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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

#491

Post by ghaff »

computing wrote: post #416
RC_ITR wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have o…

I regularly see human drivers intentionally run red lights. Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.

I don't know the last time I've seen a driver do that. The closest I've seen is a school bus/van a few months back drive through a red light after the light had already been red for a number of seconds. (I already had a green for the left turn.)

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#492

Post by bumby »

throw310822 wrote: post #365
thesz wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same applies to regular drivers. We do not track accidents they prevent.

Easy, humans prevent nearly 100% of the accidents. A car without a driver invariably crashes in a few seconds. The question is how many accidents (if any) self driving prevents with respect to average human drivers .

This is such an odd take I don’t know if it’s trolling. Both can be measured against similar metrics (an AV model against the avg AV/avg human or vice versa.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#493

Post by delfinom »

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.

I still want that metric restricted to geographical area. The average across the entire country seems many times outright malicious to use.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#494

Post by Lonestar1440 »

lkbm wrote: post #360
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse. I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car. I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. Th…

I definitely agree with your point here. That said, I don't know if the average human drives acceptably, and I'm very skeptical of a "99%" estimate, but I will say that I would prefer a fleet that consistently drove at the 40%ile of human quality vs. the current human fleet that follows the normal distribution. If self-driving cars reach 40%ile quality, and enable us to stop the 20% worst drivers from driving (or ave…

Yes, this is a difficult problem. When I do see the 1%ers changing lanes at 90mph without blinkers, or not using headlights; I long for stricter, automated enforcement. Points, then a suspended license.

But I also recognize that many people, having the suspended license, must now choose between never leaving home or driving with a suspended license.

I feel like better public transit, more than Self-driving cars (which will be expensive to actually own) is the answer here.

We need to lower the cost to an individual of losing driving privilege, so that we can lower the cost to society from bad drivers.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#495

Post by bluGill »

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…

Most cities in the US have plenty of density to support transit. However without good transit people won't ride and in turn this makes a death spiral where most less dense areas don't get transit at all, much less good. In very dense areas traffic is bad enough that people will put up with bad service, but in a less dense area they won't.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#496

Post by bonestamp2 »

bluGill wrote: post #397
bonestamp2 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases. For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We sh…

We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)

OP is talking about cars at night without any lights on. DRLs would definitely make cars at night safer than car without any lights at all.

Not to mention, I said "at least" DRLs because DRLs are a watered down version of what the European studies show as safer, which is headlights on all the time. In the US, the brightness of DRLs is limited, so the studies are shit to begin with because they're not even using the right variables to find the safest solution.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#497

Post by ToucanLoucan »

lokar wrote: post #467
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…

They lied to the DMV, that alone is enough to ban them.

Seriously! This! This times a thousand! I get that technology is cool and we love seeing stuff like autonomous cars (and to be clear, where I live, I would say they should be the default because holy shit can people not drive here) but like, this is just not okay. Cruise's cars have a well documented history of disrupting traffic, and additionally, they have been found to:

- Not be forthcoming with authorities on releasing information/video

- Be misrepresenting the performance of their vehicles to the authorities

This is just not acceptable for a company to be doing. This is not how we disrupt industries. You cannot "fake it till you make it" with road safety when building vehicles that traverse roads safely is your business' entire raison d'etre! That's just unacceptable, full stop.

And, add to it, Cruise has been given a direct and clear path to resuming operations, which essentially boils down to doing the thing they should've been doing already. Like come on! How much more benevolent can we ask a regulator to be in this scenario? One could argue, frankly, that they're being too kid gloves about a company lying to an organization who's primary goal is ensuring safety about safety!

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#498

Post by pj_mukh »

lamontcg wrote: post #477
pj_mukh wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Screwing up publicly” How else are they supposed to screw up? If the city needs more information from the cars, they should sue for it not indefinitely suspend operations. The city is looking to regulate all this like it regulates new housing (ie out of existence), there has to be consequences for it.

I don't know how to respond to this. If you screw up there needs to be consequences that bite. Suspending their operations is better than some meaningless fine and actually punishes them. If you can't see that, I can't help you.

Note this is suspending operations indefinitely with no pathway back. No "take these steps and we'll consider re-instatement". Basically a death knell. Moreover, the city had requested the DMV do this to Waymo as well (the state DMV just declined).

So yea, this is the city working to regulate driving, like it regulates housing and small business i.e. to the death while favoring incumbents that are far worse.

Cruise operates fine in Austin and Phoenix. They could just move their operations to South San Francisco or further south and be better off. The city simply does not deserve the presence of tech, and for tech companies their presence in the city seems counter-effective

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#499

Post by ghaff »

bluGill wrote: post #397
bonestamp2 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases. For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We sh…

We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)

And most new cars have an auto setting for headlights (and have for a while) that most people just leave on auto. (At least for their own cars. I never totally trust what's going on with a rental although I assume it's pretty standardized at this point.)

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#500

Post by cddotdotslash »

elteto wrote: post #123
wstrange wrote: post #71

Link to Cruise review of incident: https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-th...

Presumably this is why the permit is being suspended: "The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet." First of all, I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large. I'm sure the Cruise car recorded the plate and they passed this to the police. Second, the corporate spe…

My theory is that we’re just going to read about a never-ending (but possibly increasingly rare) series of edge cases. And in every one, it’ll be dismissed as “oh that was a really rare edge case” yet humans would have been able to make a better choice in the same circumstances.
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