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GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

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Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#61

Post by gibolt »

lorstic wrote: post #48
ramesh31 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF. Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity. Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of m…

> Waymo will coninue piddling around SF with their $500,000 cars until eternity And Phoenix, and very soon LA, and very soon Austin. They're expanding, not staying in one spot for eternity. > Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles. What a coincidence, because L2 (what Tesla actually is) to L4 self driving are m…

Tesla is legally Level 2, but has done 500 million miles of driving, with the 'driver' acting as supervisor.

The race is on, and if Tesla can fix a large number of small issue, they'll be able to do a massive global rollout fairly rapidly.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#62

Post by ralph84 »

unclad5968 wrote: post #26
jessriedel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

I don’t know where this idea that driving in SF is easy mode comes from. No one who has actually driven in SF would say that. Yes it doesn’t have snow, but it has rain, zero-visibility fog, lots of pedestrians and cyclists, heavy traffic, narrow roads, steep grades, bus-only lanes, lots of cars parked on the street and double parked. Self-driving companies don’t pick SF because it’s easy, they pick it because it’s the most challenging city that’s close to their engineers.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#63

Post by lorstic »

gibolt wrote: post #61
lorstic wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waymo will coninue piddling around SF with their $500,000 cars until eternity And Phoenix, and very soon LA, and very soon Austin. They're expanding, not staying in one spot for eternity. > Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles. What a coincidence, because L2 (what Tesla actually is) to L4 self driving are m…

Tesla is legally Level 2, but has done 500 million miles of driving, with the 'driver' acting as supervisor. The race is on, and if Tesla can fix a large number of small issue, they'll be able to do a massive global rollout fairly rapidly.

Isn't it concerning that Tesla has 500 million miles of driving and is still L2, when Waymo is at 20 million and they're at L4?

Maybe Tesla's approach isn't the way to go.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#64

Post by gibolt »

ra7 wrote: post #56
gibolt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise has Teleoperators. Their snafu revealed an intervention every 4-5 miles, which is worse than Tesla's FSD. (Cruise vehicles were also subjectively bad at driving) Leveling means nothing, and are determined by the company. Actual operations and range of operational capability matter.

Cruise’s teleoperators cannot perform any safety critical interventions like preventing a crash in a fraction of a second, which Tesla drivers can and do. If you remove the driver from Tesla, their intervention rate would be even worse. No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is more capable than one that requires a driver.

Exceedingly few Tesla interventions are safety related. The majority of mine are to fix awkwardness negotiating with aggressive human drivers and legally mandated full stop (which no human driver does).

Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather conditions, and yet still does a great job.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#65

Post by gibolt »

lorstic wrote: post #63
gibolt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is legally Level 2, but has done 500 million miles of driving, with the 'driver' acting as supervisor. The race is on, and if Tesla can fix a large number of small issue, they'll be able to do a massive global rollout fairly rapidly.

Isn't it concerning that Tesla has 500 million miles of driving and is still L2, when Waymo is at 20 million and they're at L4? Maybe Tesla's approach isn't the way to go.

The company decides the level. Tesla's approach is to get more real-world training data to reach a general solution, while Waymo goes slow with pre-mapping as a requirement.

Tesla's approach will likely be the winner long-term and can be flipped on globally far faster than Waymo's could

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#66

Post by joshe »

thot_experiment wrote: post #28

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon…

I'll second that for Waymo.

Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.

I've taken 5 trips so far, and all have been great and better than the average uber driver.

I've had 3 sketchy Uber rides out of about 10 total in the last 3 months. One older woman was was peering over her steering wheel commenting that she really can't see that well at night, she'd kinda guess and head over to next lane, and had to abort once when she almost merged into another car. One plunged across 3 lanes of traffic without signaling while looking at the phone in her hand, twice! Another did a no look left turn while looking at the map and almost hit a pedestrian in the crosswalk. I said "stop!" and he did and looked up shocked. Slow enough that it would have only been a broken leg, but still...

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#67

Post by ra7 »

gibolt wrote: post #64
ra7 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise’s teleoperators cannot perform any safety critical interventions like preventing a crash in a fraction of a second, which Tesla drivers can and do. If you remove the driver from Tesla, their intervention rate would be even worse. No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is more capable than one that requires a driver.

Exceedingly few Tesla interventions are safety related. The majority of mine are to fix awkwardness negotiating with aggressive human drivers and legally mandated full stop (which no human driver does). Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather cond…

Anecdotes are not data. “Exceedingly few safety interventions” doesn’t matter when the number is non-zero. That number is exactly zero for driverless vehicles. So their interventions are not the same as Tesla’s interventions.

If Cruise had a fallback driver all the time, it would “operate everywhere” too. That’s not really saying much. The entire problem is about how to remove the driver, which Tesla is nowhere close to in any geographic area. A dead giveaway is how they’re reluctant to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#68

Post by panopticon »

tahoeskibum wrote: post #25
jessriedel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

I use Tesla FSD everyday. It is not a robotaxi yet, but it makes a big difference in day to day life. I can do most drives without disengagement. To be clear, it needs to get 100x better for robotaxi. But even with its beta flakiness, it is magical.

I paid for a month of FSD over the summer to try it out, and it was an extremely stressful experience.

It was very twitchy and jarring at stop signs, there are several uncontrolled T-intersections around my house that FSD just flew through (almost striking another car one time), and I didn't like how it always tried to get into the slowest lane on the highway during rush hour.

Maybe I'll try it again this summer to see how it's improved, but some of the close calls last time soured me on the experience. It felt more like I was babysitting a new driver and less like I was being chauffeured around.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#69

Post by ra7 »

gibolt wrote: post #65
lorstic wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it concerning that Tesla has 500 million miles of driving and is still L2, when Waymo is at 20 million and they're at L4? Maybe Tesla's approach isn't the way to go.

The company decides the level. Tesla's approach is to get more real-world training data to reach a general solution, while Waymo goes slow with pre-mapping as a requirement. Tesla's approach will likely be the winner long-term and can be flipped on globally far faster than Waymo's could

Everyone’s working on a general solution, including Waymo. Everyone has large real world (and even larger simulated) training data. It’s not just Tesla despite what is widely claimed in Tesla circles. Others just choose to deploy in certain places because of market, operational and safety reasons. This notion of Tesla just ingesting training data which magically outputs a general self driving solution is nonsense.

The levels aren’t just slapped on by the companies for vanity. They indicate liability and therefore capability.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#70

Post by gamblor956 »

thot_experiment wrote: post #28

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon…

And I was in a Tesla 3 in sunny weather about 2 months ago, and it nearly crashed into a tow truck and a cyclist that it didn't see. It's embarrassingly bad at handling basic use cases and it pretty much the poster boy for why vision alone won't work for actual self-driving.
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