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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

#981

Post by gerdesj »

prmoustache wrote: post #854
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... )

The thing is most drivers should not be allowed to drive given their low training, driving standard, general lack of empathy and/or medications or substance abuse issues but society incorrectly assume driving is a right while it should be considered a privilege you earn and that can be revoked anytime based on regular tests + eventual tickets. I estimate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allow…

"I estimate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allowed to drive"

I don't know where you are but in the UK the driving test is pretty tricky. I failed it twice before passing and that was before it had the theory test added on. That was 30 years ago.

We all have our own perceptions of other drivers but you do need to try to think in their shoes. Today, whilst driving home I noticed a police car lights to the left and decided to indicate and move from lane one to two to give them room. The land rover behind me decided to undertake me and blunder through in lane one. Now the LR made a perfectly legitimate move - stay on track. They then undertook me (naughty). They did their thing and came across as wankers.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#982

Post by bumby »

supertrope wrote: post #972
bumby wrote: post #949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

I’m not sure the original intent of the national highway system can be chalked up to the interests of the 0.1%. It’s generally attributed to national security, which is a very public interest.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#983

Post by ehsankia »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #651
ehsankia wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Oharmaceuticals have many different tiers of trials, but even with that, there are still new discoveries and surprises once they reach the full population. Waymo has been testing their tech for over a decade in much smaller and controlled situations. Similarly, all of these companies also have done tests with humans behind the wheel for years. To claim that they've done no testing and are going straight t…

Perhaps you know more than me about pharmaceutical testing, but people are aware that they're part of a trial, and more importantly, they consent to participating, correct? I did not claim they're not testing, they clearly are. My argument is that people that didn't sign up to be test subjects are getting hurt in the process. It's worth pointing out the discrepancy in human safety trials, is it not? Why should AV tes…

It depends what you define as a "test". It's like how for Covid vaccines, antivaxxers were claiming that vaccines were still being tested on people despite it getting past phase 1, 2 and 3. At what point do you consider something to be "safe enough".

My point is that Waymo has done plenty of testing already. The question is, where do you draw the line? Are cars ever "done" being tested? Just like with drugs, you never know all the side effects for 100%, you can only make the error bar smaller and smaller, but eventually you have to distribute it to the public.

Same with the car, at some point they will eventually have to drive on public road. By your logic, they would never reach that threshold since they're still "testing" it.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#984

Post by viraptor »

Fricken wrote: post #912
viraptor wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's driving without attention, there's defensive driving, and then there's ability to react to things which would be physically impossible for people to react to. You can train all you want (and yes, that will improve your survival rate significantly), but the eyes->brain->muscles->movement->car->inertia pipeline has delays we will never be able to work around.

In the real world reacting effectively is less about reflexes and more about situational awareness, anticipating what might happen, and reacting not just quickly but properly when something sudden does occur.

I think in that space ML will beat us completely. It's basically a simple optimisation problem of: these rules improve safety, here's the situation you're in, maximise rules applied and minimise changes required to apply them, repeat. The number of ideas ML can remember, test and execute is not going to be comparable with what people can do. It all relies on getting appropriate data from sensors though.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#985

Post by TulliusCicero »

PraetorianGourd wrote: post #980
TulliusCicero wrote: post #706

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. 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 mo…

> 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.

That's what protected bike lanes are for. Basic ones aren't that expensive, really, the issue is more the road space. Cars dominate the existing space, and many, perhaps most drivers will scream bloody murder at losing any. They don't want equality and choice, they want dominance and everyone forced to drive.

> Besides, suburbs exist, and someone living in Sherwood who works in Portland, at this time, requires a car.

"Besides" nothing, you're talking about an almost entirely separate issue now. Obviously bikes aren't great for really long distance commutes for most people, they're more for short to medium distance trips. And yes, that's where public transit comes into play -- with people able to walk or bike to the stations.

> 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.

Yup, that's where you throw in bus lanes everywhere. Places like London have heavy adoption of bus lanes that lets taking the bus often be faster than driving by yourself.

> 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.

I admit that I'm not that familiar with Portland, but protected intersections are a solved problem. Takes more money than the other things I've mentioned so far for sure, but it's still quite doable.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#986

Post by bmitc »

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…

I have doubts of the claim you have made. The Waymo just turned up a hill and moved out of the way of a downhill skateboarder? What is it about that that makes it something that no human could do? Was the Waymo's vision blocked before making the turn? As that's the time to determine the turn is safe.

Also, isn't there an implicit assumption that all Waymo "drivers" would perform in exactly the same way?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#987

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

I ran a non-profit website in Brazil where schools could look up a question-by-question breakdown of how their students did in the high-school exit exam. I was a bit flummoxed by the process of maintaining a decently sized database with that data, and realized that there were only so many visualizations I'd need for it. So, over a week, I just had an algorithm compute everything I would need for each school for the several million students in the db, and then handily save a file for each institution with that data in an S3 bucket. No databases, no complex logic, just a few pennies of cost for S3... and it made building out the visualization such a breeze!

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#988

Post by someonehere »

I took a Cruise for the first time a month ago. It arrived and it sat there for almost ten minutes. It kept telling me that my ride was getting ready. Someone from the operations center also called into the car and asked if I was ok and reassured me the ride would start soon.

This was at night with zero traffic. I have no idea why it took so long.

When the CPUC was set to vote on expanding Cruise’s operations several months ago, SF first responders and other residents spoke out against expanding operations. CPUC ignored all the feedback and concerns and voted to expand. I believe the press pointed out the CPUC people that voted to expand Cruise operations would benefit off the expansion (can’t recall if they were former employees or tied to the driverless industry). But despite emergency responders giving numerous examples of how dangerous the cars were in emergency situations, they were ignored.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#989

Post by billy99k »

anigbrowl wrote: post #335
panarky wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> way higher Even 10% less grievous bodily harm would be a massive improvement.

The fastest way to do that is to put size limits on personal vehicles. There has been study after study showing that the larger and heavier cars get the greater the risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...

What about the studies on deaths and injury with smaller vehicles only involving another vehicle? My guess is that it's much higher. Most families with kids want larger vehicles for exactly this reason.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#990

Post by startupsfail »

ehsankia wrote: post #573
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.

Absolutely. Glad California DMV is taking the more level headed approach here and evaluating them case by case based on merit.

In the case of that particular incident, it seems that the pedestrian was “thrown” into the lane with Cruise when it was hit by another (human) driver.
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