Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 1001 posts

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#401

Post by fhub »

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…

Since it seems people are interested. I had one situation which this sort of thing made me a bit uneasy (So one gripe actually). I was sitting back right seat. Waymo was waiting to make an unprotected left turn over two lanes. There was a vehicle waiting to also make an unprotected left in the other direction. Behind it was a truck. Waymo made that turn where I wouldn't have. I thought it through after and it had at least two advantages over a human here. 1. It knew the car situation behind truck well before a driver would have considered it. 2. It's front lidar could see around that truck earlier than a driver could. I still provided feedback that I'd have preferred it to not make that turn even if it was safe to do so. At the end of the day I'm the customer and I want to feel safe at all times not just be safe.

This was the turn - https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7337193,-122.4350752,3a,75y,...

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#402

Post by reneherse »

olex wrote: post #351
gcampos wrote: post #320

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.

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

It would be interesting if some kind of active/inductive measurement could be made.

As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky.

No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#403

Post by cogman10 »

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…

How would you rank others? Tesla, ford, Mercedese, etc?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#404

Post by gen220 »

Any speculation on how big a deal this is for the prospects of Cruise as a competitor in the AV space?

As far as I can tell, they were open in 4 metro areas (SF, Austin, Houston, Phoenix). So this is their original testing zone, and 1 out of 4 of contemporary zones down.

Will this impede their ability to retain and expand existing zones?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#405

Post by TotoHorner »

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,…

> I had an epiphany about self driving recently late at night on the streets of San Francisco

So, the entire amount of VC dollars that went into Waymo is ~$5.5 billion dollars.

If you look at the entire self-driving market, it's probably less than $12 billion in total.

San Francisco's yearly budget, is $15 billion dollars. The Federal Gov spends 50 billion dollars per year on maintaining federal highways.

So yeah, you didn't have an epiphany. You just couldn't be bothered to spend 20 seconds thinking about the math.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#406

Post by DeRock »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #302
pj_mukh wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Cruise release the video, its not clear to me a human driver would be better (other than some textual descriptions of the event)? The (human) person who actually caused the crash is still at large, and the bay area (SF + Oakland) still continues to one of the municipalities with negligble traffic enforcement [1] and massively dangerous (human) driving behavior [2]. So the city and DMV focussing their efforts on t…

Pretty sure a human driver would have done more than what Cruise did, which was...nothing. They didn't even respond to anyone until firefighters covered the vehicle's sensors. > Firefighters obstructed the sensors of the driverless car to alert the Cruise control center. He said representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters and “immediately disabled the car remotely.”

The human driver actually fled the scene. It was a hit and run.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#407

Post by icedistilled »

huytersd wrote: post #366
cp9 wrote: post #122

if people weren't VC brained they would realize that the way to prevent traffic deaths isn't to build fancy self driving cars, it's to invest in safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities

No. Public transportation sucks. There’s no privacy and I have to walk to and from a bus stop. I have nothing against walking, I love it but I don’t want to do that when I have an upcoming appointment or return from grocery shopping. This pedestrian whatever only works in dense urban areas and if you live in apartments. What the hell do people in apartments even do? Just sit around quietly and watch TV so there are n…

Well if you're objection is that public transportation currently sucks, yes that's the problem. It doesn't have to. That's the point.

That might be the first time I've seen privacy as a main objection. Not sure how serious that should be taken considering how much privacy has willingly been given up in the last couple decades in the name of convenience. And also how few cases where it would matter. Like does it matter if a rando can see one sit on a bus? It's not going to make a difference with companies and governments since they have so much electronic location data available, not to mention license plate scanners for private cars which also have electronic location data.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#409

Post by huytersd »

icedistilled wrote: post #407
huytersd wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Public transportation sucks. There’s no privacy and I have to walk to and from a bus stop. I have nothing against walking, I love it but I don’t want to do that when I have an upcoming appointment or return from grocery shopping. This pedestrian whatever only works in dense urban areas and if you live in apartments. What the hell do people in apartments even do? Just sit around quietly and watch TV so there are n…

Well if you're objection is that public transportation currently sucks, yes that's the problem. It doesn't have to. That's the point. That might be the first time I've seen privacy as a main objection. Not sure how serious that should be taken considering how much privacy has willingly been given up in the last couple decades in the name of convenience. And also how few cases where it would matter. Like does it matte…

It’s not that it currently sucks. Even if it was the cleanest, safest, most connected system it still sucks compared to a personal vehicle (ideally electric and fully powered by renewable energy). It also means people have to live in dense apartments instead of spread out suburbs and semi rural living.

I don’t mean privacy as in personal data, I mean not having to be in close quarters with other humans.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#410

Post by bluGill »

pie420 wrote: post #380
seagullriffic wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a poor use of numbers to prove a point. Any unsafe car - one - could potentially end multiple lives. Therefore, one unsafe car is unacceptable. Look up "Vision Zero". It's possible, and should be expected from our town planners, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers.

Vision Zero is literally the least effective program out there. Almost every metric they track has gotten worse in the past 5 years

Vision zero when done correctly makes a big difference. However useful changes are often expensive so instead they do cheap things (like put up signs, and flyers) that don't really make a difference.

Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars.

We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed.

Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.

Post reply on HN