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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

#711

Post by robswc »

anigbrowl wrote: post #657
robswc wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Time is money. Look at how much time WFH has saved people, no that they don't have to commute. If anything, I would say the ability to summon an AV and have it arrive in ~5 minutes would be more beneficial when you're _not_ on vacation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/09/08/uber-lyft-...

Dated but it says 66% of riders can find a ride within 5 minutes. I think 5 minutes is a good target.

With how subsidized public transit is, I don't believe these AV taxis could beat it on price... but they don't have to. They just have to make it low enough that the benefits of private travel outweigh the cons of public transit.

People tend to take less public transit when they become wealthier, not more.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#712

Post by semiquaver »

willsmith72 wrote: post #658
gmassman wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Waymo is fully owned by a public company. Economically they are indistinguishable from Uber (other than having a huge ad profit center to subsidize them). What VCs are you referring to?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#714

Post by bluGill »

fragmede wrote: post #563
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.

> Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option. Did you just tell me to go fuck myself? I'll take the bus when the bus route is convenient, which is usually, and I'll take Uber/Cruise/Lyft when I'm in a hurry and it's not. I prefer public transportation but I'm more practical about it. Which includes electric scooters (Spin/Lime), or vespa scooters (Revel).

If you don't make an effort nobody will and the world gets worse '

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#715

Post by tialaramex »

gerdesj wrote: post #688
fhub wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do want to clarify that my comment: the skateboarder would not have died. Waymo provided a larger margin of error for the board rider than a human could possibly have.

No need for this comment - you deployed an anecdote from personal experience. That's fine. However you finish with an assertion with no evidence. Care to elaborate? What on earth does this actually mean: "Waymo provided a larger margin of error for the board rider than a human could possibly have."

Humans cannot react very fast, this incident comes down to fast reactions and the good all around vision in the Waymo. On these measures a human isn't competitive.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#716

Post by School-Cotton »

jakefromstatecs wrote: post #672
School-Cotton wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way I hate “whimsical” stuff like this. Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.

> Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor. And yet, you aren't willing to accept that they have a different sense of humor without hating them. Ironic.

I don’t hate them, and never said I did. I find their childish antics annoying.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#717

Post by TuringNYC »

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.

Can any engineers in the field comment on whether the [very cool!] Waymo vs Cruise performance anecdotes being discussed here would have been the result of Google's millimeter-level scanning of SF? Or is it just better algos only? Or both?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#718

Post by root_axis »

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…

This just shows how statistics can mislead. I own a Tesla with FSD and it's extremely unsafe for city driving. Just to quantify, I'd say at its absolute best, about 1 in 8 left turns result in a dangerous error that requires me to retake control of the car. There is no way it even comes close to approaching the safety of a human driver.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#719

Post by laxatives »

elteto wrote: post #123
wstrange wrote: post #71

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

Presumably this is why the permit is being suspended: "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." First of all, I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large. I'm sure the Cruise car recorded the plate and they passed this to the police. Second, the corporate spe…

The issue isn't even that Cruise was involved in an incident. They were not at fault for the collision and were only involved after a (human) driver launched the victim into the Cruise vehicle. Cruise had their permit suspended because they essentially tried to hide their involvement/responsibility and withheld video footage from the DMV.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#720

Post by phatskat »

lokar wrote: post #467
pj_mukh wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Cruise release the video, its not clear to me a human driver would be better (other than some textual descriptions of the event)? The (human) person who actually caused the crash is still at large, and the bay area (SF + Oakland) still continues to one of the municipalities with negligble traffic enforcement [1] and massively dangerous (human) driving behavior [2]. So the city and DMV focussing their efforts on t…

They lied to the DMV, that alone is enough to ban them.

One problem is that the state taught them that it’s ok to lie, or at least that it’s ok to omit the full details.

During the certification process for these self-driving cars, incidents of the cars “misbehaving” (for lack of a better term) were supposed to be reported. However, if a human driver intervened, then it didn’t count as the car itself making a poor choice.

Example: self-driving car approaches an intersection clipping a reasonable speed and the light turns yellow. While a human driver would understand that it’s better to go through than to slam their brakes, the self-driving cat goes “yellow means red soon, stop now”. The human driver overrides and floors it through the intersection. Had the car stopped, that would’ve been a mark against the autonomous system. But since a human intervened, it doesn’t “count”.

This is a good watch on the state of self-driving cars and how policy makers have largely just said “eh, fuck it” in places like SF. https://youtu.be/pmGOjHi-7MM

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