California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment • Hacker News Board

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#451

Post by bluGill » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:42 PM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #279

mariusmg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This looks like Cruise's fault Imagine having to write the code that "detects" if a pedestrain is caught underneath the car

I guarantee you every serious self driving car company (at least in the US) was looking at exactly this scenario after this happened with Cruise.

That is the beauty of technology: once we identify a problem we can do something about it and apply the fix to everything. While this is the type of case you can argue nobody would have expected before, once it happens you know and can setup lab situations where similar things happen and then figure out how best to respond over months of effort.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#452

Post by alooPotato » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:42 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #446

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) is going to generally beat dispatched self driving cars in terms of convenience. 20 busses per hour is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city and doesn’t need any kind of routings because swapping lines has such a minimal wait time. However, if you’ve only experienced terrible public transit then it seems li…

you still have to get to bus stop

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#453

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:43 PM UTC

alooPotato wrote: post #379

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,…

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…

[deleted]

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#454

Post by foobazgt » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:43 PM UTC

kelipso wrote: post #269

annexrichmond wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of those deaths per year are human drivers driving the same routes at the same hours in the same weather as Cruise vehicles? Without any normalization this comparison seems moot.

And how many are DUIs. They should really be comparing accident rates for sober drivers.

The same linked website (iihs.org) says between 30-60% of all fatal accidents involve alcohol.

I strongly agree that the safety comparisons aren't anywhere near the same ballpark. They are just too apples to oranges.

All that said, I don't think that means we can't evaluate whether they're safe in the limited contexts they're being deployed in. We just have to be aware those statistics are only as good as their context (weather, geography, terrain, traffic patterns/devices/laws, social norms, etc).

I'm initially most hopeful for constrained environments (city, low speeds, parking) and Waymo in particular, because of the house amount of investment and very thoughtful and cautious strategy in terms of deployment.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#455

Post by earthling8118 » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:43 PM UTC

edge17 wrote: post #280

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…

While I don't disagree, this is also a city that has whole lanes on major streets reserved for cable cars. The city isn't exactly known for making decisions that drive efficiency.

Can you gather some information that backs up your claims here? How would devoting an extra lane to cars increase efficiency? I can't see a scenario where this would do anything but the opposite effect.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#456

Post by jbdoug » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:44 PM UTC

akira2501 wrote: post #314

vecinu wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is not arguing against cars completely, they just have very limited use within high density city centers. Most people can travel by foot, bike, scooter, bus, train, trolley, etc... to get their daily errands done. When you need to go further or out of the city, by all means, jump in your environment-destroying metal cage but you don't need it daily, I guarantee it. Please don't cite extreme exceptions like disable…

> Most people can travel by foot, bike, scooter, bus, train, trolley, etc... to get their daily errands done. In the Top 10 US cities that have the density to support this, sure. Head out to the Top 100s and this reality falls apart very quickly. There's no economic incentive for businesses to be so well distributed through a dense urban core. There's differential zoning and mixed use that form the backbone of those…

Well we spend the last 60 years reengineering all our cities to be car-centric, so who's to say we can't undo that? Most of the top 100 US cities existed before cars, we just hollowed out all the urban cores in service of having ample street parking.

I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (the 244th largest city in the US) without a car. If they built a Trader Joes downtown I would have 0 issues being car free. The city has built a number of fully protected bike lanes downtown that I hope get expanded further into the greater community, and seems to be doing a good job of making the downtown denser as well. It certainly can be done.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#457

Post by foota » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:44 PM UTC

b33j0r wrote: post #142

I know that the geography of North America and the timing of industrialization basically made this a pipe dream… Yet, trying to create near-peer artificial human driving intelligence—just so cities can continue to be designed around horseless carriages, minivans, and truck nuts—well, that may not have been the best solution to the problem. Ideally, autonomous driving would be for “the edge” of a transportation networ…

I'm hoping personally that driverless cars will enable new build out of mass transit by allowing for greater freedom in last mile transport, we'll see :)

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#458

Post by farnsworth » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:45 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #206

farnsworth wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When transit is good you can ride it wherever you want to, and you can do it drunk. That's my freedom

I do not own a car. Love living in a transit forward city. But I understand the reality, that is not a real solution for most Americans who live in suburbs where good transit is just not possible due to the original layout. Instead of trying to shoehorn a solution that isn't practical we should focus on ones that potentially are.

Everybody says that transit isn't practical because suburbs exist. But nobody said that cars were impractical before suburbs existed (well probably some people did and it turns out they were right)

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#459

Post by FireBeyond » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:46 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #300

mips_avatar wrote: post #96

The incident last month where that woman got dragged and pinned by the Cruise vehicle was pretty disconcerting. The initial collision wasn't the fault of the cruise vehicle (another vehicle hit her pushing her into the cruise vehicle and fled the scene), but the cruise vehicle then proceeded to try to "pull over" and just dragged this woman and rolled over her leg. Weird situation but definitely something made much m…

Aside from the other comments, pulling over when you detect a collision is definitely not best human practice on an ordinary city street for a human driver. If you detect a collision, you stop the vehicle, access the situation and maybe pull over based on your assessment of the situation. And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop , this post-collision routine? Afaik, the overall program/system gu…

> And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations.

And then there's a momentary thought of this, and then I think how bad/hard it would be. Sitting there in a "call center", "Ding!" and you're suddenly thrown in to a car mid-collision, needing to take instant surveying of the situation (like "there's someone partly trapped under the vehicle", "am I in the middle of an intersection/interstate", etc., et al.

Even getting past that I think such a job would play absolute hell on epi, norepi, dopamine, etc., response and those people would burn out, quickly (and I say that as someone who spends a lot of time waking up to alarm tones going off before jumping in an ambulance or fire engine...).

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#460

Post by fhub » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 8:46 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #444

fhub wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> no human would be able to do. You say this but as a motorcyclist I've learned to have my eyes everywhere. I suspect many others would say the same. You acclimate to the vehicle you most often control: if that's some woolly handling sluggish SUV then I suspect, no, you probably wouldn't have done well in this situation, but if you were more used to driving a vehicle that requires more attention I suspect you'd do be…

Fair point. For more context the waymo just made the right turn and there was a line of cars in front moving slowly or still. The skateboarder was crouched down and going fast between the cars and the gutter (against traffic). Perhaps from the driver's seat you'd get a glimpse of the skateboarder but it would be very late. No other cars in front made any adjustments. I did hear the skateboarder as it went by.