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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

961–970 of 1001 posts

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#961

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 sc…

Tesla is not going anywhere. They are a driver assist technology. I don't even understand how you can put them in the same bucket.

They don't have the hardware to compete with Waymo and Cruise.

But sure, it is a good narrative for the stock to go to the moon.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#962
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t littered through CA, in CA they are exclusively in SF. In SF they are common and as they seem to drive nonstop, take more road time than a comparable number of normal cars. They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.

Waymos do stop between fares. They've gotten grief from people who don't like them parked in front of their house.

It makes sense to me that people wouldn't want a surveillance machine from a hugely powerful adtech company loitering around their property.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#963
post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree on the endpoint. I think active transit is healthy for humans, and removing it causes people to need to excercise deliberately much more — and people don’t, causing obesity and a ton of health concerns. Walking 2-3km a day would be great for most people, and much better than sitting in an auto-pod.

Would it then also be better if people had to churn their own butter? Obviously not. Exercise is fantastic and should be encouraged. I think nothing would do more to facilitate human-powered transportation (walking and biking) than replacing distracted and dangerous human drivers with attentive and safe autonomous ones.

What if we simply replace the distracted and dangerous human drivers with… nothing?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#964
post #81

TxDMV needs to follow this. Fuck these companies. They are testing their garbage in dense urban areas. Too many times their vehicles just stop in the middle of the road. If it rains, vehicle stops. If the light is out, vehicle panics and stops. Somebody puts a cone on the hood, vehicle panics. If a single variable not accounted for in their algorithms shifts beyond expected range, it fucking panics. So much money dum…

Cruise's valuation of $30 billion will get you 12 miles of subway in NYC [1], hardly the public transit revolution necessary to make autonomous driving redundant. I don't hate public transit or anything, I cycle and subway in NYC all the time, but the level of investment the US needs in public transit is an order of magnitude above the amount that investors have spent on autonomous driving. [1] https://www.bloomberg.…

how many people does that 12 miles of subway move vs self driving cars? I would think surely an order of magnitude as well.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#965
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keeping autonomous vehicles on the road will result in thousands of edge cases, and without a clear safety benefit (as opposed to Level 1 systems) its better to stop everything and reconsider. True, but I bet either a Cruise or a Waymo would have stopped rather than hit that woman crossing the street, and they definitely would not have fled the scene like the human driver did.

I mean it did hit her (again), ran her over, then stayed on top of her. That's not a better scenario at all. A Level 1 system can still avoid hitting people.

Did you read the whole thing? She was knocked onto its path. It might be have been physically impossible to avoid hitting her at that point.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#966
post #933

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a car is always more freedom than not having a car. Where I live I sometimes walk, sometimes bike, sometimes take the subway, sometimes use my car, and sometimes use my truck. I'm nowhere near rich enough, but having your own private jet would also give you a lot of extra freedom. However I don't consider these self driving taxis to give you much freedom (because you don't own them).

In a dense city car ownership is a financial trap. It’s a depreciating liability whose use is extremely limited by available real estate (normal people use the terms traffic and parking). (Also the number one killer of kids.) Lack of ownership is the point.

I'm talking about freedom. Every person's financial situation is a separate thing.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#967
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you link to says there was more to it! The Cruise vehicle, after running over the woman, stopped on top of her with the rear axle/tires pinning her to the ground, trapping her there. And it just... sat there. I hesitate to believe that a human driver would do something like that. You could, however, argue that staying in place was the right thing to do; continuing to drive to get the woman out from under…

This is such a wild edge case though. So we think the vehicle should do what, keep driving, potentially causing more damage? It's highly situation specific, and I'd expect the emergency personal to make the judgement call on how to free the person (potentially by taking control of the vehicle, or other means).

[deleted]

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#968
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you link to says there was more to it! The Cruise vehicle, after running over the woman, stopped on top of her with the rear axle/tires pinning her to the ground, trapping her there. And it just... sat there. I hesitate to believe that a human driver would do something like that. You could, however, argue that staying in place was the right thing to do; continuing to drive to get the woman out from under…

This is such a wild edge case though. So we think the vehicle should do what, keep driving, potentially causing more damage? It's highly situation specific, and I'd expect the emergency personal to make the judgement call on how to free the person (potentially by taking control of the vehicle, or other means).

Circling back to add some info. From this[0] page:

"But the DMV also said it was not made aware that the Cruise vehicle then tried to pull over while the pedestrian was underneath it."

Kind of proves my point. Stopping completely would have been more ok. The issue the DMV took is that it then pulled over, and that cruise withheld that information.

[0]https://spectrum.ieee.org/lta-airship-faa-clearance

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#969

As someone who has had FSD for the past 2 months, I would never trust it with left turn merges into fast lanes, any weird situation (I’ve seen it deal with construction fine but once an excavator was blocking the road and it kept trying to inch forward in the smallest of gaps even though it was clear that the only solution was to wait till it was off the road) and extreme turns (>150 degrees). My drive to work is 20…

> Finally, as someone working in AI, I’m actually very optimistic about their next approach of just learning an end to end model to drive the car. I think this is the only scaleable way to reach human level driving. Any set of rules based + optimization based planner will have those edge cases that ruin the cars capability, in fact it turns out the long tail is really long.

Tesla doesn’t have an end-to-end model. They call it “end-to-end AI”, which just means they’re applying AI to all subsystems, exactly like everyone else. All the big players already use heavy ML-based planning systems that are not “rules or optimization based” and which are way more sophisticated than anything Tesla has put out or is planning to.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#970
post #401
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since it seems people are interested. I had one situation which this sort of thing made me a bit uneasy (So one gripe actually). I was sitting back right seat. Waymo was waiting to make an unprotected left turn over two lanes. There was a vehicle waiting to also make an unprotected left in the other direction. Behind it was a truck. Waymo made that turn where I wouldn't have. I thought it through after and it had at…

I suspect a lot of the concern could be handled by having the car display a map of moving things that it will interact with and it's projection of encounter times/distances.
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