Cruise Automation, GM’s Self-Driving Cars, and the Founders Behind It | Hacker News Reader

Cruise Automation, GM’s Self-Driving Cars, and the Founders Behind It

fortune.com

72 pointsartfuldodger48 comments

This is a great quote: "Startups with no demanding customers can lose their urgency, with development cycles dragging on for years, says Rust, who worked at Google’s experimental research factory before joining Cruise. “We tried to accomplish what one of the most talented teams at Google did in two years and compress that into six months,” Vogt says."

This is one of the main reasons why "internal startups" at big companies fail. They lack urgency. The same thing often happens at startups that are over-funded too -- they think they can afford to take their time and that leads to compounding slowness.

Yes, but in this particular case I would say that urgency is not the best thing to have. When my life is on the line, I would much rather have an autonomous driving system that was developed slowly and deliberately without time pressure instead of one that was rushed out the door to beat a competitor to market.

This is a fair point, but don't underestimate the value of getting something to market sooner rather than later, even for something like this.

Look at it this way: would you rather wait for five 9s against getting in a collision of any kind, in a car you won't be able to buy for another 25 years ... or settle for four 9s, and take delivery by christmas?

I don't know enough about the odds or the effect vs speed to comment with any confidence about whether Cruise's autonomous driving system fits this pattern or not, but I too often see a knee-jerk "slower and safer is always better when LIVES are on the line!" reaction, and I think it's worth being careful about whether it actually does make for a safer world.

To add perspective, the interim solution (driving yourself) is probably closer to three 9s. So it's a choice between a big improvement soon, or an even bigger improvement later.

This is false, and one of the reasons Tesla got a lot of deserved criticism over the death that occurred from using their autopilot system. So far, all of the data (which is limited, so it's far from conclusive) points towards self-driving technology being deadlier than manual driving.

This is not a condemnation of technology augmenting driving. ABS is clearly a win, airbags were once controversial, and even seat belts were once considered questionable. The technology will likely improve, but it isn't there yet and believing that it is can quite literally kill you.

I'll grant you that there are situations as you describe, where people lean too heavily on the current technology and die as a result. However, I believe that there are more situations where the technology works as intended, preventing mistakes and saving lives.

So, until there is clear data to the contrary, I'm sticking my original assertion that current-gen augmented driving technology improves safety.

With all the jockeying for position we've seen in the vehicle automation space the past couple years, one thing that's become clear is that both SV and Detroit have a lot to learn about the other guys home turf, and they've both humbled themselves with respects to what they can and can't do well.

This is a false dichotomy and just not representative of reality.

There can never be self-driving cars because the type of generalized intelligence that would be required is impossible to achieve. The fact remains that a computer program can only do what it is told, it cannot think. Code has no mind.

So what the choice is between is, instead, someone (Tesla) pushing out a falsely marketed support system that does none of the things it is believe to be able to, and causes unnecessary deaths and injuries. And, on the other hand, thorough testing to uncover the possibilities and limits of the technology, to produce a reliable, usable product.

This is a little simplistic. Computers can do things they aren't heuristically programmed to do - that's the basic idea behind machine learning. I've seen some incredibly impressive robots that ran entirely on neural nets and never failed, but because it was impossible to understand how they worked they could only be used for demonstration purposes as guaranteeing safety was impossible.

What you seem to be referring to is true AI. I agree we are nowhere close to anything resembling true AI, but I do believe something representative of a computer that can "think" will appear in the coming decades.

That said, you can program a car heuristically. Statistically speaking, the unknown unknowns are so rare that assuming it doesn't fail under expected conditions you can guarantee it to be safer than humans. The unknown unknowns are not the problem right now, it's just dealing with limited sensor input (cars have a hard time "seeing" what's around them) and making sense of the world around it.

There is a considerable ongoing research effort in formal verification of learned systems. Once an ML system has been trained, it becomes deterministic and can be tested.

That sounds neat. Can you link me to a paper?

"Computers can only do what they are programmed to do" is the slogan of a 1950s advertising/propaganda campaign by IBM to alleviate fears that the newly-birthed field of AI would create computers which would not only do what they were programmed to do.

Which is precisely what AI is about. Getting computers to effectively program themselves toward some specified goal. In which case, the problem becomes "be careful what you wish for". The paperclip maximiser AI is one such cautionary tale. HAL in 2001 was an exceptionally thinly veiled reference to IBM, no matter how loud Clarke and Kubrick's protestations to the contrary.

On the Media on IBM and AI:

http://www.wnyc.org/story/engineering-intelligence/

There are numerous IBM logos throughout 2001. One is noted in this Slate piece:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_...

And it points to a now-removed YouTube video pointing out numerous other instances:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1r5dOwUS6Y

The logos also appear on the Newspad, in various shipboard equipment, and elsewhere.

I would gladly take any number of 9s better than driving myself, but the problem is we're seeing products like Autopilot rushed to market that aren't there. I personally think Google is doing the best job of building a comprehensive system that can reliably replace drivers, and most other players are rushing to try and put something on the road. There's a happy medium where autonomous cars are significantly better than human drivers and still released sometime in the near future, and I'll wait the extra couple of years for a system that is proven safe instead of clamoring for one to be available tomorrow.

You're assuming that software developed "slowly and deliberately" is higher quality than the best engineers and a sense of urgency.

Pretty sure NASA would agree with that assumption.

NASA did get to the moon in under a decade though. I definitely suspect there was a heightened sense of urgency when they were working on that. Sub-orbital to lunar in 10 years is pretty quick.

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

NASA puts lots of effort into avoiding any failure and then still encounters failures.

(Nothing wrong with failures if they're anticipated, of course.)

@pb did you watch comma.ai call out Cruise? It seems that comma.ai thinks Cruise lacks urgency, are sell outs. They clearly communicated that Cruise essentially had nothing.

It going to be interesting to see if a outsider like Hotz can outperform a well funded YC startup.

A person who hacked the PS3, iPhone versus whatever Vogt accomplished.

they aren't really competitors, comma.ai offers level 2 autonomous retrofitting for certain cars and Cruise pivoted from initially a similar offering to comma.ai at a higher price point to a level 4 system that uses lidar and is sold to car companies or in this case exclusive to GM with no direct to consumer offering

you think comma.ai is legit? seems kind of pointless ...

Hotz has described his product as 'fancy cruise control', and it isn't much more than that. I think he's about as legit as he says he is.

If he gets it out for under $1000 before 2017 he's a man of his word, and I think he'll do it.

After pulling off that impressive stunt, though, he's going to have to figure out how to turn comma.ai into a real company somehow. I'm not sure how he's going to do that.

Now that explains some things. The initial Cruise Automation system was lane keeping and auto speed control, which everybody has. It was over-promoted as full automatic driving on the Cruise web site and Youtube.[1] "Just sit back and enjoy the ride", says the video.

The founder was credible enough to sell GM on buying their 40-person startup for somewhere between $500M and $1BN. GM already had the Cadillac/CMU technology self-driving technology, which was better than what Cruise had. But GM bought anyway.

One of the best deals made since Bill Gates sold IBM on adopting DOS.

Meanwhile, Cruise now has multiple Velodyne laser units on a rack on top of the car, like everybody else.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEQqQj_zyHI

You are watching a two year old youtube video and then confidently extrapolating to conclude that Cruise has no tech and that GM got duped out of a billion dollars.

Well, all they are showing is that they have no tech.

Even the photos in this article are a bunch of Chevrolet dumps charging.

there is 15+ self driving startups at the moment, GM has prolly seen all of them and went with Cruise

That isn't sound logic. GM has a track record of making terrible managerial decisions, so assuming they know best is ignoring history. The people making the decisions haven't worked on self-driving cars and are not the best people to judge the technology, in fact these are the very people who twice (technically thrice, but that's another story) abandoned their own self-driving R&D which ultimately went to Google and Delphi (and another which was just completely thrown away).

You're also assuming that all of the other companies wanted to sell, which isn't true.

Otto sold for 680 million to Uber in August 2016, the company started in 2015, that's atleast one company that was willing to sell and I figure most of them would, they all have no end game other then being acquired for the most part

http://www.recode.net/2016/8/18/12540068/uber-paid-680-milli...

time will tell if the Cruise acquisition pays off or not

Otto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret.

we will see a few more acquisitions play out in this space over the next year or so but I do believe Google will have a hard time acquiring the companies in the space as tons of people are jumping ship and some are even starting their own self driving startups with prolly no intention of going back to google like Otto

And this DMV crash report from February of this year.[1] Cruise hit a parked car in San Francisco at 20mph. The driver tried to intervene and prevent it, but too late.

When you read Google's crash reports [2], it's almost always "autonomous vehicle was rear-ended by human driver". That's happened twice at Phyllis Av. and Grant Rd. in Mountain View. It's worth a look at that location.[3] Notice the tree in the median strip on Phyllis. That's in just the right place to block Google's car-top LIDAR scanners from seeing cross traffic on Grant Rd. So the autonomous vehicle advanced at 6mph to get a better view, detected cross traffic, stopped, and was rear-ended. The same thing happened a month later, last September. The autonomous vehicle did the right thing (not seeing "hit by cross traffic" accident reports), but it wasn't what the driver behind expected.

That's what the problems look like in the later stages of development. Not reports of hitting parked cars.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/bc21ef62-6e7c-4049... [2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton... [3] https://goo.gl/maps/T1Q33rtB67F2

I saw the tech they had in their office right before acquisition. It wasn't anything drastically different from the tech used in 2007 during the DARPA Urban challenge.

they abandoned that retrofitting hardware a while ago too, they only did that for a few months before working on a more full stack solution that is level 4 that would require a partnership with a car company to install their product which they now have

That YouTube video is hilarious, that steering is twitchy as fuck. It's like someone used PID control without a clue.

Tesla is really good at precise lane-keeping.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ3DV671CT8

GM had the Cadillac/CMU technology, but due to...I'll call it managerial oversight, they lost their initial IP to Google in 2009 (basically everybody had left and took their knowledge with them) and then again to Delphi in 2015 with the Ottomatika acquisition.

GM knew it needed self-driving technology, and Cruise was in the right place at the right time. Kudos to Cruise for pulling it off. Hopefully GM doesn't repeat themselves and effectively kill the technology for a 3rd time.

Ah. That may go down in history as one of the biggest big-company R&D management failures since Xerox couldn't figure out what to do with PARC. That would explain overpaying for Cruise - top management doesn't have to explain that failure to stockholders.

You should learn about the history of GM. Specially from the early 70s to the late 90s. Lots of horrible management decisions. You will learn how they gave toyota and honda the US domestic market on a silver platter.

I know. I read De Lorean's "On a clear day you can see General Motors" (1979) and Lutz's "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters" (2013).

Lutz makes a key point about automotive. He says that all the functional needs from automobiles have been met. You can buy just about any car from any make and get where you need to go reliably. Now it's all about the things which drive non-rational decisions about what car to buy.

Self-driving changes that. It's the first big change in basic car function in decades. That's going to have a big impact on the automotive sector, but nobody knows yet how it will play out.

> Cruise is working with GM to add autonomous-driving technology to the Bolt.

May be GM popped out $1 billion so that they can put their own of version of Tesla's auto pilot in Bolt.

I am not sure any company is going it alone, Tesla didn't create their system on their own anymore than GM did. After reading a Motortrend article where they tested most of the major systems it seemed most are very good at unsafe tailgating and work only in ideal conditions.

"Statistically speaking, most of us will never build a billion-dollar company. We definitely won’t build two of them"

If you mad a billion dollars from your first company then you have a hell of a lot of money to invest in your second, so statistically speaking its actually quite high.

I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I'm virtually positive that Cruise was just snake oil. I expect GM to trail other automakers in this area, particularly after this acquisition. Now, to be fair, that is pretty much the null hypothesis since GM trails in a lot of areas. But, I view the Cruise acquisition as a confirmation of -- not a rebuttal to -- the notion that they are far behind and will fail.

Of course that would get you downvoted. You said you're positive about something a little bit controversial and provided no observations that your view could be based on.

What objective evidence is your view based on?

> I know I'll get downvoted for this

Please don't break the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) by going on about getting downvoted.

Your assessment was also off base, because unsubstantive dismissals (which your comment unfortunately is) routinely get lots of upvotes, alas.

Prepare for downvotes. how dare you criticize the great accomplishments of our new startup heroes?

Please don't. Substantive criticism is fine; snarky meta comments add nothing.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567998 and marked it off-topic.

Edit: it turns out you've been posting a lot of stuff like this. Please don't post any more stuff like this. Instead, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

I'll go with "not at all." Thanks for the feedback.

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