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Comment by pb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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