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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

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Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#421

Post by ajross »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #348
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.

I’ve had several low-light situations where my Tesla identified a pedestrian and applied the brakes before I did (typically dark clothing on a dark street).

Ditto, FWIW. The car may not always behave like a human does in those circumstances[1], but at this point it's objectively much better at the attention and recognition side of the task.

[1] It tends to be more conservative than human drivers, and in weird ways. If a pedestrian seems at all to be moving in the direction of traffic, even if they're on a sidewalk and just meandering a bit, the car will try to evade (not violently, but it will brake a bit and pull to the outside of the lane).

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#422

Post by Zigurd »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #385
bluGill wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those sound like trips where you shouldn't call a car at all, but get on the local transit service. Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option. Self driving cars are useful to replace various maintenance or delivery trucks in cities, and farm transport. However mass transit is better for most things people are thinking about them for.

If the bus had dynamic routing, so it could show up where I am when I’m ready, and take me where I want to go, I’d be a huge fan. I don’t mean this ironically! I think dynamically dispatched, self-driving buses and vans will eventually save public transit. They’ll enable a much higher quality of service than current bus systems. Which drive around mostly-empty stopping every few blocks so it takes forever to get anyw…

AVs should in principle liberate public transit from a lot of limitations. Surge capacity should be easier to deploy. Smaller busses on smaller routes should be at less of a cost disadvantage. Pick up and drop off could be more flexible.

I live in a semi-rural area that used to have a trolley line to the next town where one could catch a train into Boston. It's also a challenge to optimize school bus routes in a sparsely populated area, and AVs could help with that.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#423

Post by mckn1ght »

bluGill wrote: post #376
ryandrake wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems. Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other ve…

Now I’m just imagining endless gridlock because an AV randomly stops mid highway, and all the other AVs reasonably stop, creating waves of backup. And this happening on a fairly frequent intermittent cycle.

Big is different, and scaling this kind of thing to majority of vehicles on the road can cause all sorts of interesting problems.

I’m not saying it’s inevitable; sure, we can and most likely will improve things on the long road to majority AV. This simply occurred to me and I hadn’t seen it articulated before so thought I’d share.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#424

Post by microtherion »

twoWhlsGud wrote: post #391
jsemrau wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ; )

Seems to be this one: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.01206.pdf

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#425

Post by Lonestar1440 »

nfriedly wrote: post #263
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…

> ...San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year... I spent a year in the bay area, working in the city for about half of it. It completely destroyed any joy I got from driving. I've been back in Ohio for 10+ years now, and I still hate driving. It was that bad then, and I hear it's only gotten worse.

I'm fortunate in that I can usually avoid rush hour(s) and have a fairly normal experience. Most of the milage is out on the big highways, away from Bay traffic. Within the city it's fine, as far as city driving goes. Modern vehicles with driver assistance help.

When I do have to get from SF to Santa Clara for a 9 AM meeting... the joy indeed slides away.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#426

Post by paxys »

alooPotato wrote: post #417
paxys wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah they aren't talking to city infra now . My point was that it will become easier to make that happen once a larger % of the cars on the road are self driving.

When will it become easier? After all these companies have gone bankrupt?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#427

Post by robswc »

anigbrowl wrote: post #375
robswc wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody will want to take public transit if the option of quick and efficient private transport becomes a reality. You can be taken exactly where you need to go in much more comfortable conditions with much less risk of running into anti-social behavior. That's why Uber has a market even in cities like NYC or DC.

That's like saying nobody would ride a bus when taxis exist. Most of the time people don't actually need or especially want door-to-door.

Taxis are not quick or efficient enough to make the cost worth it to many people.

>door-to-door

Doesn't have to be door to door.

I use Uber all the time when on vacation to get to places of interest and then back to the hotel. Trying to incorporate public transit would have added 30-40 minutes of walking, no idea how much additional time waiting. Saving ourselves an hour or so per day of vacation makes it worth it for us.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#428

Post by _ea1k »

rob74 wrote: post #247
_ea1k wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it sounds like a fairly fundamental flaw. Does the car have sensors that can determine pulling over is the wrong thing to do in this situation? In general, getting out of the way is the right course of action, but this clearly shows that there are exceptions. I'm not sure that the vehicles are currently equipped for differentiating to even be possible.

In case of a serious accident, especially one where a person has come to harm, not blocking traffic shouldn't be the main concern anymore IMHO...

Agreed, and regardless of state after impact, it should have been able to determine that someone had been hurt by the collision.

That might be the fix in this case, just hard stop for all cases of pedestrian impact.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#429

Post by alooPotato »

pj_mukh wrote: post #387
alooPotato wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is satire right?

Are people this incredulous about public transit? I love autonomous cars, but its not scalable at all. Its obvious to me that public transit is the real future as the population grows.

I think if you were building a city from scratch, it's arguable that self driving individual pods is the way to go for the most convenient AND most efficient door to door transport. Maybe you disagree, but its not important because we're not building cities from scratch.

For existing city infra and politics that we have, I think self driving is def the best way to go. Suggesting that an individual should lobby their gov't to fix public transit seems like lower probability of success than voting with their wallet for longer self driving trips.

Public transit isn't one of those things that can be incrementally fixed. Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better, that's why its so appealing imo.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#430

Post by petemir »

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 always envisioned a kind of world peace where all car manufacturers got together and in a not-designed-by-committee way developed a mesh protocol where vehicles and “the city” (i.e. traffic lights, railway crossing and so on) could communicate data to each other in order to ease some of the limitations of current autonomous driving technology.
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