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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

#951

Post by giantg2 »

jprete wrote: post #934
TuringNYC wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can any engineers in the field comment on whether the [very cool!] Waymo vs Cruise performance anecdotes being discussed here would have been the result of Google's millimeter-level scanning of SF? Or is it just better algos only? Or both?

I’d think better algorithms. A detailed scan of a city’s streets and layout is obsolete before it’s completed. A driver (bot or not) needs very good reactions to bad situations observed in the field. And ideally a good sense for when a situation is one step from trouble. As a driver, if I can’t see through a bus then I’m going to assume a crazy pedestrian is waiting to jump in front of me. (A lot of drivers are quite…

"A lot of drivers are quite bad frankly and don’t do most of the stuff you’d want"

I'd say 90% of driving is good/safe driving is mental, with at least half of that bening based on the decision making capability. Yet our tests are mostly focused on physical ability with a small amount of memorizing a subset of the rules.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#952

Post by amelius »

fhub wrote: post #277
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…

From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all. * Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a b…

> In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do

Waymo has way more sensors. Most importantly, it has Lidar.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#953

Post by amelius »

TuringNYC wrote: post #717
mike_d wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is amazing, knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety - I would feel safer riding in a Waymo than driving myself. My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.

Can any engineers in the field comment on whether the [very cool!] Waymo vs Cruise performance anecdotes being discussed here would have been the result of Google's millimeter-level scanning of SF? Or is it just better algos only? Or both?

It's the sensors and Lidar.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#954

Post by rurp »

screye wrote: post #930
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…

> driving extremely conservatively one-third of all road vehicle deaths resulted from speeding [2]. > traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd Because that is how most people in SF pedestrians are killed: in an unobstructed left against traffic. More than 300 people are injured by left-turning drivers every year in San Francisco. In 2019, 40% of traffic deaths occurred when drivers making left turns hit p…

> I support mandating driverless cars for all people with DUIs (at any phase in life), the elderly and those who have been in serious at-fault-accidents.

I think this is really jumping the gun given how limited current self driving tech is. The amount of people who do 100% of their driving in the few cities where Waymo operates is a tiny part of the population. Until commercial self driving cars can function in the remaining 99% of the country this is a non-starter. Maybe in 10 years this will be possible, although there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#955

Post by awiejrliawejr »

lacker wrote: post #32

I'm disappointed to hear this news. So many people are killed by cars every year. We just take that for granted. Self-driving cars have the potential to drastically improve this and save many lives. I worry that these regulators are weighing the costs heavily while ignoring the benefits of innovation. That said, I don't have access to the data and I don't really know if Cruise has been acting inappropriately. I'm gla…

> That said, I don't have access to the data and I don't really know if Cruise has been acting inappropriately.

That's a common response from people who would prefer NOT to know the facts.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#956

Post by coding123 »

mike_d wrote: post #540
pbarnes_1 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a Waymo come to a screeching halt in a split second as a... less than intelligent individual... skateboarded in front of a bus, into the extremely busy road . If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question. Sometimes I'm riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I'm like "dang, why d…

Waymo is amazing, knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety - I would feel safer riding in a Waymo than driving myself. My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.

I know most of it was PR but the stuff Waymo did about showing a test course they built and actually having "unit tests" related to driving showed me they're not dumping these things on the road to make money, they're trying to get it right.

The competition:

Uber kills someone and turns out they disabled "breaking due to objects in the way" because it makes it jerkier.

Tesla is often killing the drivers because they marketed it as "auto-pilot"

Cruise rolled over someone for 20 seconds.

I would have to agree. I honestly hate regulatory capture in most industries, but perhaps Waymo's "unit tests" should be turned over to the DMV and made as the gold standard driving test for AI drivers.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#957

Post by mindslight »

tempsy wrote: post #113
wstrange wrote: post #71

Link to Cruise review of incident: https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-th...

"A dark colored Nissan Sentra was stopped in the adjacent lane to the left of the AV. When the light turned green, the Nissan Sentra and the AV entered the intersection. Against a red light, a pedestrian entered the crosswalk on the opposite side of Market Street across from the vehicles, passed completely through the AV’s lane of travel, then stopped mid-crosswalk in front of the Nissan Sentra. The Nissan Sentra the…

> IMO it was a bit aggressive for Cruise to have seen this woman jaywalking and still crossed the crosswalk after detecting that the woman had just passed the car but still in the middle of the crosswalk.

Wat? (Most) pedestrians aren't squirrels that hang out in the road running back and forth. You've put forth an unreasonable standard that basically nobody uses. Except for maybe those "special" types of drivers that will slam on their brakes and wave at you when your intended path was clearly behind their car after it had passed, as if you're supposed to be thankful for their putting themselves in your way to indulge in a simulation of altruism.

A good human driver may have slowed down from perceiving the emerging exceptional situation of the oncoming car not reacting to the pedestrian, but I'd say that's a much different framing than what you asserted.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#958

Post by robotburrito »

Good. While people may argue that these things are safer, their success will only lead to the development of more car centric living spaces. Streets will be wider, harder to walk, less people centric. IMO its cheaper in the long run to just have transit and bike lanes.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#959

Post by electrondood »

I saw a Waymo in my neighborhood stopped in the middle of the road. Cars backed up behind it, and the driver quickly took over and accelerated. The car then returned to driving 20 mph in a 25 mph zone.

Tesla is going to smoke these companies. Theirs is the only software trained on high quality actual driver behavior (which they can pull from their fleet because they have telemetry in the form of a real-time safety score for every driver).

It's like every other company is trying to write an algorithm to construct strings, and Tesla has GPT-4.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#960

Post by chikitabanana »

CalRobert wrote: post #899
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.

"The" 280? Has Norcal shifted to usage of definite articles for freeways?

probably a transplant.

For those interested: _Generally_, Bay Area natives will refer to highways as "280", "101", maybe even "Highway X".

SoCal natives (and many others) will, _generally_ say: "the 101", "the 280", etc.

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