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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

#971

Post by wolverine876 »

fhub wrote: post #846
wolverine876 wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another fun anecdote. When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once (I'm not sure they still do this). What is your motivation here? I can see why some think it looks like promotional material.

a) Share some anecdotes as I was lucky enough to get early access by simply applying through the app. b) I'm a believer/early adopter and as such I guess I've enjoyed sharing my experiences. It turned out I was wrong about the windscreen wipers. LIDAR from other vehicle tripping the rain sensors. In any event, I do wish Waymo the very best. They aren't just trying to do something hard, they are doing it whilst gettin…

Thanks!

> b) I'm a believer

That is interesting to me. Not that you shouldn't be one, or that such an attitude is new to the world, but I always wonder: Why care about a for-profit company's product? Usually these companies don't care about anything or anyone else.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#972

Post by supertrope »

bumby wrote: post #949
tim333 wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

I think this ignores the way society is governed. It's easy for an engineer-mindset to think the bar to be cleared is "better than the average driver". But these systems must operate in a society that is often employing something other than an engineering mindset. I doubt the public and their political representatives (absent regulatory capture) would turn over control to a mere average robot. Do you think, for examp…

>(absent regulatory capture)

Yes trial attorneys will keep the bar very high for safety. As they should. But the bar in not infinitely high. Tech companies are salivating to disrupt the transportation market. They want a piece of your car payment, your insurance payment, your taxi spend. Insurance converts the minute risk of large accident costs into fixed premium payment. Lobbying helps convert financial capital into political capital and then into regulatory change. Our political process tends to follow the desires of the top 0.1% more than the bottom 40% combined.

Our current regime of car infrastructure was once unthinkable. Entire neighborhood were bulldozed to make way for highways. Yet today the government paying for highways, roads, and mandating each building be surrounded with amble parking is the status quo.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#973

Post by supertrope »

_2d30 wrote: post #245
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…

My day-to-day experience with Cruises on the road is much better, mile for mile, than with human drivers. Cruise's failures, in my view, have come broadly at the long tail where their cars stall out entirely in the road due and it cascades to other Cruises.

Should Cruise be compared to drivers as a whole? If a subset of drivers were restricted to a max speed of 30 MPH and drove very conservatively (like most CDL holders), they too would seem safer than the public. The public as a whole includes those who cut off fellow motorists, use their phone while driving, drive while drunk/high/groggy, etc.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#974

Post by zestyping »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #664
zestyping wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the lie?

They showed a video of the crash without the part where they dragged the pedestrian for 20 feet, claiming it was the full video of the incident. The DMV was not aware of that until notified by another government agency that was investigating the incident.

Holy shit. Someone needs to get put in prison for this. Others get locked away for far less.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#975

Post by gerdesj »

oceanplexian wrote: post #845
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…

> I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain. As opposed to what? You don’t have RADAR, or LIDAR, or echolocation, or any other way to “detect” a person in the road. You have human vision. This is the idea behind Tesla FSD. If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough. We have cameras that can approximate human vision. A…

Quite - I don't have those sensors but I do have madly myopic (sort of corrected) stereoscopic vision and a brain, with 30 odd years experience in it. Oh and I have ears. I generally drive with the window down in town. I can look left and listen right.

My office has an entrance onto the A37 in Yeovil (1) Bear in mind we drive on the left in the UK. Picture yourself in a car next to that for sale sign and trying to turn right. That white car will be doing 20-40 mph or much more. In the distance is a roundabout (Fiveways) which is large enough to enable a fast exit and people love to accelerate out of a roundabout. As you can also see this is a hill so the other side is quite fast because cars have to brake to keep down to the speed limit of 30 mph. That's just one scenario.

Anyway, back to your idea that Tesla FSD (Full Self Driving) ie RADAR, LIDAR etc is equivalent to "me" is debatable. I do have my limitations but I can reason about them and I can reason about what FSD might mean as well.

You assert: "If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough." People and computers/cars/whatevs do not perceive things in the same way. I doubt very much that you have two cameras with a very narrow but high res central field of view with a rather shag peripheral view which is tuned for movement. Your analogue "vision" sensors should be mounted on something that can move around (within the confines of a seatbelt). Yes I do have to duck under the rear view mirror and peer around the A pillar etc.

I have no doubt that you have something like a camera with a slack handful of Google Corals, trying to make sense of what is happening but it is really, really complicated. I actually think that your best bet is not to try to replicate my or your sensors and actions but to think outside the box.

Have you ever considered a drone?

Cheers Jon

(1) - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9471642,-2.6382854,3a,75y,...

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#976

Post by Tiktaalik »

oceanofsolaris wrote: post #349
paxys wrote: post #310

I had an epiphany about self driving recently late at night on the streets of San Francisco. It was a somewhat deserted part of town, and the roads were empty. There was a lone Cruise car chugging along and constantly stopping at red lights. The signals were so badly optimized that the car would be the only one waiting at a completely empty intersection for minutes at a time, only to be stopped again at the next one,…

But SF is a damn rich city (due to all the tech companies and their employees). Why didn’t they solve or at least tackle these problems? It’s not like Cruise / Waymo could change city planning against the cities will, even if they wanted.

Just because the population of SF is rich doesn't mean SF is rich.

Cities have very weak abilities to raise revenue, and are relentlessly politically attacked whenever they try to raise more revenue via higher property taxes and other things.

Our cities are actually starved of revenue and especially post pandemic at risk of bankruptcy without bailouts from higher governments.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#977

Post by solardev »

giantg2 wrote: post #951
jprete wrote: post #934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish we put our drivers in driving sims the way pilots have to accrue flight sim hours.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#978

Post by gerdesj »

n2d4 wrote: post #918
oceanplexian wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain. As opposed to what? You don’t have RADAR, or LIDAR, or echolocation, or any other way to “detect” a person in the road. You have human vision. This is the idea behind Tesla FSD. If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough. We have cameras that can approximate human vision. A…

The correct question to ask isn't "is computer vision enough", it's "if humans had LIDAR sensors, would they use them to cause fewer road accidents".

I really don't need LIDAR. I have roughly 3 billion years of evolution and the end result - eyes, brain etc.

LIDAR is simply a sensor and a very inferior one, in general, when compared to my visual system. For starters it needs something to interpret it. My eyes have a 52 year old brain stuffed with experience behind them and it isn't always a hindrance!

I can reason about other people's driving style and react accordingly. I can also describe my actions and reasoning on internet forums.

I really do not want an inferior sensor such as LIDAR inflicted on me, nor would I want it to be the sole source of information for something that conveys me.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#979

Post by askvictor »

alooPotato wrote: post #873
askvictor wrote: post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To have the city planning work correctly you kind of need participation from the cars Perhaps for the optimum solution, but you can get a _lot_ better (than things are at the moment) without that. There are plenty of cities that use sensors and cameras to adjust traffic light timing throughout the day, and have done for some time (In the 90s I studied the system used in Sydney, which had already been in existence f…

You're right the sensors help a lot too - but if a city doesn't have them then thats physical infra that needs to be bought and installed. Unfortunately, this isn't that easy any more in the US at least. Maps/Waze data is a good point and I saw an article recently that Google is providing anonymized data to cities to help them optimize their traffic lights. The one thing the driverless cars get you is the ability to…

Maps/Waze can also shape traffic by suggesting different routes.

One interesting half-way-there solution (and this is a technical solution involving cars, not reducing them as I'd much prefer) would be to have nav apps be able to read the traffic light timings for the intended route, and give you a suggested speed to travel at to maximise green lights and/or traffic throughput. It would piss off cars that want to go exactly at the speed limit, but would probably end up getting them to their destination faster.

In both cases, cities could offer incentive schemes (e.g. points -> $ or discounts off licence/registration fees) to encourage people to 'follow the computer'. Would probably be cheaper than building infrastructure.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#980

Post by PraetorianGourd »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #706
PraetorianGourd wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that it is less due to politics and "safe streets" being an extreme position and more to do with the fact that _entire metropolitan areas_ are designed around the car. It would literally require starting from scratch in many places to design a city around non-car ownership. You can argue that it is a net negative that a lot of America, and most of the American west, was built and grew in conjunction wit…

> I would argue that it is less due to politics and "safe streets" being an extreme position and more to do with the fact that _entire metropolitan areas_ are designed around the car. These are the same thing. > It would literally require starting from scratch in many places to design a city around non-car ownership. No, it wouldn't. This is part of the common set of myths that are promulgated around car dominance in…

I am very familiar with Portland ;), the green ways are cool for sure. Except if I am on Salmon or Clinton and want to go to Fred Meyer, I need to ride on 39th or Hawthorne at _some point_, which to a lot of people is a non-starter due to danger.

Besides, suburbs exist, and someone living in Sherwood who works in Portland, at this time, requires a car. And public transit would need to be either faster, cheaper, or more convenient (wifi, coffee etc) than driving for (most) people to adopt it over a car.

And Hawthorne is _super confusing_ now. Turning right from Hawthorne to 10th is a nightmare, you have a bus lane, a bike lane and a sidewalk to the right of you, all of which could contain someone. It is hard to accurately see all three "lanes" that you need to cross. Another example is the Hawthorne bridge onto 99E, the angle is below 90 degrees so you end up with a massive blind spot. I start looking for bikes/peds way before the off-ramp because I am used to it.. someone from out of town or who rarely drives in Portland is going to kill or injure someone.

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