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Comment by pavon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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