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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

#811

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

viraptor wrote: post #769
fhub wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The start stop traffic gave me car sickness quickly. The 280 is a 4 lane highway that, at certain times of day, adaptive cruise control gets very little workout.

May be actually getting better over time. A lot of the screen-related car sickness goes away with the refresh rate bumped up to 120Hz. These are slowly arriving to not-completely-gaming laptops fortunately.

That's interesting. I wonder if that's the same phenomenon that causes VR sickness with low refresh rates

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#812

Post by tanseydavid »

belltaco wrote: post #781
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.

I read that Waymo is losing 2 to 3 billion dollars a year.

Uber lost $9.1B in 2022.

https://fourweekmba.com/uber-losses-by-year/

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#813

Post by Dylan16807 »

RC_ITR wrote: post #186
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 agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have o…

> This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)?

> That seems like a comically bad baseline.

Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k.

The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline.

If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die.

We should do our best to keep standards high and increase them as technology permits, but there is no reasonable way to avoid using the current numbers as a baseline.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#814

Post by edge17 »

hot_gril wrote: post #684
edge17 wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple math? Assuming a fixed number of cars on the road, more lanes will increase the flow. The cable cars are novelty transportation for tourists that residents of the city don't actually use for commuting. In case it's not clear, I'm refering to California st starting downtown and going all the way up the hill.

Yeah but the cable cars only run in a limited area, basically the scenic hill you mentioned.

Not sure the point here. California St is a major artery in and out of downtown. All I'm saying is there is an opportunity for improving the quality of traffic but instead the public resource of an entire lane is wasted on a bespoke piece of transportation history that runs at a loss in excess of $40m/year

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#815

Post by shiroiuma »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #788
Symbiote wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am staring aghast with European eyes at a city of 4 million people where the commuter rail doesn't run outside peak hours. How do you get home if you go out for a couple of drinks with colleagues, or stay late for a call? You shouldn't be asking for a couple of trains between 8pm and midnight. They should be every half hour, or more! Midnight until 6am on Saturday and Sunday could be every hour or two. (I live in C…

I feel this way too, having gone down the online rabbit hole of urbanist content. We don’t need cheaper Ubers, we need trains!

Trains are very expensive to build and maintain, so they only work if your city has enough density to support them with sufficient ridership. America really screwed itself by building cities for cars instead of people, and it's hard to change this at this point, especially when every effort at making cities there more walkable and dense is met with fierce opposition.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#816

Post by ignormies »

dekhn wrote: post #538
paxys wrote: post #310

I had an epiphany about self driving recently late at night on the streets of San Francisco. It was a somewhat deserted part of town, and the roads were empty. There was a lone Cruise car chugging along and constantly stopping at red lights. The signals were so badly optimized that the car would be the only one waiting at a completely empty intersection for minutes at a time, only to be stopped again at the next one,…

Most intersections in the Bay Area have magnetic sensors underground to detect cars and expedite a green when appropriate. Where was this mile-long stretch? 3rd street?

As an extension of the argument the comment you're replying to was making:

Many (most?) intersections in the Netherlands have early detection systems that change the light _before_ the car reaches it.

But they didn't just do this for cars, they also do this for bikes. And public transit gets signal priority allowing buses and trams to almost always get green lights.

They've spent the money improving transportation of all forms, not just cars.

[1] https://youtu.be/knbVWXzL4-4

[2] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/traffic-lights...

[3] https://youtu.be/7KPGVP85WpU

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#817

Post by choppaface »

__loam wrote: post #691
choppaface wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been nearly hit by a Waymo as a pedestrian when the thing could see me well before it passed. I hate that they use giant SUVs, really inappropriate car for small city streets even if people love SUVs.

Waymo uses pretty small jaguar crossovers. Zoox uses suvs.

The Jaguar iPace is a full 4-door SUV, not a hatchback or a Rav4. Just because the rear hatch tapers down doesn't make the car smaller from a safety standpoint.

Jaguar iPace: 4800lbs, 79inch wide, 183 inches long

Pacifica: 4500lbs, 79inch wide, 204 inches long

Toyota Highlander: 4400lbs, 76inches wide, 194 inches long

Chevy Bolt: 3500lbs, 69inches wide, 163 inches long

The iPace might be great for LA but for SF it's totally inappropriate.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#818

Post by TulliusCicero »

aeturnum wrote: post #519
bluGill wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the beauty of technology: once we identify a problem we can do something about it and apply the fix to everything. While this is the type of case you can argue nobody would have expected before, once it happens you know and can setup lab situations where similar things happen and then figure out how best to respond over months of effort.

This is absolutely not a case nobody would have expected before? People end up under cars in accidents regularly. Imo any company that "found out" about this scenario through the cruise incident is guilty of gross negligence.

I'm sure all the bigger ones had looked at the possibility before, but it's only natural to revisit it when something horrible like this happens to a competitor.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#819

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

Symbiote wrote: post #770
runarberg wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am staring aghast with European eyes at a city of 4 million people where the commuter rail doesn't run outside peak hours. How do you get home if you go out for a couple of drinks with colleagues, or stay late for a call? You shouldn't be asking for a couple of trains between 8pm and midnight. They should be every half hour, or more! Midnight until 6am on Saturday and Sunday could be every hour or two. (I live in C…

In the wee hours catching a train and bus to get home is kind of annoying in Malmö. Mainly the buses basically stop running more than once an hour between 1-5am.

Most US towns are basically uber/taxis only at that time. I live in Austin where you could theoretically be one of the lucky 1% of the population that both lives near a train station and wants to go somewhere near where that train station is. Even then you can’t use the train past something like 11pm on weekends. Capmetro’s hours are a pretty decent source of consternation for us here

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#820

Post by choppaface »

__loam wrote: post #705
MTmind wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baseline should be other engineering we trust with our lives, like planes, trains, ships, skyscrapers, and bridges. Society expects more from technology than from humans... that's why we use technology! Deaths from self-driving cars should be very minimal, every crash analyzed and understood, and findings publicly communicated and mandated.

It's worth noting that both Waymo and Cruise do report a shit load of statistics to regulatory bodies, including all incident reports. Neither company has caused a fatality to my knowledge.

Waymo did run over a dog https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/a-waymo-self-driving-car-k...
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