Self-driving cars cause a traffic jam in Austin, Texas | Hacker News Reader

Self-driving cars cause a traffic jam in Austin, Texas

twitter.com

31 pointszolbrek18 comments

I took a ride in May in Austin. It was my first time in an driverless car. I took a bunch of notes and emailed Kyle Vogt my thoughts. In the past he's been quite generous with his thoughts on our pitch deck. Anyways, one of the points in my email was that there were several points along the route that seemed to be choke points for cruise. We tried to do the most scientific ride three slightly inebriated people could do. We rode all the way across Cruise's range and tried to experience as many different areas as possible. Generally it was better than I expected, but I still wouldn't feel comfortable putting my kids in yet.

> I took a bunch of notes and emailed Kyle Vogt my thoughts

Were they notes that he hadn't heard before from somebody else? If not, what's the benefit of telling him about them all again?

Customer feedback is useful. Understanding product issue frequency and severity is useful. Should they have emailed him to ask about what issues he was aware of before sending their feedback? Should they have asked you? :)

This is a feature. Put a cone down in front of one of these things and you’ve instantly pedestrianized the rest of the road. Easily a net positive.

Having been fortunate enough to ride in Cruise vehicles multiple times in the Austin area, my impression is that they behave better than the average Austin driver.

For trickier situations, though, there’s a lot to be said for having a human driver to make decisions, and with whom you can communicate.

There are plenty of tricky driving situations in Austin.

Doesn't surprise me. I've taken one downtown in Austin and it seemed like (at least at the time) that they had it programmed to route only through preordained areas. It avoided 6th st altogether (despite that being clearly the most direct route for my trip) and, weirdly enough, avoided a very basic roundabout (neighborhood sized one that replaces a 4way stop, not the giant 2 lane ones).

I've also seen them stopped in the middle of streets blocking a lane of traffic at night before. Not clogging the entire street like this, but definitely causing a good amount of traffic.

What happens when teenagers start throwing traffic cones in front of these things for fun.

We will finally be free from loud, dangerous, filthy, and deadly cars. I honestly can't understand why cities still allow them into downtown areas.

media should start covering all the instances of human driver’s mistakes causing crashes or traffic jams.

Specious and unnuanced take, which is probably why it's so common. We understand human error, and its ceiling. We have decades of observation of human driving across all real world scenarios. We still know very little about what self driving cars would do at scale when exposed to the full range of conditions.

> and its ceiling.

Very doubtful. I seriously doubt a single person on this site today knows there are ~20K accidents a day in the US let alone how many traffic jams are caused by human error.

I seriously doubt they're foolish enough to ignore the denominator and let the big number quoted out of context scare them out of something they've always felt safe with due to their lived experience.

I have seen many human drivers sort out the situation where they both wanted to turn down the same street. If they stopped and stared at each other for this long, it would probably make the local news or at least twitter. :)

The media is so pro-human and anti-robot. Yes many self driving vehicles may be stranding a large number of people and making an entire area impossible to traverse via the streets — but many people refuse to talk about the things these cars aren’t doing. I don’t see Cruise EVs making lewd and lascivious comments about women’s bodies or getting gym equipment all sweaty and not wiping up afterward. Yet I do not see any mainstream media coverage of this fact

> The media is so pro-human and anti-robot.

As it should be right since humans are the customer and robots should be serving them.

> I don’t see Cruise EVs making lewd and lascivious comments about women’s bodies or getting gym equipment all sweaty and not wiping up afterward.

What does this have to do with self driving vehicles?

In my opinion, anything that keeps money out of Silicon Valley investors and executives wallets while the edge cases are worked out is ok in my book. Move slow and keep everyone alive.

> What does this have to do with self driving vehicles?

Everything! The media only wants to talk about robots when things go wrong, but what about all of the theoretical accidents they’ve avoided or the fact that not a single person has caught COVID from a Cruise electric vehicle?

Well, robots aren’t humans are they? You won’t expect to catch COVID-19 from a leaf and a fish getting sweaty at a gym.

Exactly, I’m agreeing with wellthisisgreat’s salient point that every time we see (for example) driverless cars causing deadlock in a city we would best turn our attention to the flaws in humanity and the benefits that driverless cars bring us. For example, no Tesla has ever laughed at me for “putting too much corn in chili” !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com