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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

#641

Post by eep_social »

FireBeyond wrote: post #459
joe_the_user wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the other comments, pulling over when you detect a collision is definitely not best human practice on an ordinary city street for a human driver. If you detect a collision, you stop the vehicle, access the situation and maybe pull over based on your assessment of the situation. And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop , this post-collision routine? Afaik, the overall program/system gu…

> And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations. And then there's a momentary thought of this, and then I think how bad/hard it would be. Sitting there in a "call center", "Ding!" and you're suddenly thrown in to a car mid-collision, needing to take instant surveying of the situation (like "there's someone partly trapped under the…

I heard that the way Waymo works is that the car actually presents solutions, multiple-choice style, to the call center operator. The operator assesses the situation and chooses one, and then the car executes it. I assume there’s also a “none of the above”’or some such which would flag someone to come on site.

The remote operator cannot manually operate the car under these circumstances and that is by design.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#642

Post by ironman1478 »

bombcar wrote: post #383
ironman1478 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who hit and run the woman in the first place shows this is obviously not true. You think they didn't notice?There was a muni bus who hit a pedestrian a few weeks ago and didn't even notice.

If the Cruise had hit and run it might have been better than parking on the woman's leg.

Except it didn't immediately do that. Cruise released a report today saying that the car actually drove 20 feet and dragged the woman. There is no simple answer as to what to do. It's simply difficult and acting like there are easy answers to this is unproductive and imo not in the spirit of hackernews.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#643

Post by lmm »

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…

> 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 below the level of most Human drives.

Are they performing worse, or are they just making a better risk tradeoff? Human drivers kill a lot of people every week.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#644

Post by tsunamifury »

andrewia wrote: post #490
beau_g wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that's bad, just wait until you hear about some of the stuff human drivers do

Yes, but the vast majority of human drivers will stop when they hit somebody, and when there's screaming under their car.

Errrrr in this exact scenario the other car that hit the woman didn't stop...

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#645

Post by lziest »

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 second the absurd conservative driving of Cruise. At the peak hour, even going straight, the Cruise car would suddenly slow down in the middle of the intersection because it seemed it just discovered the pedestrian cross walk and got scared.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#646

Post by brenns10 »

kiririn wrote: post #412
tempsy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A dark colored Nissan Sentra was stopped in the adjacent lane to the left of the AV. When the light turned green, the Nissan Sentra and the AV entered the intersection. Against a red light, a pedestrian entered the crosswalk on the opposite side of Market Street across from the vehicles, passed completely through the AV’s lane of travel, then stopped mid-crosswalk in front of the Nissan Sentra. The Nissan Sentra the…

> (illegally) Jaywalking laws never cease to trigger culture shock for me Crossing on a red signal (when safe) is even polite in my country, to not unnecessarily impede traffic

Incidentally, "jaywalking" will be legal in California in 2024, finally. Hopefully that will be the beginning of the end for those laws across the rest of the country.

(Of course, we're talking about crossing "when safe", not when you'd be walking into the path of a vehicle with the right of way.)

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#647

Post by ralferoo »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #261
ralferoo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this, it rather seems like the AV wasn't at fault in the accident itself and handled itself well. However, after coming to a complete stop, while the pedestrian was still on the ground in front of it, it then started again and drove into the pedestrian and continued for another 20 feet pushing the pedestrian along (and presumably under) the car. They say it did this to leave the car in a safe place, but this…

> it then started again and drove into the pedestrian and continued for another 20 feet pushing the pedestrian along I like how you're parroting Cruise's spin on this: the pedestrian was "pushed along", not "run over and then dragged."

Given that I actually wrote "being driven over and dragged 20 feet" in my comment, what's your point exactly?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#648

Post by forgetfreeman »

"Ultimately we develop and deploy autonomous vehicles to save lives." Of all of the self-serving counterfactual horseshit I've seen sneak out of a corporate mouthpiece that right there might take the cake. Y'all deploy AVs to make money, The End. If saving lives was a primary goal GM would have stripped center console infotainment displays out of their vehicles a decade ago, or maybe never put them there to begin with.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#649

Post by lemming »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #561
mikeryan wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is low hanging fruit I had this feature in my 2015 Volvo.

Sure, it’s just more evidence that these automated systems improve overall safety vs. an unassisted driver. (Although I worry a bit about automation-induced inattention negating these benefits)

There are also issues like phantom braking which Teslas are prone to (or were, I'm not sure if that's better these days). That's part of a whole class of problems which the AVs suffer from which humans don't. I think the main problem is that those problems are really unpredictable to human drivers, whereas good defensive drivers will take into account what another lousy human driver might do based on lots of experience.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#650

Post by pseudosavant »

supertimor wrote: post #564
kelnos wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the follow-up[0], it's not clear that the Cruise car did the wrong thing. It may have been unavoidable for the Cruise car to avoid hitting her after she was thrown in its path, and if it had then tried to continue driving to unpin her, she could have been injured much worse, or killed (say if the axle or another tire had then crushed her chest or head). These autonomous cars have done some truly dumb thin…

But it did continue driving. It tried to pull over and ended up dragging the poor woman for 20 ft before stopping on her leg and pinning her.

And that is what is the unacceptable failure scenario. It'll be cool in the future, I guess, to have autonomous taxis. But I'm sure glad they don't test these in public where I live.
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