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Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

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Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#91

Post by jakelarkin »

my unpopular personal opinion (strictly as a casual observer): self-driving will only be commercially viable as an augmented safety technology in single-owner vehicles (collision avoidance, lane keeping etc.) for ~20 years before we come close to reaching full-autonomy.

What we have currently; maybe four or five 9s of reliability in perfect conditions is not nearly good enough for autonomous car sharing. If the car breaks down or is in a collision what is the passenger going to do? drive it themselves to the shoulder and get out? How far are we from autonomous systems harmoniously and safely coexisting with the most erratic human drivers/bikers/pedestrians? How far from adverse weather conditions? How will we finance 100 million $80,000 autonomous vehicles.

Automated collision mitigation is already in many new cars and the data on accident rates is just materializing. Toyota preemptively put it's radar/camera based system in ALL of their cars for 2017. Its rumored that the NHTSA will mandate it for all manufacturers in the near future. The gradual progression of these developments is that these systems will add features incrementally and gain economies-of-scale until one day in the far far future driver input will be minimal. Only then will autonomous ride sharing become viable.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#92

Post by vidarh »

sdenton4 wrote: post #79
_up wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they have something like a real Human remote driver. That can intervene, but also can oversee multiple cars.

Would need incredibly low latency for that to be safe, I think. FPS games use a pile of tricks to send minimal data over the network which wouldn't be available to an autonomous car: we don't have access to the game engine, after all...

It would need to be very low latency if the cars can not take sufficient action fast enough to be safe. But if the cars get to a point where they are safe enough but where that safety comes at the expense of being overly cautious in some instances (refusing to drive through a sheet of water and deciding to stop) that may be acceptable. E.g. in the given example, the car only needs input to say pretty much "safe to proceed at low speed until past obstacle, then reassess".

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#93

Post by azundo »

vm wrote: post #57
abalone wrote: post #15

> Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions Not trying to pour cold water on this but.. it's all about those "few occasions". The difference between level 2 and level 4/5 autonomy is vast. Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. A small corporate shuttle service…

I've seen ~10 Cruise cars around Mission Dolores and Soma in SF. 100% of the time the driver has his hands on the wheel and appears to be making the turns himself. I'm skeptical of how automated this service actually is. Maybe those are training runs or the drivers are letting the wheel guide them.

I believe current regulations require the test driver to have her or his hands on the wheel at all times so that's not a good indication of whether or not the car is driving autonomously.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#94

Post by aetherson »

Retric wrote: post #64
Fricken wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of 2016 all companies testing autonomous vehicles in California filed their disengagement reports. Waymo reported 1 unplanned disengagement every 5000 miles, and GM reported 1 every 180. Nobody else was even in the running. These metrics are crude, but it's currently the only benchmarking system we've got, and we'll see in December where Cruise is really at when they report their 2017 numbers. Cruise does…

Waymo (Google) is not that far from level IV. Average U.S. driver has one accident roughly every 165,000 miles and disengagements is not 1:1 with crashing. I suspect drunk drivers would probably be safer handing over control which could make a huge difference. Most interesting is the Disengagements by location. (page 9) https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b... Interstate 0 Freeway 0 Highway 12…

I don't know why you're getting downvotes.

Does anyone know off-hand, how much testing have autonomous vehicles had at night (as in, full dark/need to use headlights).

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#95

Post by adrianmacneil »

vm wrote: post #57
abalone wrote: post #15

> Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions Not trying to pour cold water on this but.. it's all about those "few occasions". The difference between level 2 and level 4/5 autonomy is vast. Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. A small corporate shuttle service…

I've seen ~10 Cruise cars around Mission Dolores and Soma in SF. 100% of the time the driver has his hands on the wheel and appears to be making the turns himself. I'm skeptical of how automated this service actually is. Maybe those are training runs or the drivers are letting the wheel guide them.

Our drivers always keep their hands on the steering wheel, even while in autonomous mode. There isn't really any way you could tell externally whether the car is engaged or not, other than some of the nuances of our driving behavior.

Source: I work at Cruise

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#96

Post by [deleted] »

anindha wrote: post #53
abalone wrote: post #15

> Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions Not trying to pour cold water on this but.. it's all about those "few occasions". The difference between level 2 and level 4/5 autonomy is vast. Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. A small corporate shuttle service…

San Francisco would be one of the harder cities to make self-driving work: bad light, heavy traffic traffic, bicycles, poor lane markings, spotty GPS downtown, etc. I haven't been to Phoenix, so can't comment on the difficulty of running a self driving car there, but I would guess its easier than SF.

[deleted]

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#97

Post by aianus »

sourceless wrote: post #20
mFixman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still do that with Uber. Why own a car today?

You have to pay a human to take you. Humans are expensive.

The human part is pretty cheap compared to the other parts at least here in Toronto:

Car insurance $220 (20h at minimum wage)

Car payment $780 (70h at minimum wage)

Gas $200 (18h at minimum wage)

Parking $250 (22h at minimum wage)

If I didn't enjoy driving and having a nice car, it would already be cheaper to Uber everywhere.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#98

Post by richardwhiuk »

olegkikin wrote: post #29
abalone wrote: post #15

> Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions Not trying to pour cold water on this but.. it's all about those "few occasions". The difference between level 2 and level 4/5 autonomy is vast. Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. A small corporate shuttle service…

> Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. You don't know that. Doesn't the car simply slowly stop if it doesn't know what to do? > A small corporate shuttle service that "only had a few accidents" would not be considered a very safe service. As soon as it's safer than a human-operated one, it's already good enough - there's literally no safer option.

It's not about not knowing what to do, it's about not recognizing things that threaten safe travel.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#99

Post by richardwhiuk »

jakelarkin wrote: post #91

my unpopular personal opinion (strictly as a casual observer): self-driving will only be commercially viable as an augmented safety technology in single-owner vehicles (collision avoidance, lane keeping etc.) for ~20 years before we come close to reaching full-autonomy. What we have currently; maybe four or five 9s of reliability in perfect conditions is not nearly good enough for autonomous car sharing. If the car b…

Human drivers are pretty terrible. I'd imagine if it breaks down, then the same breakdown cover everyone has at the moment will kick in.

Re: Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF

#100

Post by adrianmacneil »

Hi HN, engineer at Cruise here. I just wanted to point out that most people are surprised when I tell them we're hiring a ton of backend/full stack/android engineering positions (mostly go/node/react), and you don't need prior robotics or machine learning experience to apply (although we like those too).

So, if you're interested in working on AVs or the systems that support them, please take a look at our careers page: https://getcruise.com/careers (or feel free to reach out to me via HN profile).

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