Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
getcruise.com
getcruise.com
https://images.ctfassets.net/95kuvdv8zn1v/6h1C7lPC79OLOlddEE...
They and their VC backers are clearly betting on the concept that radars + lidar + imaging will be the ultimate successful solution in full self driving cars, as a completely opposite design and engineering philosophy from Tesla attempting to do "full self driving" with camera sensors and categorical rejection of lidar.
It is interesting to me that right now this is sitting on the HN homepage directly adjacent to: "Tesla to recall vehicles that may disobey stop signs (reuters.com)"
Based on https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/01/13/a-robo... Tesla's FSD has other issues as well.
Does 50 miles of geofenced and daily mapped streets mean Cruise won self driving?
What if Waymo gets to 20k miles of geofenced roads and monthly mapped?
What if Tesla gets to the point of one intervention/crash every 100k miles? 10M Miles?
I think Tesla is right that to solve it for real you need to solve the general case which can’t rely on high resolution maps.
The city cab case is smaller and can, so the cruise approach makes sense for that use case. It’s just narrower.
I found his and Tesla's arguments convincing for the general case. That doesn't mean that the narrow cases aren't super cool or valuable (I signed up for this Cruise thing in SF).
I just think that if the software is unable to make decisions based on visual data alone without up to date high resolution maps it'll never achieve true FSD in the general case (not geo locked). You'll end up trapped in a local max otherwise because there are just too many conditions in the real world that vary (and the world is too large to economically map fast enough for that approach). You have to solve the vision problem.
I don't know enough to comment on the approach differences beyond that, but my understanding was that Tesla did not rely on the same stuff that Waymo and Cruise require (largely Lidar and these high resolution maps).
My contention is that there’s no way to actually solve for the general case with currently existing technology. The amount of novelty in the real world is too great for any system to account for it without disambiguating via HD maps or remote support.
>You have to solve the vision problem.
This isn’t a vision problem specifically - even if you had LIDAR and high resolution imaging radar and 8 A100s on every Tesla, “true generalized self driving” wouldn’t be achievable without HD maps with our current understanding of Machine Learning.
>My understanding was that Tesla did not rely on the same stuff that Waymo and Cruise require.
Tesla maps individual traffic light elements, stop signs, and lane markings, but will attempt to drive even if the area isn’t mapped.
Disparities in FSD performance in different areas is largely attributable to some areas being better mapped than others - the mapping data has a huge effect on its performance. There are key elements of the driving task (including recognizing and reacting to every single type of sign other than a stop sign) that FSD can’t do and relies entirely on maps for.
Cars really don’t need to identify what something is just it’s location and movement which is a vastly easier problem. A trash can rolling down the street can be treated just like an oil drum doing the same thing etc.
You’d think that, until you encounter something like a turn restriction sign with a bizarre conditional restriction that it’s never seen before. At which point the car needs to OCR the text, parse the semantic meaning, and apply to the scene.
There are 10 MPH speed limit signs on Market Street in SF that specify in incredibly small text “when behind trolleys”. Assuming we take your approach, the car will just always go down market at 10 MPH.
Imagine if it’s a negative turn restriction - IE, it’s permitting turns except for during certain hours and conditions. Now the car is treating it as always permitted and turning into traffic. An edge case, but something it’s going to encounter in the real world.
Also, negative restrictions can again default to full restrictions. Permitting a car to say park in a snow lane doesn’t require a car to park in the snow lane.
Not to mention these sorts of edge cases are way more common in large cities than small towns - one of the examples I gave was down a central avenue in San Francisco.
>They can always get updates on what some random sign in some random location means as long as their safe and don’t block traffic that’s all that’s needed.
What if it truly fails to parse the sign accurately and does something illegal or dangerous? What does sending an update out look like? Does a human take a look at a crop of the sign and review it? Why not just map it in that case?
It’s not a question of parsing a known sign, even extremely complex rules can be encoded. Further that process can take place from a photo of the sign uploaded by the car to then be encoded by the rules. The general case is stopping and having a remote driver slowly tell the car what to do.
An unknown sign in a place without cellphone reception is about the only case where it really need to just figure it out on it’s own rather than simply avoid causing an accident.
> What if it truly fails to parse a sign accurately and does something illegal or dangerous?
Not much, people regularly disobey traffic signs especially ones with complex instructions. Don’t hit stuff or jump in front of another car is generally enough.
So you’re now agreeing that you need some level of remote support to handle edge cases like this?
>An unknown sign in a place without cellphone reception is about the only case where it really need to just figure it out on it’s own rather than simply avoid causing an accident.
Yes, and again, this is the sort of thing you actually need to worry about when trying to come up with generalized self driving solution.
> Not much, people regularly disobey traffic signs especially ones with complex instructions. Don’t hit stuff or jump in front of another car is generally enough.
What if it misinterprets a one way sign at night when there’s no other signal that it’s turning on to a one way lane and it suddenly finds itself traveling opposite the direction of traffic for a long period before encountering another car? You have to consider all of these edge cases when talking about a generalized solution.
Maybe you still disagree with me in sprit, but do you see how when we really look at edge cases how you have to fall back to some level of remote operation or mapping?
As a bootstrap step yes, after that no just regular updates for new traffic rules and such. You can’t make a purely offline self driving system that doesn’t get updated for 30 years because laws change. But presumably a non geofenced self driving car is going to be tested by driving on every road either directly or via someone’s mapping project.
> What if it misinterprets a one way sign at night when there’s no other signal that it’s turning on to a one way lane and it suddenly finds itself traveling opposite the direction of traffic for a long period before encountering another car? You have to consider all of these edge cases when talking about a generalized solution.
You mean in some location without maps? There are a finite number of roads in the world and they don’t change that quickly. If you’re worried that the AI is going to say end up on an ice road that melts, sure that’s the kind of thing that happens once. But the threshold isn’t perfection it’s ~30,000 dead people per year in the US. Beat that and you win.
I can't imagine how AI would _correctly_ see four straight arrowed lights in front of it in the intersection, some of which are red, some are green. Humans of course recognize that they correlate to the lanes, but this is a more esoteric case for AI to assimilate.
But they do relay on maps. You cannot use FSD without latest, high resolution maps.
Ideally, the taxes could be high enough that driverless taxis will operate at barely above break-even. The financial comfort of me and my neighbours are more important to me than the profit margins of a firm that barely employs anyone in my town.
Unlike a factory or a corporate office (that can threaten to move offshore, eliminating jobs and impoverishing a town), the firm in question is a hostage of local politics - not the other way around.
The cheaper and more convenient you make zero-person and single-person automobile transportation, the more people will use it, and the more congestion they will create.
The more expensive and less convenient you make it, the more trips will use non-automotive, or public transportation, both of which produce far less congestion.
There are so many inefficiencies with human drivers—chaotic merging, unnecessary lane changes, blocking of passing lanes, and so on. I could imagine that optimizing all those away would make a huge difference overall.
You could also probably increase speed limits. And fewer accidents should cause a significant reduction in traffic jams.
(And yes, I agree that that's dumb since the same politicians and voters have no problem indefinitely subsidizing and expanding the massively money-losing infrastructure called Roads at taxpayer expense!)
But the current FSD beta's intervention rate is more like one per 10 miles, judging from some quick googling. I see no particular reason to assume that incremental improvement can take us from 10 to 500K.
Maybe in rural areas? The videos on YouTube are far more than one per 10 miles.
But, In all seriousness we don't have access to the data across all 60k FSD users to know what the intervention rate is and how it has been changing over time.
To actually reduce that number you would need to make drivers feel more confident in the vehicle which is a useful metric, but only indirectly relating to safety.
Or even worst, just managing an empty intersection (video at correct time): https://youtu.be/wTybjJj0ptw?t=280
At which point releasing software so bad, becomes a criminal liability? Another one at correct time: https://youtu.be/wTybjJj0ptw?t=652
There are simply no words...Correct time: https://youtu.be/wTybjJj0ptw?t=722
Should not be allowed out of the labs...
The rideshare explosion has already had a measurable effect on drunk-driving deaths; to the extent that a theoretical lower-cost AV will make rideshare even more accessible, then its effect on drunk-driving reduction absolutely makes non-sober drivers a relevant comparison.
For an average young person who'd get in the car with one of their friends, or drives a bit recklessly themselves[1], an AV at sober-human-driver level would be valuable.
For a guy who needs his kids driven around, a "sober cautious human driver" level of safety may feel right.
For questions like "what should the regulatory bar for launch be", all human drivers seems like an easy answer.
[1] I'm probably guilty to a degree here, on the rare occasions I drive
In a full-self-driving situation you no longer have to pay your driver, but you do have to pay for all of the above. With the inevitably higher standards of maintenance required for AV fleet vehicles I can't really imagine it being cheaper than it currently is.
Sure the sensor/cv/vision tech will get cheaper, but machines still wear down.
That's what the industry is betting on. I think it's reasonable in the steady-state: labor costs are expensive as hell.
> vehicle purchase/maintenance/depreciation/liability are all externalised.
These aren't 100% externalized with Uber, as they show up in the labor cost. They're only externalized with Uber to the extent that drivers do the math wrong on the costs they're paying[1]. Most of the analyses I've seen of this choose every possible pessimistic assumption, and still end up with net wages that are very high. They're of course low relative to "a living wage", which is what the analyses are focusing on, but that's precisely the point of what we're talking about: even the floor of labor costs is very high, when you're looking at expenses.
[1] Completely tangentially, but also note that this ignores the extent to which people derive value from being able to convert assets around. It's hard to imagine for us SWEs making 1% salaries and sitting on mountains of wealth, but liquidity is a constant and pressing concern for a large portion of the country. See also: payday lenders, where there's a stark difference between the opinions of those who've actually studied the economics of the industry and the midwit affluent John-Oliver-watcher.
Unfortunately, I expect that automation will be held to a higher standard than human drivers, rather than the same standard. When an accident happens, people want to know who to blame, and an unimpaired human driver gets somewhat more latitude for a genuine accident, while a piece of software is always going to be perceived to be at fault (which it may well be, even in a situation where a human wouldn't be considered to be). And conversely, people (somewhat validly) want to have more control: every driver thinks they're above average, and the software won't be as good as their accident rate, and if something happened at least they were in control when it happened.
I don't necessarily even think those are incorrect perspectives; we should hold software to a high standard, and not accept "just" being as good as human drivers when it could be much better. But at the same time, when software does become more reliable than human drivers, we should start switching over to make people safer, even while we continue making it better.
(Personally, I wish we had enough widespread coordination to just build underground automated-vehicles-only roads.)
The average driver in a crash is worse than the average driver. Why would we compare FSD with reckless drunks, etc.
Also, I should have written "the average driver in a crash is worse than the median driver".
"* In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.
* Drugs other than alcohol (legal and illegal) are involved in about 16% of motor vehicle crashes." https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im...
If we include recklessness, FSD maybe need better than half the fatality rate of human drivers, to be on par with the median driver.
What Tesla is doing is not driverless.
Success is when I trust the autopilot to handle the weather conditions where I live, not just sunny days in California.
And even really naive integrations of LIDAR will show big improvements over camera only. You can do something as simple as overlay the returns from the most recent LIDAR spin over a camera image as a fourth channel and feed it into your models and most of your depth prediction/spatial predictions will improve dramatically.
0: vulnerable road users, eg pedestrians and bicyclists
With the most complex, context-aware, intuitive computer in existence. In addition to eyeballs that are dramatically more capable than any camera Tesla is using.
For human flight, we borrowed the wings, but made them fixed and added propellers, to cheat the mechanical incompetence.
I wouldn't be shocked that radar/lidar/sonar/whatever sensors are what it takes to cover the incompetence in matching human brain+vision.
Heck, use multiple "brains" and give each veto power on moving the vehicle. Supposing that stopping doesn't kill you, that would at most frequently annoy the driver, and sometimes save his life or someone else's.
At least today we probably could build a craft that flies by flapping its wings but what would be the point?
Tesla was already heavily relying on vision before going vision-only.
I don't know the contract, it is likely that there is some ordering where the luxury brands can sell it first. It will be rolled down to cheap brands as needed (depending either on market demand, or legal mandates)
Tesla is imitating humans in a way that removing LIDAR and relying on the compute to make up for them and build more accurate picture.
Also, isn't Cruise owned by GM - who are the VCs here?
Did you know we can see light polarization?
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/googles-waymo-reduces-lidar-...
So $200,000 is probably not correct.
They are trying to imitate a fraction of what humans can do. And the state of the art ML research still does not account for issues like whether a photo of a person on a truck is real or not.
You really need LiDAR for accurate bounding box detection.
Strobe’s solution will reduce the cost of making these sensors by 99 percent, Vogt says. “The idea that lidar is too costly or exotic to use in a commercial product is now a thing of the past.”
When the ml stack is capable of leveraging purely camera sensors, Cruise and others like them, own the fleet and can swap out the hardware. Tesla does not "own" the fleet per se. So perhaps its different bets on which cars will still be on the road when the ML threshold is crossed.
If, not when.
Even the most cutting edge research today still pales in comparison to LiDAR.
Not who you're replying to and not saying you're wrong, but how do we know this?
That's all the person is saying. Simple animals can use only vision to do what we're using lidar and radar to do. But neither camera, lidar nor radar or any combination of them guarantees that you'll be able to make a computer drive a car in all situations.
For me, intuitively, the problem of reconstructing a distance field from cameras must be way harder than say, trying to predict what a person on a bike will do next, or detect road lines on the road in heavy rain or snow. So it seems very likely that an "AI" capable of driving a car in all situations would be powerful to not need lidar or radar (though I don't see the point of dropping radar, as it gives you some ability to "see" around objects which can make cars better than humans)
Because they already have the data advantage for ML.
Ah so Karpathy will be fired this year. Because they're not reaching L4. FSD isn't even L3 yet.
-- Elon Musk
He set the milestone.
------
Level 4 _ High Automation
System capability: The car can operate without human input or oversight but only under select conditions defined by factors such as road type or geographic area. • Driver involvement: In a shared car restricted to a defined area, there may not be any. But in a privately owned Level 4 car, the driver might manage all driving duties on surface streets then become a passenger as the car enters a highway.
Example: Google’s now-defunct Firefly pod-car prototype, which had neither pedals nor a steering wheel and was restricted to a top speed of 25 mph.
But Tesla within a year with no lidar? Yeah, no. Not happening.
You're right, though, that the challenge is that it also makes it easier for everyone to opt for cars over mass transit.
This is the kind of setup I can't wrap my head around. The car might "require" you to take over when you exit the highway, but it can't exactly "make" you. If you fall asleep on the freeway and the car isn't willing/able to drive at the end of your journey, or in edge cases if you were to pass out, etc. what does it do when it gets to your designated exit, or to the final exit of a designated highway? Are there going to be a bunch of cars all stacked up with flashers on the shoulder by every off-ramp waiting for their people to wake up / quit playing on their phones and engage manual mode?
As you say, city driving is hard, but there are a lot of trucks that cross the US on freeways that are easy to automate.
They can't add them now to new vehicles because they promised the vehicles back then are only a software update away from full autonomy [1]. Building on Lidar now would mean developing on 2 heavily differentiating stacks. Going back on the promise of old Tesla's being "FSD capable" would introduce a huge liability.
Long story short, Tesla's stance on Lidar determined 8 years ago, without the option to revise the decision with future developments.
[1] Note this has turned into "we'll only have to replace the computer in the car", which is still doable, contrary to adding sensors to the existing vehicle.
Sells for 12k USD here, for instance: https://www.tesla.com/modely/design#overview
Please ignore the fact that this is the 7th (or more?) year in a row he has said this.
Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win.
In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensing lands in these vehicles and our service area will be large enough that you forget there is even a geofence. If OEMs have still not managed to get the necessary performance gains to go fully driverless, we'll know what move was the right one.
We shared several details on how our system works and our future plans here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkK2JX1iHuzz7W8z3roCZ...
This improved resolution don’t necessarily help an AI grok the situation in real time with >20 Hz response time though.
If you have pre-sold a 'self driving' capability which you have guaranteed to be backwards compatible on cars you have already sold, then you are effectively cutting out Lidar as an option unless you are going to go back to all those cars and screw it on.
And considering that self-driving isn't solved yet, it seems like a bold move to define both your processing power and your sensing hardware in a way which makes it very difficult to (commercially) change.
Visual algorithms run into the same problem as human brains, and the size of e.g. rain drops interferes with the frequencies employed by radio techniques.
Is anyone aware of any strategies that give us hope in solving this problem?
I suspect there are operating conditions the AVs won't solve acceptably - some of those conditions IMO are also conditions where we should not accept a human to solve acceptably. In general I feel we have a lackadaisical culture around driving that encourages/excuses unsafe behavior, and is overoptimistic about people's ability to drive well.
obviously you try to avoid driving in these conditions when possible, but sometimes a moderate storm is much more intense than forecast and you get caught out. pulling off to the side of a snowy mountain pass doesn't guarantee your survival either.
I don't think vision-based FSV will ever reliably handle winter conditions like this. The engineering and QA effort just isn't worth the cost-benefit when you factor in the very small amount of drivers who are consistently exposed to conditions like that. My father, who spent his career commuting to the city on that highway, was disappointed when I explained this to him.
It does seem like "something else" is needed for these kinds of low-visibility scenarios -- frankly, when nobody should be on the road.
Then a person knocked on a window through the brown wall. It was someone we were to meet at the destination. He greeted us, and told us to come out. We tried to explain we can't just walk all perhaps a quarter mile to the place in this heavy rain, leaving the car left at a roadside. He insisted it'll be a short walk, and gave us no choice. Only when we stepped out, we realized that the car is right in the middle of the premise we were looking for, just couple feet from the main door.
This memory surfaces to my mind in the context of human drivers and inclement weathers; I'm still one piece, but maybe that has more to do with my luck, not necessarily due to myself playing every games extra safe.
"Oops it's pouring, can't get a Cruise, gotta fall back to an Uber" doesn't sound that terrible to me, for now.
Cruise could even offer a product that compensates/insures you for that eventuality, if for example Cruise was your primary vehicle.
Looking forward to ride from my home there!
Things like promising "full self driving" for 6+ years now and charging people $12500 for it leave a really bad taste in my mouth and I find it difficult to square with my overall very positive impression of spacex.
- Merlin engine
- Vertical landing
- Raptor engine
... or, what exactly is the "much of what's been accomplished" that you talk about? Look, I'm not trying to minimize her role, she was clearly a great COO for SpaceX, but it seems weird to me that you try to minimize Musk's importance while at the same time picking one other singular person to highlight. I could understand the argument that "it's a team effort, no one person did this alone"; but if we're picking only one person to assign credits, then surely, _surely_ Musk is that one person, right? I understand the skepticism that he really does engineering & design, so here is supporting evidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Why not?
What mystical gift does this one person have that 7 billion other people don't, that permits him and only him to run the company? This is a really unpopular opinion on a web site that exalts founders, but I don't think it really takes much special skill to run a company. Most (but admittedly not all) CEOs are in their position not because of their know-how, but because 1. They founded the company, and happened to be the one that flipped a coin heads 20 times in a row; or 2. They were born into that Ivy League class that closely gatekeeps CxO and SVP positions for themselves; or 3. Were descendants of one of the above.
Assuming a successful CEO is uniquely skilled is like assuming a lottery winner is uniquely skilled at winning the lottery.
I think many people, if given Elon’s financial war chest and basic knowledge of and an interest in rocketry, could have made SpaceX.
Maybe it's just a selection effect, but maybe they played their cards wisely and maybe some of the key choices can be attributed to the founder of the company that set the vision and picked the team carefully.
I'm personally not a fan of personality cults, but I don't think it's fair to swing too much on the other side. It doesn't strike me as plausible to think that Musk is just sitting on his ass and reaping the benefits of hard work of other people, and did that successfully with at least two companies.
From reading comments in other similar threads I seen the argument that Elon did not created Tesla, so maybe would be more honest to rephrase your "created" wording, I am wondering how many people know that Elon did not created Tesla so he is assigned the role just because of his big social media presence.
Do you really, really think that Musk is just a "big social media presence"? Why doesn't Trump or any of the Kardashians achieve similar feats?
1 if you know Elon did not created Tesla then why would you use the word "created" and not be precise, even if you don't like the truth about Tesla creation you can avoid spreading falsehood and having people correcting you and the others you misinform
2 if you were wrong and thought Tesla was created by Elon, then who is at fault, Elon, Elon fanboys, the Illuminati
> Why doesn't Trump or any of the Kardashians achieve similar feats? they probably don't care about cars and space, one dude in your list managed to accomplish a big thing, he got elected by a large number of people
There are people that accomplished big things and we don't know their names or faces because they are not media stars, think at people that saved lot of lives by inventing medical procedures, or the ones that promoted introduction of safety belts in cars, or the ones that proved some chemicals are dangerous and we stop using them. \ In comparison Elon bought got his hands on an existing car company and used public money and a lot of PR to increase it's value. The timing is not a coincidence, only at this moment the batteries and climate change allinged to make it possible and remember there were electic cars before Elon appeared on the scene.
It gets a bit more complicated however: Ian Wright was the third employee, joining a few months later. The three went looking for venture capital funding in January 2004 and connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million round of investment in February 2004 and became chairman of the board of directors. Musk then appointed Eberhard as the CEO. J.B. Straubel joined in May 2004 as the fifth employee. A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.
So I guess it depends on your definition of "created".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.#The_beg...
When Bob created his company X and later got some money from his dead uncle your "created" definition will assign the dead uncle the creator of X, I really want to see this definition, but don't segfault if you can't manage it.
Check out how Bezos's space company is doing.
Another example Cook (coming from Compaq) is perfectly able to run Apple. A lot of people could have thought about iPhones and Macs but Jobs deserves some credit to actually start the company with Wozniak and actually pushing it to deliver those products.
Repeat with any successful FAANG or company in general.
...not to forget the period between 1985 and 1997 when he was ousted, founded NeXT and Pixar, and then re-hired to save Apple, which was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Attrition rate among space startups is insane. A lot of exciting projects like Armadillo Aerospace (by John Carmack of DOOM fame) crashed and burned. The graveyard of defunct space companies is huge.
AFAIK Musk's involvement in Tesla was specifically to address climate change/ help move the industry towards electric cars. To the extent that this, plus improved battery tech, ends up reducing our oil dependency and eventually contributes to "solving climate change" - would you credit any of that back to him? Or just say that he didn't single-handedly solve climate change, so it doesn't count?
Have noticed this through my career as well. There is a whole class of people who go through life never actually doing anything. They just talk about people doing things. And get paid to talk about people doing things. And by the time people realize that they are just full of shit, they move on to the next place where they get paid to talk about people doing things. And they never actually did anything in the first place, so it's not like you can even say they were a bad worker.
I heard the figure was 1 in 30 but 1 in 20 is close enough.
Also Cruise wants to license to automakers, not make their own car, so they have to act like trustworthy partners in their PR. Elon has his own car company and instead is antagonistic and belittling to automakers because he thinks there's a competitive advantage to it. Any positive sentiment towards his competitors is potentially lost sales for Tesla. Capitalism encourages zero-sum thinking and rewards zero-sum strategies.
CEOs are marketers and salespeople primarily and as such know how to play different roles for different situations. They code switch just like everyone else. The role isn't for everyone in tech because a lot of tech people don't have the people, political, and acting skills for it.
tldr; capitalism doesn't work well with honesty, in fact it works best with dishonesty. You don't have a personal relationship with a CEO or company, you're just absorbing marketing delivered via executive personalities. Personalities are perfectly valid marketing tools in capitalism. Take that as you will.
As for Elon, he's currently doing a bad boy anti-government bit in an attempt to make Tesla "electric cars you can buy even if you're a Republican". Since we want those people buying EVs instead of coal rolling, that's a good thing.
NO.
Investors are supposed to be able to live with all the usual risks of technology, execution, marketplace dynamics, etc.
They are NOT supposed to be OK with deliberate fraud.
If you invest at Early_Round when the tech looks promising, but then it fails to develop, CEO truthfully tells everyone what failed, the plan to overcome the failures, and you invest in Later_Round, or don't, and it ultimately fails and you lose your investment, fine.
BUT, if you invested in Early_Round and then the tech fails to develop, but the CEO straight-up lies to you and says they are "light years ahead of everyone else", shows phony endorsements from major industry players, and more so that you invest again in Later_Round, and then lose your shirt - that's fraud, and all involved in the fraud should be prosecuted, convicted, and jailed.
Anything less will create an environment where blatant lying for 100s-of-$millions is okay, and that is doomed to systemically fail.
The specific comment that I was responding to seemed to say it should be okay to defraud Accredited Investors should be "able to live with that".
How many rounds did Draper participate in? If Draper stopped after the first round or two, then it "got some early money from SV but everything else came from outsiders."
Based on the reply to the question: What sets Cruise technology apart from others like Waymo, Tesla...In other words, how was this difficult technical problem, solved in a way others were unable to do so far... And whose reply you can hear here (video at the correct time):
https://youtu.be/ABto5nqWgc0?list=PLkK2JX1iHuzz7W8z3roCZEqML...
Thank you, but wont be volunteering to ride one of these.
If you've read Dan Sperling's Three Revolutions, any thoughts on what kind of [transportation future](https://www.planningreport.com/2018/03/21/dan-sperling-three...) you foresee Cruise contributing to building ?
So refreshing to see a leader in this field say “we are not sure which one will work out” rather than just hyping their stuff.
Can I get a test ride soon!
If feel like this tech could have a massive social impact if you sell it to local goverments so they could offer a highly efficient subsidized robotaxi service to their residents. It would democratize access to transportation and enable so many classes of underserved people to gain access to reliable transportation.
I don't think anyone inside or outside of the AV industry is expecting that there will be zero injuries or fatalities involving AVs. Why would that be the bar, when AV rides displace human drives that already injure and kill tens of thousands?
I ask this in the context of machines being governed by classical deterministic physics, so there is an argument that there is no such thing as an accident involving a self-driving car: only a design flaw.
This is a genuine question, as I can see that companies with self-driving systems that work, and who do serious fault analysis and rectification, might be in favour of 100% liability. 100% liability would stop cowboys from entering/surviving in the industry and sullying the reputation of self-driving. A company’s system would have to perform well enough that any residual risk of injury could be covered by an affordable insurance policy.
https://driveteslacanada.ca/software-updates/your-tesla-can-...
If all the tires wear evenly this detection won't help.
Remember that wheel slip depends on surface properties.
Longitudinal tire slip is caused by thrust in excess of the tire's grip, which is a function of slip speed among many other things. Grip peaks with a mild amount of slip, but slip isn't the norm outside of racing. Mild acceleration produces zero slip.
Lateral slip angle is a different story.
You also have the rolling radius depend on load (car mass) and tire pressure.
I don't say I know it is impossible, but it feels like there is way to much noise.
A typical 17" tire has a radius of 318 mm and 8 mm of tread. So a bald tire is 2.5% smaller than a new one.
The tricks you mentioned are already used for some aircraft inspections.
What the software needs to worry about would be other types of failures. Software is much more likely to detect issues before the driver. Say, brake performance is outside the expected range, or appears to be degrading too quickly.
For one thing electric cars are too quiet.
There should be a law that someone with a bell has to walk in front of the car to let people know it is coming
Not quite this, but you get the idea:
https://nypost.com/2021/05/20/motorcyclist-rider-survive-hor...
I couldn't find the clip of a motorcyclist patiently stopped at an intersection get taken out by an out of control left turner. Lots of fully legally stopped vehicles get hit.
There are corner cases and exceptions, but that has to be the rule.
Which should mean that as and SDC owner, you don't have to pay car insurance.
There's the rub... How do you seperate those from the rest?
1. AI/automation/tech bros undercutting the working class.
2. The mortal danger of self driving cars to pedestrians and the public- perhaps with an AI bias/racism zest.
3. The price, location-availability, or otherwise explicit exclusion of people that damage the cars or are otherwise unprofitable being harmful.
4. The proliferation of self driving cars reducing public transit use, thus reducing public transit investment, reducing transit access for poor, increasing pollution, and clogging roads.
5. Something something self driving taxis are subsidized by the government via public investment in roads.
All of these arguments are bullshit and I am not excited to hear people recite them to me in 5 years.
Full size EVs are still bad for air quality too because of tire dust.
[citation needed]
I only ever see Tesla fanbase making outrageous claims like this without any supporting evidence.
Elon Musk has been promising imminent L5 self driving every year for the past 7 years; that requires more than incremental improvement. The ones actually doing incremental improvements are companies like Cruise and Waymo, making it work one geography at a time.
Throwing data at the problem isn't going to solve it. Only people without expertise in AI think that's how it works.
historically, the pattern in tech is to succeed with strategy 2 -- that is, ride moore's law and achieve exceptional performance by combining commodities into super systems. google server farms are the canonical example.
obviously, this is only a pattern and not a law.
tesla's pathway represents strategy 1: start with super machines then drive costs down.
for non-SDC experts like me, could you share why it felt more compelling to start with super machines then drive costs down?
excited to see cruise help lead society into the future!
thanks again.
The roads and pedestrian crossings could be much clearly marked with RF transceivers, etc. and the inclement weather could be pre-considered. HOA agreement could have a "I agree to co-exist with autonomous cars" TOS clause and perhaps a built in monthly subscription.
I think a ton of home builders (Lennar, etc.) and senior community developers (Ventas) would be interested if only as a PR concept. I also think a lot of remote Techies/senior citizens would be interested [1]. Sort of like this but replace golf carts with autonomous cars.[2]
[1] https://news.voyage.auto/why-retirement-communities-are-perf...
[2] Tom Scott - City of Golf Carts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM
By using all (or almost all) available Active and Passive sensing technologies, fused with geofencing and operating at 'low-ish' speeds -- surely must be the fastest way to achieve 100% accident-proof self-driving vehicles that operate on ordinary city streets. Congratulations, Cruise. Keep up the Good Work.
The reason is simple: cost. The goal isn't to build a proof-of-concept safe AV, it's to build one that meets the safety bar _and_ is as cost-effective as possible, in a reasonable timeframe.
I happen to agree with the target-then-scale approach, but I also agree with Kyle that it's not a given that this is approach is definitely superior to the one that launches everywhere and tries to improve functionality.
For all Tesla's problems, the automation-via-cameras solution is the one I find myself having the least problems with: using a single, obvious input (to humans), you don't wind up in a situation where you can have multiple differently-capable systems disagreeing on what they're seeing.
I can only suggest you think harder about the 'all cameras' approach. Imagine say a snowstorm. Hail. Rain. Ice sheets. Sun in your 'eyes'. Cameras, basically, suck. Elon's game is to use suck-tech and make it un-suck with computons. Bad Choice.
That was Adam years ago in the Self-driving world. Now, it costs only few hundred dollars only, starting with $99.
Resolving that correctly takes time (in ms), adds complexity and will sometimes be incorrectly judged.
Since the visual data is the more accurate the vast majority of the time, it will anyways take precedence over the other input. As humans have proven that visual is technically enough, they decided it makes more sense to squeeze the most out of the visual, rather than collecting other data, crunching it, then (in most cases) discarding it.
I am not sure they are right, and am pretty sure that even if so - they need better cameras.
But misquoting them doesn't really help your argument.
Thank you for saying the honest, obvious answer. I am tired of people claiming to know what the implementation details of a technology that does not exist. As a nobody retail investor, I have long positions on autonomy (Tesla, Nvidia, GM/cruise, Google), not specific takes on it.
I'm fact, I think the radar/vision debate is not going to matter long term, as there can be multiple winners and the tech will likely converge.
If so, do you have a sense for how many orders of magnitude more bits of data your sensors are acquiring versus Tesla?
For now by using the cheapest technology he's arguably selling more EVs and/or making more profit per vehicle. If the market's competition requires a course change, then I don't see why he wouldn't take it - I don't think he'd fall pray to sunk cost fallacy; the reason for decisions may not be obvious to the public either, as we likely don't know details of his nuanced master plan.
And how the automative industry has functioned since its existence is risk-benefit-cost analysis, so if the cost of a future fallout is less than the short-term benefit then they tend to decide for the short-term benefit; most disgustingly in regards to known problems of vehicles, where only recalls happen if the potential harm/death rate and the cost of that is lower than the cost of replacing whatever needs to be replaced; I'd hope that practice has greatly improved, but who knows - most of our government agencies seem captured by industrial complexes.
Marketing is admissible in court as evidence of intended contract. Since marketing is generally easier to understand the legalese, if the court decides the marketing is misleading they will tend to punish you for that and accept the marketing as the shared understanding over whatever the letter of the contract is.
Note that I used a lot of wishey-washy words like tend... Each court case is different, and there is no real rule of what courts will do in any given situation. Consult a lawyer for legal advice about your specific situation.
Because at least one of y'all have to for this to work.
When at stop signs they will sit back and wait even thought it is their turn. At times they will slam on brakes causing rear end accidents because the car saw a bird or reacted to steam from the ground.
Please talk with your legal team about embellishments made in insurance claims against other drivers.
Some people I've talked to insist that an up to date map is "all that's needed" and that all such projects will need to be put in the system. Haha, a water main broke and they think people are going to update a database for them?
A traffic light is out and the police are DC directing traffic at an intersection. This will happen inside any given geo-fence eventually.
The list goes on... forever. Tell me how self driving cars don't need full AGI.
I suspect a lot of these could also be handled by that being a remote connection where a human is given the camera input and can indicate how the car should proceed (i.e. broken water main is a road obstruction that won't clear, and the obvious answer is a manual override to mark the road as unusable so the nav system reroutes).
Well that's not even a robo-taxi then.
Here's an example Vogt discusses a bit: https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8?t=202
...of course this brings up many other problems, like network connectivity and inter-city transport, which the companies have as far as I know not commented on. IMO the sensible solution is obviously to just require passengers be able to take over if given plenty of warning, but for whatever reason Cruise isn't doing this.
Why did your previous CEO Dan Ammann quit just before this launch?
> Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down.
There are broadly two ways to achieve your desired outcome of aggressively lower costs:
1. use money raised from VCs to subsidize the final cost of the product, or;
2. use money earned from customers as a natural consequence of growing demand for your product, in spite of strong competition from established OEMs, to fund your expansion.
Historically, the former has a lower likelihood of success relative to the latter and that’s because the former is really just a cash transfer from VCs to consumers. The latter is how Apple and Tesla have been able to grow into what they are today.
The reason the 2nd kind is so effective is that, when executed correctly, it often leads to a vicious cycle: your growth will lead to steadily increasing order volumes with your suppliers. This will in turn lead to sourcing for more suppliers to keep up with your growth. At a certain point, a supplier will feel confident that you are here for the long haul, causing them to take on more risk by pouring additional capital into their business to expand capacity. This will improve their ability to accommodate your current and future needs quickly, cheaply or both.
In other words, reality is multidimensional. It is rare for an individual company to aggressively drive down the costs of its product single-handedly, unless that company is ready to assume an enormous amount of risk currently being borne by its ecosystem of partners and suppliers.
Maybe I'm just salty my 2021 Model Y had lidar stripped out of it, and to me the more tech toys the better. Not that it matters because Tesla FSD is a scam and I wouldn't use it even if it came for free with the car.
In short, Elon made a high risk bet that vision-only would be enough and so far has been proven horribly wrong. But I've got to say, it was brilliantly executed because it gave Tesla mindshare as a tech company, drove sales and contributed massively to their insane valuation.
Autopilot and now FSD on Teslas doesn't have depth checking beyond visual/cameras. They removed the RADAR/sonar and have zero physical world depth checking currently. Tesla recently instead of adding LiDAR, they [just removed RADAR to rely on computer vision alone even more](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/25/tesla-ditching-radar-for-aut...).
Self-driving cars need cameras and physical depth checking sensors like LiDAR, or at least RADAR. Telsa has only cameras and some sensors but not for depth anymore, that is insane.
Humans have essentially LiDAR like quick depth testing. Humans have hearing for RADAR like input. For autonomous units, depth may be actually MORE important than vision in many scenarios. Humans have inherent depth checking with 3D space, movement, sound, lighting, feel, atmosphere, air, pressure, situational awareness, etc that computer vision converted to 2D flat images for depth checking will never be able to replicate.
A human can glance at a scene and know how far things are not just by vision but by how that vision changes with these distance inputs. Humans are able to detect 3D/2D imagery easily where it is all based on 2D with a camera. LiDAR is faster than humans at depth checking in the actual physical world not just from an image flattened.
With just cameras, no LiDAR OR RADAR, depth can be fooled.
Like this: [TESLA KEEPS “SLAMMING ON THE BRAKES” WHEN IT SEES STOP SIGN ON BILLBOARD](https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-slamming-brakes-sees-sto...)
Or like this: There is the [yellow light, Tesla thinking a Moon is a yellow light because Telsas have zero depth checking equipment now that they removed RADAR and refuse to integrate LiDAR](https://interestingengineering.com/moon-tricks-teslas-full-s...).
LIDAR or humans have instant depth processing and can easily tell the sign is far away, cameras alone cannot.
LiDAR and humans can sense changes in motion, cameras cannot and even RADAR struggles with dimension (frame to frame changes).
LiDAR is better than humans on changes in motion, depth, seeing all around always, and much faster at all those things.
[LiDAR vs. RADAR](https://www.fierceelectronics.com/components/lidar-vs-radar)
> Most autonomous vehicle manufacturers including Google, Uber, and Toyota rely heavily on the LiDAR systems to navigate the vehicle. The LiDAR sensors are often used to generate detailed maps of the immediate surroundings such as pedestrians, speed breakers, dividers, and other vehicles. Its ability to create a three-dimensional image is one of the reasons why most automakers are keenly interested in developing this technology with the sole exception of the famous automaker Tesla. Tesla's self-driving cars rely on RADAR technology as the primary sensor.
> High-end LiDAR sensors can identify the details of a few centimeters at more than 100 meters. For example, Waymo's LiDAR system not only detects pedestrians but it can also tell which direction they’re facing. Thus, the autonomous vehicle can accurately predict where the pedestrian will walk. The high-level of accuracy also allows it to see details such as a cyclist waving to let you pass, two football fields away while driving at full speed with incredible accuracy. Waymo has also managed to cut the price of LiDAR sensors by almost 90% in the recent years. A single unit with a price tag of $75,000 a few years ago will now cost just $7,500, making this technology affordable.
> However, this technology also comes with a few distinct disadvantages. The LiDAR system can readily detect objects located in the range of 30 meters to 200 meters. But, when it comes to identifying objects in the vicinity, the system is a big letdown. It works well in all light conditions, but the performance starts to dwindle in the snow, fog, rain, and dusty weather conditions. It also provides a poor optical recognition. That’s why, self-driving car manufacturers such as Google often use LIDAR along with secondary sensors such as cameras and ultrasonic sensors.
> The RADAR system, on the other hand, is relatively less expensive. Cost is one of the reasons why Tesla has chosen this technology over LiDAR. It also works equally well in all weather conditions such as fog, rain, and snow, and dust. However, it is less angularly accurate than LiDAR as it loses the sight of the target vehicle on curves. It may get confused if multiple objects are placed very close to each other. For example, it may consider two small cars in the vicinity as one large vehicle and send wrong proximity signal. Unlike the LiDAR system, RADAR can determine relative traffic speed or the velocity of a moving object accurately using the Doppler frequency shift.
> Though Tesla has been heavily criticized for using RADAR as the primary sensor, it has managed to improve the processing capabilities of its primary sensor allowing it to see through heavy rain, fog, dust, and even a car in front of it. However, besides the primary RADAR sensor, the new Tesla vehicles will also have 8 cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and the new onboard computing system. In other words, both technologies work best when used in combination with cameras and ultrasonic sensors.
LiDAR and depth detection will be needed, no matter how good the pure computer vision solutions get.
The accidents with Teslas were the Autopilot running into large trucks with white trailers that blended with the sky so it just rammed into it thinking it was all sky. LiDAR would have been able to tell distance and dimension which would have solved those issues.
[Even the most recent crash where the Tesla hit an overturned truck would have been not a problem with LiDAR](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-16/tesla-dr...). If you ask me sonar, radar and cameras are not enough, just cameras is dangerous.
Eventually I think either Tesla will have to have all these or regulations will require LiDAR in addition to other tools like sonar/radar if desired and cameras/sensors of all current types and more. LiDAR when it is cheaper will get more points almost like Kinect and each iteration of that will be safer and more like how humans see. The point cloud tools on iPhone Pro/Max are a good example of how nice it is.
Human distance detection is closer to LiDAR than RADAR. We can easily tell when something is far in the distance and to worry or not about it. We can easily detect the sky from a diesel trailer even when they are the same colors. That is the problem with RADAR only, it can be confused by those things due to detail and dimension especially on turns like the stop sign one is. We don't shoot out RADAR or lasers to check distance but we innately understand distance with just a glance not just from vision alone though.
Humans can be tricked by distance but as we move the dimension and distance becomes more clear, that is exactly LiDARs best feature and RADARs/CV trouble spot, it isn't as good on turning or moving distance detection. LiDAR was built for that, that is why point clouds are easy to make with it as you move around. LiDAR and humans learn more as they move around or look around. RADAR can actually be a bit confused by that. LiDAR also has more resolution far away, it can see more detail far beyond human vision.
I think in the end on self-driving cars we'll see BOTH LiDAR and RADAR but at least LiDAR in addition to computer vision, they both have pros and cons but LiDAR is by far better at quick distance checks for items further out. This stop sign would be no issue for LiDAR. It really just became economical in terms of using it so it will come down in price and I predict eventually Tesla will also have to use LiDAR in addition.
[Here's an example of where RADAR/cameras were jumpy and caused an accident around the Tesla](https://youtu.be/BnbJvUwbewc?t=262), it safely avoids it but causes traffic around to react and results in an accident. The Tesla changed lanes and then hit the brakes, the car behind was expecting it to keep going, then crash.... dangerous. With LiDAR this would not have been as blocky detection, it would be more precise and not such a dramatic slow down.
Until Tesla has LiDAR it will continue to be confused with things like this: [TESLA AUTOPILOT MISTAKES MOON FOR YELLOW TRAFFIC LIGHT](https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-autopilot-mistakes-moon-...) and this: [WATCH TESLA’S FULL SELF-DRIVING MODE STEER TOWARD ONCOMING HIGHWAY TRAFFIC](https://futurism.com/the-byte/watch-tesla-self-driving-steer...). [They are gonna want to fix FSD wanting to drive toward moving trains](https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1487080178010542085).
In the end I bet future self-driving, when it is level 6, will have computer vision, LiDAR, RADAR and potentially more (data/maps/etc) to help navigate. [Tesla FSD has been adding more of data/maps in which is basically what they said they didn't need to do](https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1488428565347528707), so LiDAR will have to come along eventually. Proof of them [using maps data](https://twitter.com/IdiocracySpace/status/148843350997893939...) and possibly previous driver data.
LiDAR is extremely fast and accurate up to multiple football fields even determining which way a pedestrian is facing, with high fidelity. That is much better than a camera or computer vision. LiDAR can get many reads in the time you could do one complete CV pass.
The best process is to do depth checks across the viewable area, then overly the results of the computer vision tick, then again check the differences and when it comes to depth, go with the LiDAR feedback as video can be wrong/tricked. This is probably how the cars that use LiDAR are doing it (Waymo/Cruise/etc), the equipment is also on the roof for better vision/coverage.
Tesla is going to be massively behind when the regulations come down that self driving needs depth checks beyond CV. You can still base lots of the process on CV. However doing depth solely in CV can be tricked and uses massive amounts of processing power which ends up with faster usage of power. CV will always be limited in distance, dimension and depth to LiDAR and physical world detection/sensors.
To think a Tesla can drive you without intervention or watching it closely, there will eventually be a distance confusion and it won't go well. The name Autopilot was better as it inferred like a plane where you still have to watch it, though planes are much further apart. The name Full Self Driving should be changed immediately even in beta, it is going to be ripe for lawsuits and problems.
Tesla is trying to brute force self-driving and it will have some scary edge cases, always.
So in theory if Tesla had cameras instead of eyes, and those cameras were positioned were the driver's eyes would be positioned, and its computer systems were a human brain, and those cameras has the dynamic range, resolution, auto-focus abilities of the human eyes (or better), then the car could drive just like a human. The problem isn't really that humans have direct depth sensing and the car doesn't, the problem is the vision system of the car is inferior in many ways to the human's vision system, and the brain of the car is far inferior to the human brain.
Better sensing can (maybe) make up for that. If a car can sense all objects on the scene that it may collide with accuracy and far enough in advance then avoiding accidents becomes collision avoidance rather than general intelligence. In ambiguous situations just don't crash into anything and don't go too close to other moving objects. The car might not obey traffic rules perfectly but it probably wouldn't crash ;) If the car occasionally goes through a red light, or doesn't stop in a stop sign, but does so safely (for itself and the surrounding traffic) then it's not a big deal. If the car relies on recognizing a stop sign even if it's behind a tree or partially obscured and failure to recognize the sign leads to a side collision with other traffic or running over pedestrians that's a little bit of a bigger deal.
LiDAR is a physical world depth checking system. It will always beat simulated depth checking. It also does dimension and movement better than computer vision. LiDAR is a 360 degree depth check.
Essentially Tesla is trying to do a LiDAR like point cloud from camera inputs only. That may work in many cases, it will be beat by LiDAR in all cases due to the difference of virtual vs physical data.
> The justification for dropping radar does make sense, says Weinberger, and he adds that the gap between lidar and cameras has narrowed in recent years. Lidar’s big selling point is incredibly accurate depth sensing achieved by bouncing lasers off objects—but vision-based systems can also estimate depth, and their capabilities have improved significantly.
> Weinberger and colleagues made a breakthrough in 2019 by converting camera-based depth estimations into the same kind of 3D point clouds used by lidar, significantly improving accuracy. Karpathy revealed that the company was using such a “pseudo-lidar” technique at the Scaled Machine Learning Conference last year.
> How you estimate depth is important though. One approach compares images from two cameras spaced sufficiently far apart to triangulate the distance to objects. The other is to train AI on huge numbers of images until it learns to pick up depth cues. Weinberger says this is probably the approach Tesla uses because its front facing cameras are too close together for the first technique.
> The benefit of triangulation-based techniques is that measurements are based in physics, much like lidar, says Leaf Jiang, CEO of start-up NODAR, which develops camera-based 3D vision technology based on this approach. Inferring distance is inherently more vulnerable to mistakes in ambiguous situations, he says, for instance, distinguishing an adult at 50 meters from a child at 25 meters. “It tries to figure out distance based on perspective cues or shading cues, or whatnot, and that’s not always reliable,” he says.
> How you sense depth is only part of the problem, though. State-of-the-art machine learning simply recognizes patterns, which means it struggles with novel situations. Unlike a human driver, if it hasn’t encountered a scenario before it has no ability to reason about what to do. “Any AI system has no understanding of what's actually going on,” says Weinberger.
> The logic behind collecting ever more data is that you will capture more of the rare scenarios that could flummox your AI, but there’s a fundamental limit to this approach. “Eventually you have unique cases. And unique cases you can’t train for,” says Weinberger. “The benefits of adding more and more data are diminishing at some point.”
> This is the so-called “long tail problem,” says Marc Pollefeys, a professor at ETH Zurich who has worked on camera-based self-driving, and it presents a major hurdle for going from the kind of driver assistance systems already common in modern cars to truly autonomous vehicles. The underlying technology is similar, he says. But while an automatic braking system designed to augment a driver’s reactions can afford to miss the occasional pedestrian, the margin for error when in complete control of the car is fractions of a percent.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tesla-places-big-bet-vision-only-s...
Hotz is the founder of comma.ai which is doing open source (I think?) Company.
This IEEE item seems to summarize the situation well.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tesla-places-big-bet-vision-only-s...
If you have radar and lidar and vision, then you have at least three different specialist machine learning models running, and then another model running that takes their outputs and decides what the car is going to do. You may have even more than that, some doing specific tasks like localization.
Neural nets and vision only is a more difficult but in the long run straightforward solution. The example he brought up was alphazero vs some other chess engine that has a rook engine, and a knight engine, etc.
Basically he's backing the end to end neural network back approach over some kind of multi-sensor fusion.
So the claim is there is absolutely no scenario where the other systems can contribute which seems to be false. E.g. Tesla's cameras are blinded pointing straight on into the sun, the car even tells you the cameras are blinded. If the cameras are splashed with mud they'll also see nothing. Tesla's radar was able to see "through" some obstacles which the vision system can not (and you can see that in the traffic visualizations).
Now how far do you want to fuse, do you just want to overlap the unique sensing abilities of each of those systems? How do you handle conflict when you're in the regions where all systems sense "equally" well. Sure, there's questions. But clearly having more data can't make things worse.
Elon's argument that that's the way to go because that's how humans drive is just ridiculous. And I say this as a proud Model 3 owner (great car, will never ever be autonomous, I don't care). It doesn't pass the sniff test.
Doing it with vision only saves on cost, latency & energy consumption.
It's not just about paying more dollars, but also range.
You're assuming that a dual system will be safer, but what if such systems are more prone to perception confusion, or other anomalies?
Even if a dual system were safer, it doesn't make sense to say that you will pay for safety absolutely. For example, you can always add an additional smoke alarm to your house for some marginal improvement in safety, but at some point most people decide they are safe enough.
No. The claim was that pouring resources into those other systems is better spent improving the vision system, within the context that Tesla and Comma.ai is operating.
> But clearly having more data can't make things worse.
There are several examples of cars hitting stuff because one part of the sensor suite thought there was a problem, or that there wasn't a problem.
In general, the more complex you make a system, the more complex the failure modes get.
If your car is 'driver assistance' then you don't have liability for accidents. If your car is 'self driving' then now you're going to get sued every accident.
So instead you're always 'driver assistance' just from the risk analysis perspective.
1. What is necessary vs sufficient.
2. Processing power.
3. Power consumption.
4. Hardware cost. (even if may have decreased now, the cost of initiating the programme years ago)
5. Training cost / volume of data.
The approach that Tesla is using balances all these things. I can't fully explain why it's so controversial, but I suspect this topic attracts folks from autonomous startups who are using very different approaches, people who repeat what they've heard elsewhere, and the usual anti-Tesla folk.
If you want to know whether Tesla's approach can work, first realise that the sensor suites only help with the 'perception' part of the autonomy problem. Then watch some of the Tesla FSD videos on YouTube and check whether the visualisation seems accurate or not. It's certainly not 100% perfect yet, but it's clear to me that the perception part of the problem is mostly solved. The biggest remaining problems seem behavioural.
Tesla's approach is a textbook case of premature optimization.
Despite Elon's commentary, the reason Tesla does not use lidar is sensor cost (waymo/cruise cars probably have 250k+ worth of sensors on them), and reason Tesla does not use radar is supply chain.
Tesla put constrain on themselves, because they wanted to sell product years before they existed, and they were super cheap on HW, to optimize their costs.
They optimized their solution, before they even had a slightest idea what's needed to make it work.
all that said, I'm still pessimistic about tesla's chances at making camera-only L4 work in any short time horizon. we will see if they pull it off, but it's such a severe disadvantage compared to fully-kitted competitors.
They are also ahead of every other auto maker in commercially purchasable L2 autopilot.
With that context, it doesn't make sense to add $50k+ to the price of their cars (e.g. doubling the cost of a Model Y) just to get slightly better autopilot performance. Lidar would help them in some cases (e.g. stationary objects), but it's not a panacea. Their strategy makes perfect sense given they want to sell semi-affordable cars to the public.
On the flipside, Cruise & Waymo's strategy of "geofenced L4 at any initial cost" makes perfect sense for their short term robotaxi ambitions.
Maybe in ~10 years these strategies will intersect, but for the time being they are completely different products.
Numbers came out a few days ago showing that Teslas had some of the highest margins in the mainstream auto segment.
I am afraid that the robotaxi timeline was pulled in so that the rest of the believers inside Cruise can get supporting data to prove it’s a viable model and to make it harder for Mary to change its course. This may come at the expense of safety.
Safety is the most critical value that our company has, and we live it every day in all of our processes / culture. I won't comment on the executive changes, but I can guarantee that this company (unlike some rivals...) would never compromise safety in any decision.
I have never witnessed a self driving car exhibiting aggressive behavior towards cyclists or pedestrians. I have witnessed many humans driving cars exhibiting aggressive behavior.
Though it probably depends on your definition of 'narrow'. I'm guessing a lot of Americans think the average SF street is narrow, and it would be a medium or even wide street in some other countries.
That said, I'm probably not signing up for this.
Yeah Cruise definitely seems to be moving with safety in mind. Props to the team for this milestone!
https://www.engadget.com/cruise-ceo-to-step-down-as-gm-accel...
"GM’s Barra Dismissed Cruise CEO Ammann Over Mission, IPO Timing" https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/rk0v7h/gms_...
Isn't The Weakest Link about firing the worst performers?
So the game can resolve to two devious but not-so-bright people who've schemed their way to the final two, and then one of them gets lucky with the topics.
If you want to watch something where people are just ludicrously good at general knowledge try "Only Connect" (even the title of the show is a relatively lesser known reference) but note they don't win prizes - why would they, they enjoy quizzes, they're not here for the money anyway.
I guess time will tell. I only hope that the worst thing to happen would be lost money or ego and not lives.
I find it a bit hard to believe that people aren't more concerned about calling out what exact legal framework this operation is being allowed under. Having a car without a driver in it driving around seems like a massive risk for the drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists sharing the streets of San Francisco; they should be entitled to know why they are test cases for these car-driving programs.
The most I could find was that it seems to be this permit [1], and the link in it states:
> Cruise’s permit is available at www.cpuc.ca.gov/avcissued.
...which is a 404.
It also states:
> More information on the CPUC’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service Pilot Programs is available at www.cpuc.ca.gov/avcpilotinfo.
...which is also a 404.
This does not...inspire confidence, to say the least.
Given that official information about this seems to be a bit thin on the ground, I guess I'll ask the obvious question – if the cars hit and injure someone, is Cruise's CEO going to be held personally liable? The engineers who worked on the tech? The passengers in the car (who are the nearest thing to drivers)?
It's not like this is an unexpected scenario, we have preexisting example of this happening [2]. Or is the plan to sweep real-life consequences under the carpet with euphemisms like "stumble along the way"?
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[1] https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M387/K...
I'll stay out of SF until this ends in a huge lawsuit.
That was probably what made me feel like I was in SF more than anything else in SF. Seeing their cars drive by with the LIDR, cameras, and the person in the passenger seat staring at a MacBook Pro.
For folks who think about Cruise's achievement cynically (not directed at the commenter), please consider what your stance would have been back in the day in the following situations: 1) Cars being introduced to challenge horse carts in the late 1800s and early 1900s 2) Countries like India spending on a Space program while having a considerable population below poverty line, rise of SpaceX 3) The rise of the internet in the 90s with its trivial applications like radio, silly websites etc
If your answer is - oh of course I would cheer each of these, but view self driving cars cynically, good for you.
If you’re letting autonomous multi ton vehicles roam around a dense city, I would expect them to go over and above in playing by the book.
My second comment was targeted at naysayers and pessimists who find faults and issues everywhere. Yes gaps exist and that's how tech and society plays catch up, but let's not miss the forest for the trees here.
> The California DMV, the agency that regulates autonomous vehicle testing in the state, issued Cruise a permit in October that allows the company to test five autonomous vehicles without a driver behind the wheel on specified streets within San Francisco. Cruise has had a permit to test autonomous vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel since 2015.
I saw their cars a lot while I lived in San Francisco. But back then they had safety drivers and such.
Information about the permit can be found here https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
I can’t help but think this thread may be a marketing ploy. If this were the case, is it allowed on HN?
Edit: In addition, any negative/challenging/sceptical comment is quickly downvoted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22871601
As for negative/challenging/sceptical: that depends on the quality of the comment. Thoughtful critique is always welcome. Shallow dismissals and snark are not welcome—not that the target of the criticism always deserves better, but the community deserves better.
Out of curiosity, and regardless of this case, how do you deal with artificial manipulation of sentiment on HN?
Nudging the views of one of the most active developer communities in the world has value if you were an adversary. Do you see signs of this?
And if the campaign is sustained over a long period, with all comments/threads being within the guidelines, but heavily biased, how does one defend against it?
It would be naive to assume Reddit is the only platform that manipulates user sentiment. And despite the average user here being more capable of critical thinking, we are all still fallible. Can you speak to any of this?
As for the breaking of rules, dang has commented, and I’ll take responsibility for my actions.
You should just read them when you have a chance since they address the stuff you bring up simply and directly. Don't start meta-threads about votes. Don't accuse fellow users of shillage, brigading, astro-turfing, etc, without evidence. If you suspect abuse, email the mods. It's all in there, along with the rationale.
It's a marketing ploy only in the sense that they just launched public signups and wanted to let us know about it.
> All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now
Cruise is the first to do driverless (zero humans in the front seat) testing in SF. Waymo have been doing this for a couple years in Phoenix, but have not yet tested driverless in SF as far as I'm aware.
Economics will outcompete 50 self-driving cars going in the same direction for 30min when you could have one driverless-bus doing the same.
If this transition is smooth and fast, think what this will do to traveling time, car prices and property prices. How far can you travel without stops and no traffic jam?
I'm also gonna go out there and say what many are afraid to talk about openly. When I used to commute by public transit in SF the crowd frequently wasn't pleasant as a whole. There were a lot of very nice people going to work, but there also were a lot of folks who caused problems for others. People with mental illnesses, people who seemed to not have access to showers and folks who were just generally quite roudy. There were days were I wished that there was a separate compartment that's exactly identical but costs $0.5 more. I feel guilty that I wanted that, but I think that's just the reality of life in a country with such a unequal society. I think this is one of the reasons why public transit works better in countries with more wealth redistribution and a stronger social system.
smh
Smaller vehicles going more frequently with fewer stops and more routes would make public transit a lot nicer.
More realistic I think is finding the right size for vehicles somewhere in between the size of a car and a bus: A bus gets you somewhere at maximum efficiency while sacrificing accuracy (walking to and from bus stops) while a taxi gets you somewhere at maximum accuracy while sacrificing efficiency (roads full of single-passenger vehicles). Something like 6-10-passenger vans are probably the right middle ground to maximize both efficiency and accuracy.
(Highly recommended for anyone interested in self-driving cars!)
How much of the public plans rides in advance, for a limited service area, via the web? I want to hear when these services finally have the capability and capacity to match the experience of Uber and Lyft: get a ride when and wherever you need one.
I doubt that means what they hope we think it means. So your employees have been taking your carefully designed ride and now you've let a couple of non-employees ride the course. If it means more than that, especially allowing random rides with random passengers, I'd be very surprised.
The evidence is easily accessible - next time I suggest you just research a little bit first instead of going straight to speculating.
Edit: The Cruise CEO kvogt says it's geofenced. That's what I thought.
In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensing lands in these vehicles and our service area will be large enough that you forget there is even a geofence
As to the earlier question about intersections at steep streets, I would guess they just avoid the most difficult blocks. But they do also have superhuman vision, since they have lidar and cameras on the roof of the car (higher vantage point than a human).
I'm skeptical because San Francisco is probably the worst city in North America to do this. I could believe this in San Jose with it's wide flat boulevards and I'm suspicious it's not San Jose first. San Francisco is unique in that the city planners decided to ignore that they had mountains in the middle of their city and laid a grid plan over the mountains. Most other cities lay roads that gently circle around and up a mountain. Not San Francisco. You go a straight line up and then straight down at an extreme angle.
The only way this can work is if they've cherry picked the safest streets and geofenced the cars to those routes. That's not what most people imagine about robo taxis. Not glorified light rail without the rails.
Edit: two other concerns of mine 1) SF is a great place to kill a pedestrian with not completely proven driving technology, especially kids, because there are so many of them. And 2) These companies give very little consideration, if any, to the millions of people who drive for a living who might no longer have that means of supporting themselves.
Telsa's underpants plan appears to be (still?): [1] Base self driving software on affordable components that already exist in production models. [2] Get lots of high quality data from an existing fleet using this hardware [3] Climb the "levels of automation" ladder step-by-step, straight to consumer [4] Robotaxis, with Tesla owners lending their cars to Tesla's Uber (Tuber)?.
If/when version X of Tesla's self driving software "solves self driving" in the sense that it can use roads/infrastructure as-is and achieve superhuman safety... Tesla hit a massive jackpot. They'll already have millions of cars on the road. Producing millions of cars takes time, and a lot of capital. This amounts to few years' head start and is a big advantage.
Waymo's underpants plan is more of a traditional prototype/proof-of-concept/R&D lab thing. Google already poured >$20bn into Waymo without a start date for a business model. But... they have every advantage. Expensive sensors & hardware. No limits imposed by industrial engineering, manufacturing, marketing or cost concerns. Limited, hand picked routes areas of operation. Waymo is set up to smash performance milestones as quickly as possible.
Waymo, on paper, are better set up to achieve milestones... a working L5 vehicle. But, the road from this milestone to profitable revenue & scale is still pretty long. What if the hardware costs too much? Even if it doesn't cost too much, how long to start and scale production to Tesla levels?
George Hotz has his "Android to Tesla's Apple" underpants plan. No vehicle.
It seems to me Cruise (kvogt, the ceo has commented) is doing something similar to Waymo, strategically. There's a lot of interesting stuff to discuss. Personally, I'm interested in takes on how self driving "rolls out." Will the infrastructure (roads, signs, etc.) need to be adapted? How can this all play out?
BTW... kvogt. It would be great to hear you on Lex Fridman.
I'd give it up in a heartbeat if hiring a car was easier and more economical, but the reality is that for visiting family over weekends, renting would cost about the same as owning the car full time. The convenience of then having the car ready to go whenever you want it wins out.
I sincerely hope that self driving cars bring in the possibility of renting it for a couple of hours as it drives us to Kent to visit the in laws then drives itself back to London, or simply re-clusters itself into the local network ready to take us back on Sunday evening.
Of course it also depends on how much you drive. If you only drive a few times per month that is very different from driving hundreds of miles per day.
I've concluded that the majority of suburban dwellers will own their own car even where shared cars are possible to get. Because of the amount of driving they do a shared car won't save them much if anything, and by owning a car they can leave "stuff" in the trunk.
What I would like to see is companies and people working towrds eliminating as many vehciles from the road. It is untainable, if we want an habitable planet, to have have a dependency on cars.
This means we have to move back to a denser environment (for the US, think pre WW2 suburbs, vs the current car-dependent sprawl). Either that, or boil the planet. We don't have any other way right now – and as such, Tesla is working towards the idea of heating the planet. Musk is very amandmanet on that, with his constant efforts to destroy public transit with his other companies.
You could make the same argument for ditching email and calendar technology in favor of everyone having human secretaries typing inter-office memos. It's absurd now, yeah, but that's because we live with the benefits.
Cheaper on what time frame? Obviously the upfront R&D costs start out as more expensive, but the marginal cost goes toward 0 while human cost is flat/increases.
Also cheaper isn't the only axis, safety is a big reason to invest in not having humans drive.
The sooner we solve on-demand transportation at scale without requiring a human driver the sooner we can move away from this colossal degree of waste.
Instead you've created two economies, one with just you and one with all of them, and the other one's better because it has more people.
Buses are also inherently less efficient outside of peak operating hours. Why should we operate a fleet of million-dollar, high energy consumption buses looping practically empty late at night? A fleet of cars would far better suit the transportation demands for off-peak small scale transport. Cars as a service are also easy for a local government to subsidize so that lower income riders can access the benefits.
Also, Tokyo is the best city in the world, so yes. The rural areas are depopulating because nobody wants to live there more than a lack of work. There are suburbs for families too, but they're still transit-oriented.
(Not that Japan is against cars. They just don't do all their transportation with them.)
In terms of subsidization, we've had enough problems in the US from the US picking winners with the interstate highway system to the detriment of railway. They shouldn't subsidize anything and let the market handle things. There will be a small demand for robocabs but most will still want to own a car, if they want a car at all.
Limited capability folks benefit a lot from easy to access taxi service. It won't replace folks who want to own a car or need to (e.g. commuting when public transit isn't good enough).
Think of self-driving cars as likely to use their own version of "bus stops" but the route and flexibility would be greater than that of a standard bus
At first. They will optimize that later.
So I guess safety is a major plus based on that.
Honestly, we could all use a bit more of a break from each other, in my opinion.
And the robot won’t take offense.
It's not the robot that might take offense, it's the folks in the panopticon and their databases.
Ubers are sent directly to you, and everyone’s identity has been verified.
Compare that to flagging down a random taxi, where you have no idea who the person is before you get in the car.
Based on what? Certainly not RO
Covid transmission via surfaces is basically non-existent, as far as we can tell.
I’d use it daily if it were an appliance rather than an interaction. Right now I have a car.
I suspect and hope there will be some push back. Imagine a counterpoint in either a bug or malicious attack where innocent person is locked in and then driven into a lake or something.
I dont think autonomous cars should be able to lock people in. The car can report to police silently, that's fine.
No, it should not do even that. You are making an assumption here that police/government always have good intentions.
What society needs is kind of power balance: law enforcement being able to catch 98% of criminals is a noble goal, but pushing that number up to 100% is not possible in democratic society, it requires totalitarian control. That's why we need to make a choice here and oppose surveillance, event if it seems well intentioned.
Not risking kidnapping, sexual assault, etc.—or even just “this person won't shut up”—from the driver.
> Is it cheaper?
Eventually, though perhaps not initially.
No sarcasm. Why it's impossible to have public transit like every other country in the world but it's possible to pour tons of money on driverless cars development?
Also, we have bad combinations of when to make things public/private - the US actually has much more public services than many other countries (other places do have privatized mail, transit, etc) but then doesn't fund them. If this was Japan all the good stores would be in the train station and would fund the operations.
2) social anxiety / norms
3) experience tuning / consistency
People aren’t getting cheaper. Indeed, this pandemic is showing us just how fragile the labor market is and automation that was too expensive to consider before (like fry robots at caliburger) are now very reasonable upgrades. Uber was great when they cost $40 from the airport, but not $200 given the driver is now considered a full time employee with full benefits.
The benefits to the company who runs the service is, of course, huge.
Tesla's vehicles are in the consumers hands and have many many thousands of drivers using their system every day. Also the VERY first comment here mentions a misleading article "Tesla to recall vehicles". This is misleading since Tesla probably didn't recall even a single vehicle, they probably all got an over the air update within a couple days of the problem being spotted. When a problem comes up Tesla is quick to send out an update and the news loves to write misleading articles every damn time because bad news about Tesla sells, there are so many wrong articles out there it's insane.
So disappointing that even the people I assumed would be smarter (Hacker News), are falling for this shit. Also this debate of cameras vs lidar is so old and outdated because LIDAR IS NOT GOD DAMN MAGICAL it has it's problems too. Tesla has also dropped radar because they don't see it being beneficial enough.
In reality talking about lidar vs cameras is not too important especially in the long ron, how far the tech is underneath is the most important thing currently and over time the amount of compute power you have in each car will be the most important factor.
Congrats to them!
Are these actually self-driving or are they remote controlled by a person?
The former is incredibly dangerous, the latter is what Waymo is doing.
Separate thought:
> I’m still surprised I can even write those words — this moment really snuck up on me.
This seems to be poorly worded PR considering how much general worry there is over the safety of self-driving cars. If I were writing it, I would have phrased it along the lines of "I've been waiting months and months for this. We've been ready for months but we understandably had to triple-check all our compliance etc."
Some times I will see a fleet of Waymo cars in quick succession, going through seemingly the same route
Because no-one is arguing someone will be killed, only that "human drivers kill people too" or "machines will kill fewer, eventually".
Will it be the passenger? The coder for bad code? The person who assembled the hardware for improperly tested malfunctioning sensors? The person who made the malfunctioning sensors?
Who? Because someone is responsible. You can't just spread the blame around and the corporation just pays a fine and shrugs after someone's life is ended.
No "oops oh well, I'll do better next time, sorry you're dead but it's your fault for being there". 2+ ton machine, willful negligence.
There's even a connection log with handy timestamps proving the phone was in use.
It's extremely rare for a third-party fatality in an auto accident to be caused by something other than criminal negligence or intent.
There are plenty of similar precedents for this, and it's airline industry. Literally hundreds of planes have fallen out of sky and thousands of people perished due to design flaws, improper maintenance, be it using wrong parts, bad repairs, failing to inspect, etc.
Yet, individuals working at plane makers or mechanics rarely get jail time. Sure, companies are held responsible, can pay restitutions, but jail time is exceedingly rare.
“I want to bring my little son along on this ride, but obviously that’s not where we’re at today.”
edit: Fixed link
Lots of Cruise employees in this thread.
I had an extra slash in the link, I corrected it in the original and above.
I actually would love an automated version of this that goes at 200 or 300 miles an hour, the ultimate thrill ride. Have it run on something like the Autobahn. While it's impossible for a human being to drive at that speed, computers definitely could .
It would be like sky diving but on land
Maybe on roads in the Mojave Desert/South Dakota I90/etc?
I didn't get any sense he meant that he didn't trust the technology (otherwise he wouldn't be in it either).
It's much harder to believe that he didn't bring his son because of some weird insurance exclusion (presumably 1. they were insured for riders under 18 outside the vehicle and 2. he would have explicitly called out that it was a legal formality) than that this was extremely new technology which still had a reasonable chance of getting into a serious accident.
It is if you pay the right people enough money. Welcome to the future; where the mass dregs of humanity are now a liability to our elite cybernetic enhanced 1% overlords.
Wow thats a nice amount of funding? Is this going to be their last funding round before they IPO? Is there a VC who give more funding? Are employees gonna be rich or is this gonna be a wework scenario?
Also how is this legal?
I mean, we already have cars that can handle driving themselves in some contexts (e.g. Waymo in suburban Phoenix) but we're obviously nowhere close to AGI.
Plus you got, "handle themselves", versus, better than humans drivers.
You may be underestimating how hard that is.
1. Is this even legal? Is this a legal requirement or some alert text they come up with?
2. If the car stops quickly, it'll eventually result in accidents and possibly not for itself (but other drivers). Did they think this is not risky and safe enough to put it out on the street.
3. The video demos are all at night when there is little traffic. How does it respond at day when you have more traffic?
I, uh, don't know if I like a CEO who is surprised that he's being allowed to do the thing he is doing.