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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

#651

Post by ProfessorLayton »

ehsankia wrote: post #628
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a question for regulators. What AV companies are doing is akin to human trials in pedestrian safety without consent. This wouldn't fly in another industry like pharmaceuticals.

Not really. Oharmaceuticals have many different tiers of trials, but even with that, there are still new discoveries and surprises once they reach the full population. Waymo has been testing their tech for over a decade in much smaller and controlled situations. Similarly, all of these companies also have done tests with humans behind the wheel for years. To claim that they've done no testing and are going straight t…

Perhaps you know more than me about pharmaceutical testing, but people are aware that they're part of a trial, and more importantly, they consent to participating, correct?

I did not claim they're not testing, they clearly are. My argument is that people that didn't sign up to be test subjects are getting hurt in the process.

It's worth pointing out the discrepancy in human safety trials, is it not? Why should AV testing be less rigorous than pharmaceuticals?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#652

Post by CSMastermind »

jjoonathan wrote: post #636
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.…

Tesla just announced 500 million miles driven by FSD [1]. Per the video, were it fully autonomous they could have a 95% CI on "safer than human" at only 275 million miles [2], but obviously having human supervision ought to remove many of the worst incidents from the dataset. Does anyone know if they publish disengagement data? [1] https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... [2] https://youtu.be/y…

Note that it would need to drive those 275 million miles without incident to be safer than a human.

Which for Tesla's FSD is obviously not the case.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-...

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#653

Post by WillDaSilva »

huytersd wrote: post #409
icedistilled wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you're objection is that public transportation currently sucks, yes that's the problem. It doesn't have to. That's the point. That might be the first time I've seen privacy as a main objection. Not sure how serious that should be taken considering how much privacy has willingly been given up in the last couple decades in the name of convenience. And also how few cases where it would matter. Like does it matte…

It’s not that it currently sucks. Even if it was the cleanest, safest, most connected system it still sucks compared to a personal vehicle (ideally electric and fully powered by renewable energy). It also means people have to live in dense apartments instead of spread out suburbs and semi rural living. I don’t mean privacy as in personal data, I mean not having to be in close quarters with other humans.

Even if we accept that the personal vehicle provides a better experience for an individual in a vacuum compared to ideal public transit, we're left with the critical problem that if a significant number of people choose to use personal vehicles instead of public transit, then there will be so much traffic that the experience will be awful for everyone. This traffic will cause travel delays, noise, pollution (from exhaust, brake dust, tire dust, etc.), and create an unpleasant dangerous environment for pedestrians and cyclists.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#654

Post by gerdesj »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #515
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…

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…

Good grief, two skateboarders lives saved by a Waymo in two consecutive comments.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a biker partially lying in the road, trapped by his bike. I parked my van at an angle, so if it was hit from behind it should roll past him. I jumped out and performed an assessment (I'm a qualified, OK: certificated first aider). I diagnosed "pissed" and ascertained he was unharmed. We got his bike in the back of the van with the help of some concerned pedestrians who initially thought I'd hit him. I drove him home.

I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain. What sort of sensors do these Waymo things have? They will have to be really, really clever and seriously expensive.

I don't deny that eventually a vehicle with enough decent sensors and some fancy processing will outperform me but I've managed 30+ years on the road with just a few scratches, a broken wing mirror and a rear ending from an articulated lorry.

I've managed to return a hire car around Napoli (Italy) after a couple of weeks without any issues! That may not sound too impressive but have a look at the state of vehicles around St Antonio Abate etc - it looks like the locals play bumper cars. May I also note that I'm a Brit and we drive on the left. Italians don't. So I can adapt to local conditions. I have also driven across large parts of the rest of Europe and the north Americas. I can adapt to local driving styles from the "use your entire car as the indicator" as seen in the Amalfi coastal area (int al) to "no after you" as you tend to see in large parts of the UK and Eire. I can deal with all the different regulations. A classic European one you don't see elsewhere is the white diamond sign with a yellow centre that indicates that you have right of way until it is cancelled with black stripes. Then there is the French "priority to the right" thing (which has also pervaded the UK somewhat wrt roundabouts).

I can negotiate this with ease: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5628345,-1.7713341,110m/da... and this on a wing and a prayer: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@48.8654026,2.3222455,464m/dat...

I'd love to see a Weymo navigate those.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#655

Post by andrewxdiamond »

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…

Sounds like a 911 operator but more technical and more data available

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#656

Post by danielmarkbruce »

eep_social wrote: post #545
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What biases? Are you saying you expected Waymo to be better than Cruise?

> expected Waymo to be better than Cruise? Yes, very much so. In previous discussions Waymo and Cruise were typically lumped together — “self driving bad” — usually by the original article even! However, my personal experience both as rider and as former Google employee says that Waymo is holding itself to a higher standard and therefore having higher order problems. That’s a lot of nuance for a flame-y topic but thi…

It's fair, I had the same sense (and am also former google) and wondered if I was the only one. It always seemed crazy to me to lump Waymo and Cruise together, but I never had a water tight argument for why.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#657

Post by anigbrowl »

robswc wrote: post #427
anigbrowl wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying nobody would ride a bus when taxis exist. Most of the time people don't actually need or especially want door-to-door.

Taxis are not quick or efficient enough to make the cost worth it to many people. >door-to-door Doesn't have to be door to door. I use Uber all the time when on vacation to get to places of interest and then back to the hotel. Trying to incorporate public transit would have added 30-40 minutes of walking, no idea how much additional time waiting. Saving ourselves an hour or so per day of vacation makes it worth it fo…

As I said, 'most of the time'. If you're on vacation or time > money for wahtever reason, of course it makes sense.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#658

Post by willsmith72 »

gmassman wrote: post #590
fhub wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current ride pricing feels about 10-20% less than an Uber in SF - but I haven't really checked properly. So don't expect the rideshare product (Waymo One) to be a super cheap option.

This morning my coworkers rode in together in a Waymo. One told me it was $16 while an Uber would have been $35.

isn't that just because the waymos are still funded by VCs? an uber might've been the same 10 years ago, but now they've achieved world domination it's time to make a profit

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#659

Post by nickvec »

eep_social wrote: post #82

But not Waymo. Which confirms all my personal biases. More seriously, the statement cites four specific clauses that caused the permit to be suspended. The second one seems really interesting as it implies that there was a lie of omission where the others are more or less what I’d expect regarding safety risks: > Today’s suspensions are based on the following: > 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of…

Waymo is leagues ahead of Cruise wrt their AV tech. Saying otherwise as your post is implying is borderline misinformation.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#660

Post by njarboe »

ehsankia wrote: post #580
pbarnes_1 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

You should be able to set the "aggressive" level. I believe Tesla has this option internally on their FSD Beta. Hopefully you will be able to set this level for robot taxis and personal vehicles like you can with (some) human drivers.
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