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

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#571

Post by oldgradstudent » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

hardcopy wrote: post #129

wstrange wrote: post #71

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

> 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. Jesus Christ! Good riddance, I'm glad their permits are revoked. Can you imagine witnessing this and watching an autonomous vehicle slowly crushing and dragging someone underneath? That 20 ft must have felt like forever to witness…

They also somehow, cough, forgot, cough, to include this part in the video they've shown to reporters and the DMV.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#572

Post by supertimor » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

zachur wrote: post #87

swatcoder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article, it sounds like the Cruise vehicle didn't just strike the pedestrian but stopped on top of her and pinned her in place. A bystander needed to recognize the incident and reassure her until emergency services arrived and mechanically removed her from below the vehicle using the jaws of life. While not impossible, it's hard to imagine a human-driver scenario that would look quite like that, regardless o…

You're right, a human driver might not have remained in place. And as a result they would have risked further injury or death. "“When it comes to someone pinned beneath a vehicle, the most effective way to unpin them is to lift the vehicle,” Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the department, said in an interview. Were a driver to move a vehicle with a person lying there, “you run the risk of causing more injury…

Yes, but the Cruise dragged her for 20 ft first before stopping and pinning her. So it didn’t even remain in place initially, just after dragging her for 20 ft.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#573

Post by ehsankia » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

mike_d wrote: post #540

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Waymo is amazing, knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety - I would feel safer riding in a Waymo than driving myself. My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.

Absolutely. Glad California DMV is taking the more level headed approach here and evaluating them case by case based on merit.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#574

Post by saagarjha » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #538

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,…

Most intersections in the Bay Area have magnetic sensors underground to detect cars and expedite a green when appropriate. Where was this mile-long stretch? 3rd street?

Yeah San Francisco has some of the best traffic lights in the Bay Area when it comes to predictive signaling and synchronization

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#575

Post by l33t7332273 » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

stouset wrote: post #543

olex wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.

Although things are changing, the overwhelming majority of AV miles are generally-safer miles on protected highways. And yet their statistics are typically compared against vehicle miles on all road types. Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated m…

> most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding

What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#576

Post by saagarjha » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #442

alooPotato wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The streets are otherwise empty - they don't need any data other than there is a car that just left a red light - it will most probably get to the next light in (calculate based on the speed limit) so we can turn the light in time. We typically have sensors in the road so we can detect which lane the car is as it goes through the next (now green) light and so make predictions and turn the next light green (sometimes…

That is how the lights in SF work. Presumably the Cruise car was traveling in a place where that was not set up, broken, or perhaps just slightly slower than the normal rate so it would always miss the lights.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#577

Post by stouset » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

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…

I am not aware of a single city across the world that has such a thing, and yet public transit remains incredibly useful and functional in places not-the-US. An enormous part of Europe, for example, even in towns and cities with far less density than those here.

Can we pretty please stop acting like this is a complete enigma that nobody else has managed to figure out?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#578

Post by thesz » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

gensym wrote: post #368

thesz wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or even the ones they cause, for the most part. It's notoriously difficult to get clean data about non-fatal crashes.

This Cruise debacle clearly shows it is notoriously difficult to get clean data about crashes caused by or related to self-driving vehicles.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#579

Post by ethbr1 » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:50 PM UTC

ballooney wrote: post #567

ethbr1 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One huge advantage sensor-equiped vehicles have is knowing velocity and acceleration of traffic around them. Human drivers are often conservative because they don't know the speed/acceleration of a potentially colliding vehicle. We look at something and estimate (How fast? Speeding up or slowing down?), but we don't know . If you could put an actual number on it, I think you could drive a lot more "aggressively" and…

To be clear and dispel your misconception: These cars estimate rather than ‘know’.

They objectively know in a much truer sense than any human.

(Vehicle) Lidar/image multi-point calculation against a precision chronometer

(Human) Parallax and object size change estimation against an extremely irregular, low-precision chronometer

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#580

Post by ehsankia » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #521

fhub wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 throug…

It's a lose lose situation. I've been reading conversation about self driving cars for years and what you always heard back in the days is that they were way too conservative on these kinds of turns and blocked traffic. Hell even in this very thread people are saying that about Cruise. Yet when they make it more aggressive, people feel unsafe.

As you say, this is something they are constantly tweaking to find the perfect middle ground. That being said, maybe people are extra hyper aware of the turns when it's a self driving car, and wouldn't bat an eye or pay attention if it was a normal taxi driver?