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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

#511

Post by Lonestar1440 »

cogman10 wrote: post #403
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?

Cruise and Waymo are the only two fully automated services I encounter. There might be others in other cities, but I can't comment.

I have all sorts of thoughts on the quality of driver assist from various manufacturers, but that's out of scope here and better material if I ever do Youtube.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#512

Post by pbarnes_1 »

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…

I would never let my family ride in a Cruise (and have never).

Waymo's are far, far better. I ride one every day, and trust them more than I trust 99% of Uber/Lyft drivers.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#513

Post by cco »

hiidrew wrote: post #318
fragmede wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is limited to San Francisco, rather than the whole of California, but they do just drive around the city, especially after 9pm. As a rider, the future is here. Instead of just checking Uber and Lyft for prices to get somewhere, now I check the Cruise and Waymo app for prices too. (Well, not Cruise anymore.) But yes, it's a thing . I call a car, sometimes it doesn't have a driver, and it takes me to where I need to…

How does the price of these compare to Uber/Lyft?

My experience has been that they are roughly equivalent in most cases. Sometimes they're slightly cheaper, multi-stop routes they tend to be a lot cheaper.

If you tip in Uber/Lyft, Waymo is always more price competitive.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#514

Post by paxys »

hnav wrote: post #438
paxys wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what we all initially thought, but with a decade and a half of constant engineering effort and tens (maybe hundreds) of billions of dollars poured into the space with basically nothing to show for it, I wonder how true that assessment still is.

The cars are driving themselves, how is that nothing to show? Ultimately self driving will allow smaller buses and improve the pedestrian experience that way.

> The cars are driving themselves

According to the very article being discussed no, they are not.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#515

Post by pbarnes_1 »

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…

I saw a Waymo come to a screeching halt in a split second as a... less than intelligent individual... skateboarded in front of a bus, into the extremely busy road.

If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question.

Sometimes I'm riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I'm like "dang, why did I doubt you, robotic overload?"

The best part is that it works the same way in the day time vs the night time.

Magic.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#516

Post by paganel »

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…

Based on this recent-ish YT [1] video Waymo is also crap, just as Cruise is, as any car that stops at a green light, on the left-lane, is a danger to all the other drivers it shares the road with.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rxvl3INKSg

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#517

Post by csharpminor »

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…

A respectful culture is needed for public transit to properly function, and the Bay Area doesn’t have that.

Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.

And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.

So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#518

Post by cco »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #214
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 counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. This one could be fixed tomorrow by adopting regulations that other advanced countries have had for decades.

It boggles the mind doesn't it? Since I think the 70's in the US it has been a DOT requirement for motorcycle lights to be always on when the engine is running.

I find it remarkable that we haven't done so with cars as well. It seems like a win-win-win? Automakers (and service centers) get more money replacing more headlights, the public gets safer roads, and politicians get an easy win.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#519

Post by aeturnum »

bluGill wrote: post #451
TulliusCicero wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is absolutely not a case nobody would have expected before? People end up under cars in accidents regularly. Imo any company that "found out" about this scenario through the cruise incident is guilty of gross negligence.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#520

Post by marcosdumay »

FireBeyond wrote: post #468
marcosdumay wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if it turns out that those self-driving cars don't have object permanence. Making things move around without a physical model looks like a really nasty infinite bug-breeder.

For the longest time, at least the visual representation of trains at a level crossing strongly implied challenges around object permanence for Tesla. I will say that I recognize that the visual representation may not be a 1:1 (in fact quite certainly isn't) mapping of the computer's "world view". But it was quite ridiculous and definitely disconcerting seeing a level crossing with a train going through it and seeing…

Well, ok, in hindsight I have to make an exception for Tesla here. They are famously flickery, and I do expect them to have a bug after the other.

But I really don't expect that from the cars that go around without a driver.

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