cure cancer, has a 1% chance of death!” “Ah shit good point, fuck it then. As long as we can still get pissy with that musk fellow.”

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#48
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vision-only is very very very far behind other techniques. Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF.

>Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF. Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity. Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of m…

> Waymo will coninue piddling around SF with their $500,000 cars until eternity

And Phoenix, and very soon LA, and very soon Austin. They're expanding, not staying in one spot for eternity.

> Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles.

What a coincidence, because L2 (what Tesla actually is) to L4 self driving are millions of miles away from each other.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Tesla FSD everyday. It is not a robotaxi yet, but it makes a big difference in day to day life. I can do most drives without disengagement. To be clear, it needs to get 100x better for robotaxi. But even with its beta flakiness, it is magical.

So do your regular drives just not include any tree lined roads, or have they done some mapping to fix phantom braking in your area? And that’s a serious question, because the stress of trying to anticipate the next phantom brake event completely defeats the purpose in my mind. I’d much rather just drive myself.

I never experience phantom braking in FSD Beta on HW4.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.

Even if it didn't work in snow (and it's unlikely to do worse than humans), all the west coast, desert west, and south have basically zero snow all year long.

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