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Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

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Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#81

Post by yazaddaruvala »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #73
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The myth about good vs bad drivers has long been out to bed. All drivers are better than average drivers. The problem for all humans is alcohol, sleep deprivation, stress, phones, coffee, makeup, shaving, food, etc. Everyone, including you, has read at least one text while driving. Sleep deprived actors by definition cannot correctly judge their ability to be sleep deprived. None of us are immune to these realities.…

> Sleep deprived actors by definition cannot correctly judge their ability to be sleep deprived. What is that supposed to mean? Especially 'by definition'?? Your body gives you plenty of feedback for sleep deprivation.

Sleep deprivation causes a reduction in ability to reason. Similar to being drunk. A drunk person can also feel drunk, but “how drunk is too drunk?” Similarly “how sleep deprived is too deprived?”

The answer is, at a minimum, that a second “sober” party make that judgement.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#82

Post by llbeansandrice »

_acco wrote: post #77
jhugo wrote: post #17

> “Over one hundred people lose their lives every day on American roadways, and countless others are badly injured, Cruise said in a statement sent via email. I’m so tired of this angle being accepted at face value. Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing…

You’re missing the point. It’s an appeal that we need to change the status quo. They may not be there yet. But AVs are the only serious contender to solve the traffic fatality problem.

Trains. Buses. Bikeable areas.

How did we land in a spot where the “only serious contender” to solve this problem is VC funded companies using the roads and people’s lives as beta testing grounds?

Absolutely absurd.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#83

Post by aidenn0 »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #25
YeBanKo wrote: post #19

> The latest Cruise incident occurred Thursday night when a Cruise robotaxi and an emergency vehicle crashed and left a passenger injured. Cruise said in a social media post that one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene. It sounds serious. But more impor…

It would be interesting to see, but emergency vehicles responding to a call (and with lights and sirens going) clearly have right of way. That said, every emergency driver I know and have seen slows to a near stop at intersections to make sure it's clear before proceeding. But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.

> But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.

Definitely is. I was on the jury for a case that involved an officer calling for help on the radio. We watched the dash-cam footage of the first officer coming to assist. He got up to 80 between the intersections, but slowed down to near the speed-limit for green lights and almost stopped at red lights, despite the urgency and it being 3 in the morning when the odds of another car being there were low.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#84

Post by aidenn0 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #70
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to see, but emergency vehicles responding to a call (and with lights and sirens going) clearly have right of way. That said, every emergency driver I know and have seen slows to a near stop at intersections to make sure it's clear before proceeding. But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.

No, the driver with the green light has right of way. Emergency vehicles are not allowed to break traffic laws in any state; they're just afforded some privileges other vehicles aren't, and other operators are required to get out of the way. If an ambulance hits a car that had a green light, the ambulance driver is cited. https://www.google.com/search?q=ambulance+driver+cited

In all states I'm familiar with, the driver with the green light is still supposed to yield the right of way to the emergency vehicle once they see it. The ambulance driver has a responsibility to make sure that the driver with the green light is doing so. If a car is e.g. going 55 through a green light, they might not even hear the sirens until it is too late to stop.

The US, in general, doesn't have strict "right of way" rules for it's always X driver's fault. All parties involved have a duty to avoid an accident. If you see someone doing something totally stupid and against the rules of the road and just plow into them, it's technically your fault (of course they would have to prove that you deliberately failed to avoid the collision, so if you keep your mouth shut, you might get away with it[1]).

1: Not legal advice!

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#85

Post by jahewson »

jhugo wrote: post #17

> “Over one hundred people lose their lives every day on American roadways, and countless others are badly injured, Cruise said in a statement sent via email. I’m so tired of this angle being accepted at face value. Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing…

Is this not a logical fallacy? “Technology fails at something simple therefore it will fail at something complex.” Humans might fail in that manner but this technology was trained and operates in an entirely different manner.

I think you may also be rather too generous to human drivers. My grandmother crashed into a parked car at 10mph, flipping her car upside down in the process. My wife’s grandmother phoned up her son mid-journey to ask which pedal was the accelerator and which was the break - when unsure she would just press both!

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#86

Post by thephyber »

jhugo wrote: post #17

> “Over one hundred people lose their lives every day on American roadways, and countless others are badly injured, Cruise said in a statement sent via email. I’m so tired of this angle being accepted at face value. Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing…

The evidence is always nuanced and we should be wary of motivated reasoning from those who stand to profit / lose from decisions made from such evidence. /throatclearing

BUT the thing that most people ignore is that self-driving cars share a learning network, where the entire network benefits from hitting and learning from edge cases. Humans tend to have to re-learn their mistakes on a per-human basis. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the common failure conditions of humans — stressed, exhausted, distracted, frustrated, greedy, emotionally unstable, unpredictable, imprecise, etc.

So long as the cost of the damage is borne by the car manufacturer/owner and there was minimal harm done to life, I’m perfectly willing to allow self-driving car experiments to continue.

… Not that I had any significant power to stop it in the first place.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#87

Post by 8bitsrule »

Good idea. Let's extend that to all gasoline vehicles. They can only be driven (or robo-ride) every other day. Cuts congestion and gas consumption. Makes parking easier.

Every driver can still get to all of things they have to. They just have to learn to schedule things better. Car pool, transit, whatever. Most cars aren't driven many hours a day anyways.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#88

Post by jahewson »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #82
_acco wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing the point. It’s an appeal that we need to change the status quo. They may not be there yet. But AVs are the only serious contender to solve the traffic fatality problem.

Trains. Buses. Bikeable areas. How did we land in a spot where the “only serious contender” to solve this problem is VC funded companies using the roads and people’s lives as beta testing grounds? Absolutely absurd.

I get where you’re coming from but SF is full of busses, it has trams, light rail, (even some cable cars!) and a subway. A couple of years ago it was stuffed full of electric scooters. Bikeable areas are constrained by the hills or practically impossible due to the road layout (bus lanes, tram tracks, crazy Victorian street plan) pedestrians who go literally anywhere they want at any time, questionable grid system that inhibits walkability with endless crosswalks. Changing anything significant costs billions of dollars. We don’t have any credible solutions to these. It’s like a massive technical debt where you can’t rebuild and every fix breaks something else.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#89

Post by Dylan16807 »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #81
Dylan16807 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sleep deprived actors by definition cannot correctly judge their ability to be sleep deprived. What is that supposed to mean? Especially 'by definition'?? Your body gives you plenty of feedback for sleep deprivation.

Sleep deprivation causes a reduction in ability to reason. Similar to being drunk. A drunk person can also feel drunk, but “how drunk is too drunk?” Similarly “how sleep deprived is too deprived?” The answer is, at a minimum, that a second “sober” party make that judgement.

"If you can feel it, you're too drunk" is the answer these days, so I don't think even that one is true anymore. And as far as I'm aware it's a good bit easier to tell how sleep deprived you are than how drunk, am I wrong on that?

I think I understand your original post better now, but I disagree with how high of a bar you're setting for "correctly". "Am I sleep deprived?" is not a question that needs precise measurement.

Re: Cruise told by CA DMV to reduce robotaxi fleet 50% following crash

#90

Post by Dylan16807 »

lumost wrote: post #44
swid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise released a statement which said the car did hear the siren when it was louder than background noise. No indication how close the siren was for that to happen, but it sounds pretty definitive that audio sensors are already part of the kit.

How good are those sensors relative to human ears? Human ears are still freakishly effective at filtering out background noise.

I don't think you need freakishly good filtering to find something as pure as a siren.
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