Can we just call out how incredibly awesome this is? We might stumble along the way but this is as big as moving from horse carts to cars. Respect to all of you working on self driving cars!
Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#412The Cruise CEO is here, along with many grand stories of how good/safe their vehicles are. I can’t help but think this thread may be a marketing ploy. If this were the case, is it allowed on HN? Edit: In addition, any negative/challenging/sceptical comment is quickly downvoted.
Public, fully autonomous taxis in SF is big news regardless. Hard to imagine it not being extensively discussed here.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vision-based driving. Humans don't have lidar sensors.
Humans don’t regress per-pixel depth or use convolutions and region proposals to draw bounding boxes around objects. They don’t function on models with fixed weights trained by backprop either. The idea that “vision only” somehow more closely resembles how humans drive quickly falls apart if you inspect the internals of these systems.
I think the comparison comes from the fact that humans infer a 3D map from stereo vision whereas LiDAR to some extent gives you the ground truth 3D map. You’re right that it falls apart pretty quickly though.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cruise CEO here. Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win. In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensin…
In addition to going into highly dense cities and inserting autonomous cars into existing driver regulation; an interesting auxiliary strategy could be to partner with a master planned community that was designed from the ground up (physically and regulation wise) to be an autonomous first town where the majority of vehicles were autonomous and the majority of home owners were pro-autonomous cars. The roads and pedes…
Cruise acqui-hired voyage, which was basically working towards this. I don't think they've done anything with it since though.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesla limited themselves to cameras because Musk said “humans can do it with two eyes”. He also didn’t like the look of LiDAR on cars. Such an idiotic decision. Good to see Cruise is not lead by a mega-maniacal CEO.
As of a few years ago, lidar added at least $7500 to the cost of a car. That's a huge price difference for a consumer.
Cruise is a ride service - they don't sell cars. So the actual question is: How much does it cost to pay an Uber driver over the lifetime of a car?
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cruise is interesting insofar as they are not simply looking to sell their technology, but they also want to monetize it as a service. Not only will they not need a driver, they will also be able to buy the hardware (the car) at cost. If it's successful, their margins will be much higher than Uber and Lyft by a long shot.
On the other hand, Uber and Lyft externalize many costs including liability.
Externalizing liability and automated driving seem quite at odds unless Uber somehow manages to bypass laws again.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#417At last! Uber and Lyft prices have been sky-rocketing in the city. Great to see a new option on the horizon
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vision-based driving. Humans don't have lidar sensors.
Humans aren't just a stereoscopic camera - we can sense depth by knowing what things should look like, or by moving our head, or refocusing, or… Did you know we can see light polarization? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4528539/
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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#419Based on this image: https://images.ctfassets.net/95kuvdv8zn1v/6h1C7lPC79OLOlddEE... They and their VC backers are clearly betting on the concept that radars + lidar + imaging will be the ultimate successful solution in full self driving cars, as a completely opposite design and engineering philosophy from Tesla attempting to do "full self driving" with camera sensors and categorical rejection of lidar. It is interes…
Cruise CEO here. Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win. In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensin…
I'm no where near as experienced as you and your team, but that is what I was thinking as I read this. Tesla rather quickly went from the expensive sensors to the camera based setup they have now and it'll be interesting to watch how all this unfolds, safely from my 2006 vehicle with nearly no computers.
Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cruise CEO here. Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win. In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensin…
What’s your view on whether self-driving cars should automatically be 100% liable for any accidents? I ask this in the context of machines being governed by classical deterministic physics, so there is an argument that there is no such thing as an accident involving a self-driving car: only a design flaw. This is a genuine question, as I can see that companies with self-driving systems that work, and who do serious f…
I've given it some thought, and I think the SDC manufacturer must be liable for any accidents the SDC causes. Who else is there? The passengers certainly can't be responsible for any programming or manufacturing errors.
There are corner cases and exceptions, but that has to be the rule.
Which should mean that as and SDC owner, you don't have to pay car insurance.