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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

#851

Post by prmoustache »

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!

Even before talking about traina, you'd need to get rids of the suburbs and the clear separation of housing and commercial stuff.

There is so much thing to undo and people are so overly sensitive of the value of their property it is nearly impossible or would take centuries to fix.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#852

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#853

Post by alsodumb »

It's wild that Cruise intentionally decided to hide the information of them dragging a person under the car for 20 feet from regulators. However, now that the news is out, their PR team says they showed the video to DMV folks while DMV denies that. Well, someone is lying and I bet it is Cruise.

Here is Cruise initial NHTSA filing: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2023/INOT-PE23018-11585P2.p... They mention every detail from start to end but don't mention the fact that they dragged a person under the car.

Let me be very clear, if Cruise just collided with a person due to the mistake of another driver, that's cool. However, this is something way worse. Cruise car stopped, and then decided to drive 20 feet dragging the pedestrian under the car because someone on Cruise team designed a rule that says "if there is a collision, move away from the spot after stopping to avoid blocking traffic". No human driver will ever do that.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#854

Post by prmoustache »

tim333 wrote: post #703
gerdesj wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Though Waymo et al aren't really competing with unusually good drivers, more with average drivers and they are probably safer there, on the roads they have been trained for. (one study - 100% reduction in the frequency of bodily injury claims and a 76% decrease in property damage - https://www.ktvu.com/news/waymo-says-its-driverless-cars-saf... )

The thing is most drivers should not be allowed to drive given their low training, driving standard, general lack of empathy and/or medications or substance abuse issues but society incorrectly assume driving is a right while it should be considered a privilege you earn and that can be revoked anytime based on regular tests + eventual tickets.

I estimate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allowed to drive given their current driving standards. Possibly more could be allowed after additionnal training and showing better driving standards knowing their license is at risk.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#855

Post by trogdor »

kbos87 wrote: post #838
AustinDev wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise vehicles have sufficient sensor payloads to produce a 'milimeter-level scanning of SF' with many fewer hours than they've been on the road there. I doubt that provides the biggest difference. It's all down the software at this point. Especially because they're not trying to do anything crazy like vision only.

We keep hearing this is crazy, but is there evidence to back that up? At this point with hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles logging millions of miles a month, I feel like we’d be hearing non-stop reports of destruction on the highways if it really is as crazy as the average HN reader has been led to believe.

>with hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles logging millions of miles a month, I feel like we’d be hearing non-stop reports of destruction

Why do you believe that Tesla vehicles are driving millions of miles a month on autopilot?

I suspect that autopilot accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of Tesla miles-driven. Mostly because it sucks, but also because of how hard it is to not miss a nag on a long road trip, with the result that you are locked out of autopilot until your next stop.

(Yes, even when paying attention to the road, with your hands on the wheel. Hell, autopilot locks you out if you exceed 85 mph for more than a few seconds by pressing the accelerator, such as when passing. This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph.)

I love the performance of my Model S Plaid. Autopilot, however, is a joke.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#856

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

fhub wrote: post #602
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.

From my personal experience they are priced cheaper for all rides. But rarely that much cheaper - perhaps a surge time? The variable that differs is time to pickup. I've found Waymo is generally pretty good for me in off-peak times - perhaps on average 2-3 minutes further away on average. But I have got the odd "20 minutes away" and I then just order an Uber. But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are th…

> But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are the same distance away. I love playing my own music and just being in my own world without another human to consider. It is truly a relaxing commute.

Not to ruin your commute, do you know if there are interior-facing cameras monitoring the passengers?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#857

Post by quest88 »

lmm wrote: post #643
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…

> 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 below the level of most Human drives. Are they performing worse, or are they just making a better risk tradeoff? Human drivers kill a lot of people every week.

Honestly they scare me a little.

I frequently walk my dog where a lot of cruises operate. I dislike there's no.. two-way communication? with car. I mean that with a human driver if we make eye contact then I know they see me and I can safely (yes yes not 100%) cross the street. With a cruise I have no idea if it sees me, or if there's a bug that will make it drive as I'm in the middle of the crosswalk. They actually make me jog across out of fear.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#858

Post by Galaxeblaffer »

kbos87 wrote: post #838
AustinDev wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise vehicles have sufficient sensor payloads to produce a 'milimeter-level scanning of SF' with many fewer hours than they've been on the road there. I doubt that provides the biggest difference. It's all down the software at this point. Especially because they're not trying to do anything crazy like vision only.

We keep hearing this is crazy, but is there evidence to back that up? At this point with hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles logging millions of miles a month, I feel like we’d be hearing non-stop reports of destruction on the highways if it really is as crazy as the average HN reader has been led to believe.

the only reason we don't hear non-stop about destruction is that you're required to keep both hands on the wheel/yolk at ALL times while FSD is activated. comparing the current cameras on a Tesla to the human eye is just silly really, sure they cover 360 which is superior, but in almost any other way, the human eye is superior having better dynamic range, better contrast, better resolution and best of all, we have eye lids. if you would just sit down and think about it for 10 mins you'll realize that gimping your self driving car by using cameras only is just a very very silly proposition when we have all this cool tech like lidar essentially giving the car super powers.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#859

Post by phatskat »

bluGill wrote: post #451
TulliusCicero wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guarantee you every serious self driving car company (at least in the US) was looking at exactly this scenario after this happened with Cruise.

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.

The problem is that the world is full of near infinite permutations of situations that will continue to prove difficult for these technologies. A group of pigeons, to most human drivers, is identifiable from any approachable angle, in various weather and lighting conditions. To a computer, it has to be trained on all of that and consider the countless permutations - is that two pigeons in the rain in the dark? Is it 50 in broad daylight? Is it 12 cardboard cutouts? Our brains are incredibly good at parsing the world around us, and I’m not sure we’re even remotely close to that level of accuracy with self-driving cars, and that should worry people in cities where these are being rolled out.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#860

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

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…

By the time you're paged to handle the situation, the pedestrian is already trapped under the vehicle and you cannot see her because the car does not have an under-the-vehicle camera. So the only way you can handle this case is to rewind and review what happened before the collision and respond only then. Considering that the speed with which you react can be a matter of life and death, I don't see a satisfactory solution to this problem.
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