Cruise driverless vehicles involved in 3 separate traffic incidents in SF

3 out of 30 is pretty pretty bad!

For more details, see this recent whisteleblower account of the situation: Cruise robotaxi service under review following anonymous letter (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/cruise-robotaxi-under-revi...)

I work directly with the employee who submitted the complaint. He is understating the problem.

The letter also states that Cruise ... intentionally hides from the majority of employees the results of investigations into collisions involving Cruise vehicles and other sensitive, potentially damaging matters.

Cruise has been covering up safety incidents since before the GM acquisition, including an early incident where an engineer suffered a concussion due to violent cabin motion caused by bad motion control code.

In a taxi or even perma-loss-leading Uber/Lyft, there is a labor component which disincentives between-ride transient driving. Whether they are paid employees costing company money, or independent contractors looking at hours worked vs take home pay..

In a high fixed cost, low operating cost driverless taxi this is not the case. Very easy to imagine fleets of these stupid things clogging the streets even worse than Uber ever did.

Note NYC traffic + TL&C stats already show Uber/Lyft have always had much lower utilization rate per hour/mile than yellow cabs, and thus require more cars on the road to serve the same passenger miles.

3 complete shutdowns blocking traffic in one city on the same day.

It's a shame SV took advantage of ZIRP to fund never-going-to-work software and perma-unprofitable businesses, subsidizing the urban upper class lifestyle.. but governments did not use the same cheap funding to build some trains.

No company should be running "experiments" like this on a public road with a 5000+ lb vehicle.

Hopefully there is consolidation & regulation in the space before we have too much testing in public gone wrong.

In my mind the entire self driving industry is trying to apply ML/AI practices from use cases that just require ~51%-ish "right more often than wrong" precision onto driving which needs 99.999+%.

If some of your phones images are mis-tagged as a cat instead of dog, or some of your cat photos are not tagged as a cat, it's not a huge issue..

In quant trading as long as your trade makes money 51+% of the time, you are going to accumulate returns in the long run.

Car license plate readers for speed tickets / tolls / etc have a similar "pretty close / pretty good" requirement.

I was up in Palo Alto during a light rainstorm, and we were on our lunch break. I was driving two coworkers in my 1988 Acura, one of whom was an absolute freak who drove his sports car super-aggressively.

I was at an intersection in the left turn lane, waiting for an opening. Traffic was fairly heavy and the roads were slick. I saw a possible opening and took it, but there was a car in oncoming traffic faster than I had anticipated. Having begun my maneuver, I counterintuitively held my foot to the accelerator, rather than stomping the brake, and my Integra obediently sped through the turn without incident.

Both of my coworkers commended my presence of mind and I was relieved that my driving skills were validated. Our company was involved in selling software components, and I have no idea what a "self-driving" car would've done in that situation, but as I had discovered, staying the course and stomping the gas pedal was counterintuitive in that place and time, but ultimately correct and safe.

Albuquerque NM has/had issues with older drivers (lots of retirees there and Santa Fe) who would refuse to use turn signals and would purposefully drive slow on the highways to slow the flow of traffic.

Police and highway patrol had to start issuing tickets and instituted minimum highway speeds.

Here in California, drivers all use their highbeams in the city. Police refuse to enforce it so it's become rampant.

Blinds me and sears my retinas thanks to my astigmatism. Like staring at the sun with those damned halogen lights.

When I was a young man with a new wife and child I applied with a local IT company to be a 'desktop expert' (they only knew business/IT solutions).

Part of the interview was driving around talking.

A person was pulling to a dog leg to turn, we were far from them and the other car had plenty of time/room to turn...since so were we. The owner- an older man, said 'I'm not going to signal because if I do, he will go first.'

Blew my mind someone could do that on purpose .

Moved back to California years later and it was endemic. People all over now do this and it infuriates me every time.

Or they see you waiting to turn and speed up until they see you give up on going, then slow to a crawl.

Contrast all of this with rural Texas and all of Washington where people wave, give right of way, always dim lights, move over for bikers, and are generally nicer, more respectful on the roads and in general.