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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

#751

Post by grogenaut »

ironman1478 wrote: post #237
mips_avatar wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This woman got dragged 20 feet by the car after the collision, and then the car rolled over her leg and left her pinned to the ground until the fire department came and removed the wheel to get her out. The cruise vehicle wasn't at fault for the initial accident, but the subsequent damage it caused was entirely the fault of the autonomous vehicle. A person would have stopped and helped the pedestrian.

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.

The person who hit and run commuted a felony. Cruise not providing evidence as asked and required by their testing agreement did similar. A muni bus and a car are different.

But the big issue is hiding / eliding the data.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#753

Post by s1artibartfast »

mips_avatar wrote: post #183
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…

This woman got dragged 20 feet by the car after the collision, and then the car rolled over her leg and left her pinned to the ground until the fire department came and removed the wheel to get her out. The cruise vehicle wasn't at fault for the initial accident, but the subsequent damage it caused was entirely the fault of the autonomous vehicle. A person would have stopped and helped the pedestrian.

People get dragged to death under cars with unaware human drivers all the time.

I dont think you can definitively say a person would have stopped and helped.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#754

Post by raylad »

fhub wrote: post #569
unshavedyak wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait till those are generally available. I'd go out more if i could have a nice night and not have to deal with coming home later. Hell i live about 1.5h from Seattle and i never go because it's just awful (to me) dealing with cars there. If i could get a cab all the way there and back? Oh man, amazing. Or even park and ride would be nice. Cities seem so much more approachable to me if i don't need to drive t…

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.

Last time I checked (in SF), Uber was $16.70 for a ride I wanted to take and Waymo was $25.40.

All things being equal (or anywhere near equal), I'll pay the human driver rather than the bot.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#755

Post by bhelkey »

FireBeyond wrote: post #474
ipqk wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one was sold anything yet. These things don't go from 0 to 100 overnight. We've assumed that self-driving cars will be safer than humans in the future, though that's yet to be determined. And even if their safety record is better than humans, they will be more dangerous in different ways than human drivers, much like this recent incident where the woman was dragged and pinned.

LOL, what? Musk has repeatedly stated that Teslas on FSD/AP are safer than humans, now . You can take issue with the veracity of his claims (and I certainly do, on several levels), but let's not pretend like "no-one is selling this, yet" - let's also not forget, "The driver is only in the seat for legal reasons. The car is driving itself" - that was six years ago now.

Tesla's Full Self Driving is driver assistance software and is not an autonomous vehicle[1].

There are rules governing autonomous vehicles in California. They must report all accidents involving their self driving vehicles[2], miles driven, disengagements,... Tesla's FSD does not follow these rules.

Tesla's marketing may imply that FSD is an autonomous vehicle. However, today, in California, these are driver assistance programs and not self driving cars.

[1]https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2023/02/17/2022-disen...

[2]https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#756

Post by runarberg »

unshavedyak wrote: post #546
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…

I can't wait till those are generally available. I'd go out more if i could have a nice night and not have to deal with coming home later. Hell i live about 1.5h from Seattle and i never go because it's just awful (to me) dealing with cars there. If i could get a cab all the way there and back? Oh man, amazing. Or even park and ride would be nice. Cities seem so much more approachable to me if i don't need to drive t…

If feel like Seattle needs an all day and weekend Sounder service, more than it needs self driving robo-taxis. 1.5 hours away you might be at the edge or beyond Sounder reach so this may not help you much unless you get a local bus to your closest station, but you can probably still just drive to your closest station and not having to have to deal with driving in the city.

If the Sounder would run like the ferries do (say every hour until like 8PM and then a couple more trips before midnight) it would really take the hassle of going to the city for much more people than robo-taxis ever could.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#757

Post by xnx »

stouset wrote: post #591
minwcnt5 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymos do stop between fares. They've gotten grief from people who don't like them parked in front of their house.

I really hope if anything that seeing so many occupant-less vehicles on the streets makes us collectively realize how inefficiently these vehicles are using a scarce, congestion-prone resource in a way that wasn’t as visible with Uber/Lyft. I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.

I feel this way about free parking.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#758

Post by xnx »

londons_explore wrote: post #597
minwcnt5 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymos do stop between fares. They've gotten grief from people who don't like them parked in front of their house.

Kinda surprised they stop... When you have a self-driving system that costs $200k+, you want to keep it running and collecting data as much as possible - passenger or no passenger. The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.

It probably make sense to pre-position them to the spot most likely to reduce time to pick up the next predicted passenger.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#759

Post by wsinks »

alooPotato wrote: post #680
wsinks wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take point with your use of 'correctly' because traffic engineering cannot get every car to its destination without stopping it even if it knew every destination. Cars already do talk to various traffic lights via underground sensors and occasionally a camera. The investment required to have a fully networked traffic light system with a centralized controller would be immense, and would create an organization with…

This is getting into traffic research territory - i.e. given the entire dataset (current and historic) can you shorten average trip time vs individual cars just doing whats best for them. Either way, having a real time data infrastructure seems only positive. Traffic lights are already remotely controlled by city planning departments, it's the software that's missing. My whole point is that driverless cars, where the…

I agree with you that the idea seems intuitively like it would be better, however I'm skeptical that it will work and that it is the 'correct' way to run traffic.

To quote your own example, this will be controlled by the government, which takes a long time to do physical infrastructure projects. So I would lately just assume it's not worth the investment dollars.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#760

Post by Guy_w_Keyboard »

This industry is evil, and I can't fathom what kind of a market would exist for driverless cars. KITT is science fiction. In reality, human drivers are almost always going to be safer. I would never trust my life or those I care about to ride inside a computer-operated vehicle.

Those that do are making a costly mistake. Any robot-assisted car still requires a human driver to be paying attention to the road, but by definition, because the robot does most of the driving, the human failsafe is going lulled into a false sense of security, or bored by effectively driving without actually driving. They will slack, and when the critical moment of awareness from the human is needed, he will be caught off guard, as opposed to the actual human driver who was aware the entire time, because he always had to be.

More to the point, even if I had a 100% guarantee of safety, I would never want to have the joys of driving taken away from me in the first place! Driving is liberating. It's power. It's the freedom to go anywhere and do anything. It's, dare I say, cathartic.

And for those that are unable to drive, Uber & Lyft exist to fill in the gap. They are themselves a relatively new technology, just under a decade old, and you can always find a quick, affordable ride on demand to just about anywhere.

What gap in the market would a self-driving car even fulfill?

This is yet another example of the arrogance of big tech, pushing out unsafe and socially deleterious products in the hopes of a get rich quick scheme. It's no different to what social media did a decade ago or what "generative a.i." is doing now.

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