Cruise blames Outside Lands for driverless car traffic fiasco in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Cruise blames Outside Lands for driverless car traffic fiasco in San Francisco

sfchronicle.com

67 pointsmikhael67 comments

Looking over the incidents in the last few months, it's pretty clear that Waymo is significantly better than Cruise in tech - Cruise has a lot of things to fix and they clearly rushed it but have good PR team to sell it well and make it seem like Waymo and Cruise are in the same bucket.

If I were Waymo, I'd start doing the best I can to distance myself from Cruise - I think it's unfair for any city regulations that'll come after things like this to effect Waymo which is doing much better but is in the 'AV' category with Cruise.

Look at this hilarious video where a Cruise is stuck in the middle of the road and a Waymo passes by it, imo better than what other human drivers did: https://www.tiktok.com/@highwithlo/video/7266311787237362990 Listen to the audio; small things like this can significantly skew public opinion/belief.

Edit: More evidence - checkout Cruise twitter account reply history; most of the replies are Cruise justifying why they fucked up or hyping up their approvals and numbers. Look at Waymo's history, there is barely any mention of an incident (I'm making a fair assumption that both companies have a similar PR strategy of responding to popular tweets with incidents involving their vehicles).

Cruise: https://twitter.com/Cruise/with_replies Waymo: https://twitter.com/Waymo/with_replies

That is hilarious. The Waymo Jag did an excellent job.

Doesn’t mean it was autonomous, a lot of those Waymo vehicles still have drivers in them.

Some of Cruise and Waymo cars have drivers in them, but based on my personal experience and what I've been hearing from friends, they see a lot more Cruise with drivers than Waymos these days. Not sure if this particular car had a driver, but the comments on the video seem to say it didn't.

> [...] but the comments on the video seem to say it didn't.

The commentators on the video clearly don't know.

Thanks for sharing! :)

It seems to me that if waymo is ahead they’re having a hard time showing it - seems like their operational area is smaller and they have fewer cars in fewer regions.

I’m curious about the capabilities of all of the players myself but this information appears to be somewhat closely guarded - I don’t know anyone that’s gotten off of the Cruise or Waymo waitlist personally.

> their operational area is smaller and they have fewer cars in fewer regions

Waymo has consistently been more conservative. That’s partly what makes them better.

If the vehicles were actually autonomous they wouldn't need a network connection.

Mic drop

They're not completely autonomous, but a remote driver can take control if there's an issue. If the car doesn't have a connection so a safety driver can take over, it's probably safer to brick it before it gets into a situation where it needs a safety driver.

That is a reasonable design decision for a small fleet of test vehicles. It is not reasonable for a large fleet of production vehicles. Causing massive traffic disruptions is a safety hazard in itself, and these companies should not be allowed to scale up their fleet as large as they have until the rate of vehicle stalls is on par with normal car breakdown rates.

it seems like this incident was isolated to a single intersection in SF.

i don't think we need to make an assumption that cruise vehicles shut down when they lose cell connection. more likely is that there was a situation on this street outside a music festival that required remote intervention, and when the cars couldn't connect to get that assistance they stopped moving. and that would be a sane design decision even at scale.

I worked in the AV industry - not at Cruise but based on incidents like this and other things I’ve seen from riding in Cruise cars - they absolutely need a cell phone connection and will strand or pull over (or stop in the middle of the street) if there’s anything more than a very transient break in remote connectivity. Fundamental parts of the stack assume that if there’s any uncertainty in a situation, a remote operator will be available to clarify how the car should proceed. The car can’t make certain safety or operational guarantees without this.

Then it's not an autonomous vehicle if it needs a cell link and remote operattor. It should not stop dead in the middle of the street but follow the road code and get out of the way, like drivers with defective vehicles do.

But then that just circles back to the OP about how they're not really autonomous.

Or… train it to handle a diverse range of freshly developing environments and scenarios without having a leash with central control.

Instead of that, just build it so it doesn't need training and can autonomously build the next generation of itself.

“Just”? Is this sarcasm? Your point fell flat. Training is required one way or another.

It's kind of an interesting idea. I'd be willing to let someone else drive me around by remote controlling my car, as long as a blaring alarm goes off whenever the network connection goes down. Some small amount of ML could be used to ease the transition, which defaults to "safely pull over and stop." That way at worst I just go back to driving normally.

Probably a terrible idea for a few reasons, but it was neat realizing there's an alternative to fully autonomous driving. Also doubt it would be legalized, but it's neat to consider.

Sporadic lag would be a killer. Think of how often you had Zoom calls that would lag for a second or two. Now, imagine the remote driver had that lag.

So design it to augment, rather than replace, a conventional autonomous driving system. If the self-driving system is kept running full-time, it can take over instantly if there's a communications dropout. That way, the car only has to stop immediately if a problematic situation happens to coincide with signal loss.

Perfection is not an option in this business, so it's time to stop demanding it. If we can manage to kill something less than 30,000 people a year on the roads, the way humans currently do, we can call it a win.

> it can take over instantly if there's a communications dropout

The only way to detect a communication dropout in a packet network is with constant exchange of keep alive packets. The detection time should be within some safety margins for the maximum allowed speed of the vehicle and the computational overheads. I think we’re speaking at least 100 pps, which is unlikely to deliver on time using public Internet over the unreliable medium.

tl;dr - I think it’s not currently possible.

> They're not completely autonomous, but a remote driver can take control if there's an issue.

Waymo says they don't try to actually drive with a remote human driver, because lag. The control center can give hints, presumably along the lines of "turn around and take an alternate route", or "OK to go around obstacle", or "park and wait".

As they get more experience with these systems, they may be allowed a bit more autonomy after signal loss, enough to creep to a safe stopping position.

> it's probably safer to brick it before it gets into a situation where it needs a safety driver.

Bricking the device would be massive overkill. Surely they would just switch it off, or even just put it in a sleep mode.

That was my first thought as well. Why the heck do they need wireless connectivity at all times?

What happens if there's an emergency situation and the network happens to be down?

Cruise doesn't currently offer any payment for vulnerability disclosures [0] so I wouldn't be surprised if attacks involving this vector (think Stingrays) aren't going to be looked at now, if not already being exploited without the public hearing about it. A conspiracy theorist might note DEFCON happening this weekend and disruptions Cruise vehicles have experienced prior to this weekend as another potential explanation for these issues, rather than OSL-related congestion alone.

[0] https://getcruise.com/security/

So the exact kind of situation where you would want robotaxis, such as a music festival, is exactly the kind of situation they didn't plan for and didn't have a way to mitigate?

So what's going to happen when we get a big earthquake? It sounds like the streets could end up clogged with driverless cars confused by the debris and unable to communicate, blocking emergency vehicles.

I truly doubt driverless vehicle obstruction will matter in an event like that.

Uncontrolled lithium battery fires throughout the city from EVs on the other hand..

As someone who’s 2 days into this festival and have seen cruise and Waymo cars a lot this weekend.. I think it’s overblown. We took a regular person-driven Uber tonight from the festival and it took 30 minutes to just get out of the traffic jams created by all the road blockades and shear boards of people.

Cars are just not a good solution for moving that many people full stop. Add in self-driving cars and it’s even more of a cluster but what we really need is a metro stop there and more in the areas people stay during the festival.

Why not self-driving buses? That will be next.

The thing that’s great about metros is that you’re not stuck in traffic. Of course in SF it’s like a metro/tram hybrid which is okay but not great.

Yeah, I agree. I actually prefer trains

I live in SF and saw at least twenty driverless Cruise vehicles today while walking around the Mission. It's really quite sudden to see so many, really I've just noticed in the last week or so. My daughter asked me yesterday "are we in the future?!" Previously they all had someone behind the wheel.

Personally I don't understand the hate. There are a lot of frustrations in this city, but they really aren't one of them. They all seem to drive perfectly and predictably, by my observation. I understand that there will be issues like this, but none of them are realistically safety issues.

I look forward to a day where driverless taxis become cheap enough (due to lack of having to pay someone, and supply and demand) that more people can choose to be carless. I still need a car because I need to get my kid to school outside the city. But now that she doesn't need a booster seat, and now that Cruise vehicles seem ok with having a medium sized dog in them (kind of a problem previously if I want to take my dog across town to a park), I'm almost at the point I could get rid of my car and use public transportation as well as robotaxis when needed. So much space in the city is taken up by parked cars, and this should free up a lot.

At the very least I think having robotaxis will allow a lot of two car families to only have one car.

I understand the concerns about lost jobs but what do you want to do, bring back switchboard operators and elevator operators? If a machine can do the job, I just don't think that's a good use of a human.

> I look forward to a day where driverless taxis become cheap enough (due to lack of having to pay someone, and supply and demand)

Going by previous history, this is unlikely to happen. The companies seek profit and will simply pocket the margins instead of passing them on.

Then customers will choose their cheaper competitors.

You assume there will be competitors.

Why wouldn't there be?

Because there won't be and it's naive to think otherwise. The tech isn't open source, the hardware is expensive, and then there's the massive regulatory over head to get these into the road.

You'd be better off hoping for your personal car to be autonomous so it can come pick you up and that's assuming personal cars remain affordable enough.

> the tech isn't open source

Neither was automobile tech a hundred years ago yet somehow GM and Chrysler managed to put up a fight against Ford

> the hardware is expensive...and then there's the massive regulatory over head

Sure. It's expensive and not easy, and yet already a few companies are trying. Evidently they view the potential upside as worth it. Turns out, they don't have a monopoly on that view.

That's a really bad false equivalence.

It doesn't take a lot of effort to reverse engineer mechanical parts and by that time the early automobile patents long expired. It doesn't take a mechanical engineer much effort to recreate parts from patent documents. Also Ford didn't invent the automobile, Karl Benz did.

Now try and reverse engineer the black box algorithms necessary to make a self driving car. See the same efforts involved in reverse engineering other proprietary closed source products.

Now good luck getting the NHTSA to approve those to drive those on the road.

> It doesn't take a lot of effort to reverse engineer mechanical parts

Internal combustion engines are ridiculously complicated. Modern engines directly trace lineage to their manufacturers’ founding. Major engine differences continue to define the automotive field.

> It doesn't take a lot of effort to reverse engineer mechanical parts

Have you personally ever reverse-engineered an internal combustion engine or recreated parts from a patent document?

I don't have to assume there will be competitors because I know that there already are competitors.

So.... supply and demand doesn't work? Why is this field immune to normal market economics?

Waymo is already $5/ride, no tip, in Phoenix. That’s cheaper than an Uber and competitive with public transport.

"Already" betrays a misunderstanding of how this process works. Fares are likely to increase, not decrease.

Nobody can predict the future, not even you.

Some people like driving taxis/Lyfts.

> The California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday voted to lift all restrictions for Cruise and Waymo’s full commercialization in the city amid vocal opposition from city officials.

Why do the state's removal of restrictions override the city's? Surely if the city officials had objections they can just impose their own restrictions within city limits?

Idk how California law works for this particular area, but some states for certain types of things have state-level preemption, placing limits what local governments can restrict or apply. Though it's a lot more common for things like tax, it happens for a wide variety of subjects:

https://ballotpedia.org/Preemption_conflicts_between_state_a...

I wonder if something like that is happening here

The state is sovereign, the city is not. All authority the city has has been delegated by state laws. The state (wisely) does not want to delegate transportation regulation to thousands of municipalities.

That makes sense. I guess I would expect the state to be more conservative in its rulings than the city.

So they are vulnerable to simple WiFi jamming and interference? Unfortunate. Poor, poor Cruise. Poor stupid Cruise. I pity them. Thanks for disclosing it, though!

You'd think they could at least pull over to the side of the road if they lost their network connection.

My wife and I have been attending and we can honestly say it's the worst planned festival we've been to in a long time in terms of crowd flow, safety in that regard, and transportation in and out and to and from the festival. It's really a nightmare.

That being said, it's made for a couple of pretty magical nights walking through Golden gate park. It really is a magical place, SF, golden gate park. The weather here is amazing, this is August! It's just not the experience I think a lot of others are prepared for.

What a weird defense; Grant Ave/North Beach is nowhere near Outside Lands (in Golden Gate Park).

Yes, blame everything but yourself. Classic.

Paywalled.

SF should just start towing and crushing them

So a tech clown show is blaming a techbro-hipster clown show....got it.

Autonomous driving would be a solved problem today if we got all of those pesky people out of the way.

Navigating a dark dirt road in a snowstorm is a piece of cake compared to predicting a drunk pedestrian's walk into the street. This is why I don't have much hope for L5 in the near future.

Wait until you hear about what happens when it's the driver who is drunk and not the pedestrian.

Autonomous cars can be far from perfect and still safer than human drivers, who all consistently overestimate how safe they are.

Doesn't make any difference if they're sitting in the middle of the road with their hazards on, refusing to drive.

Statistically, autonomous cars sitting in the middle of the road with their hazards on are also safer than human drivers.

As long as there’s space for bikes and pedestrians to get past, it’s probably a net win.

In the TikTok posted in the thread I doubt that the risk of a crash in that situation is less than without the Cruise stopped in the middle of the road. So more dangerous, not less. How safe it is in another situation is irrelevant to any pedestrian risking getting hit there.

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