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

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#521

Post by pbarnes_1 » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

fhub wrote: post #401

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…

Since it seems people are interested. I had one situation which this sort of thing made me a bit uneasy (So one gripe actually). I was sitting back right seat. Waymo was waiting to make an unprotected left turn over two lanes. There was a vehicle waiting to also make an unprotected left in the other direction. Behind it was a truck. Waymo made that turn where I wouldn't have. I thought it through after and it had at…

I've been in this situation, and it's something that seems to get tweaked every week.

They definitely pushed the "aggressive" lever up a little over the last month.

I think it's one of those cases where it's sort of obvious it can calculate trajectories and speeds much better than a human, so it's a safe manoeuvre in theory, but it "feels" bad as a passenger.

Same thing for where it can see that it can squeeze through a tight "lane" but a normal human driver would probably wait until the oncoming traffic had passed.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#522

Post by ternaus » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:15 PM UTC

So sad.

We, I mean humanity, need an example that L4 self driving is possible.

When SpaceX showed that private company can access space and build a product in the area world changed.

Startup founders, investors, government changed their opinion and many space companies were created and trying to do things that they would not even consider before SpaceX: Astra, Rocket Labs, Planet Labs, Firefly, etc

(Great book on the topic "When Heavens went on sale": https://amzn.to/46NRx9l)

If we get one example of self driving as a product on the roads, it may have the same effect. We are going toward self driving winter and unless Cruise, Waymo or similar companies will do the impossible new iteration will happen in 10+ years.

It is mentioned in the text that in Q3 GM spent 700M on Cruise.

Not that many companies in the world: 1. have similar level of talent as engineers at Cruise 2. can spent similar amount of money 3. are willing to spend them

And we need all three.

There are so many corner cases that without large scale as close to the real life deployment as possible...

I feel very sad.

P.S. Worked for 3 years in a self driving company, till our division was sold :(

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#523

Post by serial_dev » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #510

CSMastermind wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty. Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement.…

Can someone summarize the video? That was my first thought as well: crash data for humans is clearly underreported. For example, police don't always write reports or human drivers agree to keep it off the books.

And I'm not even sure how reliable is the "miles driven" metric. I mean I'm sure you can estimate it somehow, but what's the margin of error there?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#524

Post by akira2501 » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

jbdoug wrote: post #456

akira2501 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

> Well we spend the last 60 years reengineering all our cities to be car-centric,

We engineered them to be human centric. It's just that the humans had easy and reliable access to affordable cars and fuel. So, naturally, the market did what it does. When you say it's car centric you intentionally ignore any benefits or efficiencies that were created in that decision and equally imply that it was a top down decision.

> I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (the 244th largest city in the US) without a car.

Do you own or rent? Are you a college student or a resident?

> If they built a Trader Joes downtown

Why do you suppose they haven't? Should the government compel them? Why them and not some other chain? What if two chains want to compete for that footprint?

> number of fully protected bike lanes downtown

Do you bike in the winter?

> and seems to be doing a good job of making the downtown denser as well.

The population of Ann Arbor has been steadily increasing for the past 80 years. The last 20 years have shown no change in that steady rate. Any recent changes are very unlikely to account for the very slight continual trend.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#525

Post by huytersd » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #488

huytersd wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this but with an appreciation for that paradigm. I get to live away from the city center, in privacy, and can have a bunch of land and room for activities I want to do. This way I get to raise goats, have a woodworking shop, grow my own vegetables and still be 10 minutes away from restaurants/shows/nightlife in the city center. I felt like an animal the few years I lived in an apartment.

Where you live is a compromise. Sometimes I wished I lived downtown - but there are enough things that make it unlivable that I instead choose something else. However many of the things I don't like about downtown would be easy to change.

That’s not the way I see it. There’s no reason for it to be a compromise unless it’s purely financial. I have everything set up just the way I like it with the existing status quo.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#526

Post by iancmceachern » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

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…

We live in SF right near one of their yards and I have the same opinion. They're not ready, and there are incidents I see nearly daily

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#527

Post by kaibee » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #296

mumblemumble wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me that this is purely a software problem; it might be a "the car doesn't even have the sensors necessary to detect this kind of situation" problem. It could also be a "the software can't anticipate that this would be happening the way a human can because it doesn't have object permanence" problem. That's probably at least part of how a human would do it. But I have a suspicion that we're very, very…

yeah, another poster mentioned they would have heard the screaming. audio is difficult because a human can differentiate a woman screaming from the sounds of construction, etc. And also can tell that it's someone in shock vs someone in pain. I'm unsure if audio processing is good enough for that yet, but imagine if someone were to try and you could get these vehicles to stop by screaming near them.

An ML model to differentiate human-in-pain screaming from other noise sounds like scifi-satire.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#528

Post by kelipso » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:20 PM UTC

spaced-out wrote: post #304

kelipso wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why? Allow enough humans to drive and inevitably some of them will start doing so drunk. It's in our collective nature.

It's illegal and we send people to jail for it. What is this.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#529

Post by paganel » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:20 PM UTC

Solvency wrote: post #301

mint2 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t littered through CA, in CA they are exclusively in SF. In SF they are common and as they seem to drive nonstop, take more road time than a comparable number of normal cars. They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.

Why would they keep driving at all times with no passengers? How is that ecologically smart or sensible from a business perspective?

That was always the selling point about autonomous cars, i.e. that they could be driven 24/7, almost.

There was no selling point related to the environment backw when the hype about self-driving cars really got going, I'd say 2016-2018-ish, you weren't getting people talking about taking the tram instead of getting driven around by these things.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#530

Post by Avicebron » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:21 PM UTC

starlevel003 wrote: post #465

petemir wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps we could optimise it further, by having sets of steel paths for the cars to drive on too.

Or we could link them together to make it safer so one doesn't veer off the track, maybe get nicely furnished stations where people can switch over to another set of linked cars to get where they need to go. Imagine the possibilities!