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This was a plot point in Captain Laserhawk: All the self-driving cars and flying drones were actually being remotely piloted by prisoners in a massive VR facility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Laserhawk:_A_Blood_Dra...
> Two months ago, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, choked up as he recounted how a driver had killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at a San Francisco intersection. “It barely made the news,” he said, pausing to collect himself. “Sorry. I get emotional.” ... > Cruise’s board has hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the company’s response to the incident, including its interactions with regulators…
> performative charade How is it performative? Is it not sad that a 4-year-old girl in a stroller got killed by a car? That it barely made the news? Or is that just not sad and is normal these days?
If humans need to remotely intervene for a car in motion, that implies it could impact safety. If that's correct, then the remote signaling of a problem and the human's response and control must have flawless availability and low latency. How does Cruise achieve that? Cellular isn't that reliable. Maybe I misunderstand something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.
That 2% is much cheaper than going for five nines immediately. Nice bridge until then.
Having to be remotely operated every 2.5 to 5 miles seem to defeat most of the economics of self driving cars. Back of the napkin math, cars drive at an average of 18mph in cities, so every 10-20min. Let’s assume it takes over for 1min, and that you need remote drivers not too far for ping purposes, so at the same hourly rate. To guarantee you’ll be able to take over all demands immediately, due to the birthday parad…
What? That's literally insane compared to the current standard of 100 drivers for 100 vehicles. They're literally reducing 70% of the labor cost compared to uber/lyft/etc.
It's pretty reasonable to expect that this will improve over time as well. This is exactly how you want a startup to roll out a new technology.
* Build a pretty good base implementation
* Do things that don't scale for the edge cases
* Reduce the things that don't scale over time
Even if they can only improve this to 10 for 100, that's still a massive improvement.
In my area, a small, rural city, this would literally be a game changer. Right now, there's a single Uber within 15 minutes - if I'm lucky. Meanwhile, cruise could drop a handful of car in town, let them idle (at no cost), then pay a driver for a few minutes of intervention every now and then.
This also enables intercity transit. Most of that is highway miles. Outside of the start and end, those are easy and predictable. You could have dozens/hundreds of miles where Cruise can compete with the cost of privately owned vehicles.
Lastly, this makes it feasible for Cruise to reposition cars between cities without huge costs. Currently, that's basically impossible. Any human driven car needs to offer the driver a ride in the opposite direction.
It's not an allegation. It's the same as using human feedback for tuning large language models. There are no autonomous cars currently regardless of what is written on the marketing brochures. In various "emergency" situations the cars phone home and ask a human operator to take over the controls.
The latency on that has to be massive.
I'm imagining a situation where a car comes across a parked truck on a one-way road (common in cities). A human operator comes in the loop to ensure that it's actually safe to switch lanes and pass. Check for things like emergency vehicles, unusual pedestrians, etc. They don't need to literally take the wheel, just confirm that the vehicle can take a specific action.
Cruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows. Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations. The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many ar…
remote operation of vehicles often makes a lot of sense economically, since you can effectively decouple drivers from vehicles/riders. As you pointed out, this means you can shift to deal with peak loads and all of that - great. Given everything you know now, was it wise to push for expansion over improvements to safety and reliability of the vehicles? On one hand, there is certainly value in expanding a bit to uncov…
Maybe the article answers the following, but don’t know since I haven’t read it yet.
- median, p95, p99 latencies for remote assistance
- max speed vehicle can go when RA is activated.
> Two months ago, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, choked up as he recounted how a driver had killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at a San Francisco intersection. “It barely made the news,” he said, pausing to collect himself. “Sorry. I get emotional.” ... > Cruise’s board has hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the company’s response to the incident, including its interactions with regulators…
Hmm? I saw it exactly the opposite. A lot of people in the autonomous driving industry are driven by exactly what Vogt describes (little girl in the stroller etc.). See also Chris Urmson of Waymo fame's TED talk, he talks about a similar motivation[1]. Its a fallacy everyone conveniently ignores. The woman the Cruise car ran over was actually first hit by a human driver who is still at-large , not a peep about him. T…
Cruise barely drove a few million miles with new modern cars, good weather, the ability to choose optimal roads and weather, and yet it already severely injured a pedestrian.
We can argue about Cruise hitting the pedestrian, but reportedly, the major injuries were caused by Cruise, after reaching a complete stop, deciding it has to clear the road, and dragging the screaming pedestrian and ending with the axle over the pedestrian.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm? I saw it exactly the opposite. A lot of people in the autonomous driving industry are driven by exactly what Vogt describes (little girl in the stroller etc.). See also Chris Urmson of Waymo fame's TED talk, he talks about a similar motivation[1]. Its a fallacy everyone conveniently ignores. The woman the Cruise car ran over was actually first hit by a human driver who is still at-large , not a peep about him. T…
In the US on average, there's a fatality every ~85 million miles driven, and that's an average that includes motorcyclists without helmets, old unsafe unmaintained cars, the worst roads, and adverse weather conditions. Cruise barely drove a few million miles with new modern cars, good weather, the ability to choose optimal roads and weather, and yet it already severely injured a pedestrian. We can argue about Cruise…
That's not even close to a fair comparison. We just have to admit that there isn't a fair comparison yet and everyone's just got an axe to grind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? 100% is scalable, and it’s the common case today. 2% scales just as linearly as 100% does.
That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.