California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
reuters.com
reuters.com
Today’s suspensions are based on the following:
13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation.
13 CCR §228.20 (b) (3) – The manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles.
13 CCR §227.42 (b) (5) – Any act or omission of the manufacturer or one of its agents, employees, contractors, or designees which the department finds makes the conduct of autonomous vehicle testing on public roads by the manufacturer an unreasonable risk to the public.
13 CCR §227.42 (c) – The department shall immediately suspend or revoke the Manufacturer’s Testing Permit or a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit – Driverless Vehicles if a manufacturer is engaging in a practice in such a manner that immediate suspension is required for the safety of persons on a public road.
Misrepresenting safety seems like a big deal.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-statement-o...
Edit: This Vice article [2] says Cruise tried to withhold pedestrian injury footage from the DMV.
> In the Order of Suspension, the California DMV said that the Cruise vehicle initially came to a hard stop and ran over the pedestrian. After coming to a complete stop, it then attempted to do a “pullover maneuver while the pedestrian was underneath the vehicle.” The car crawled along at 7 mph for about 20 feet, then came to a final stop. The pedestrian remained under the car the whole time.
> The day after the incident, DMV representatives met with Cruise to “discuss the incident.” During that meeting, Cruise only showed footage up to the first complete stop, according to the Order of Suspension. No one at Cruise told the officers or showed any footage of the subsequent pullover maneuver and dragging. The DMV only learned of that from “another government agency.” When DMV asked for footage of that part of the incident, Cruise provided it.
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspen...
They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far below the level of most Human drives.
They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways.
Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down.
From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably.
I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday.
I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic.
2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways.
This was a good day, FWIW.
Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either.
EDIT: This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)?
That seems like a comically bad baseline.
The bar for AI should be way higher than just "outperform mediocre humans".
Even 10% less grievous bodily harm would be a massive improvement.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...
Requiring cellphones to disable themselves in cars might be even more effective.
That means the net danger of traffic as a whole goes down.
Setting an unreasonably high bar - like "drive with perfect record" - will simply prevent that happening, and we're stuck with humans. Perfection is a north star, not an attainable goal. As long as we get net positive, the world is a tiny bit better. And then you make it a tiny bit better again. And again.
Why do you think the bar for AI should be higher than "better than what we have"?
Right now, any incident involving a autonomous car is going to immediately be blamed on the autonomous car and not any other party, even if the fault lies entirely on the dickhead running the red light.
It won't be enough for autonomous cars to merely not cause crashes, people will expect them to actively avoid them, even in cases where a human would have failed.
A rounding error?
The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.
Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars.
We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed.
Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.
This claim gets made a lot but, while I'm not sure how you would test this, I'm not really convinced that an expensive driving school and more rigorous driving test moves the needle much relative to just a lot of hours on the road and perhaps becoming more mature with age. My recollection is that my driving almost certainly approved with a year or two of driving after I got my license; you're not going to replicate that amount of driving with training/testing.
Commercial (not private) pilots would be a good example. They regularly take refresher courses to get updated on the latest laws. They have regular simulator training so they can practice situations harder than anything they will ever encounter. They have to provide proof they are in good health. (I'm not what is legally required, or what something all airlines require but isn't legally needed).
I've seen driving simulators - not video games, but actual driving simulators. They are very good, we can require everyone spend a couple hours per year in one to show they know how to drive. We can setup situations where the other car does something stupid. We can setup situations where you will crash and have to choose the least bad crash. We can setup bikes and pedestrians to ensure that you drive safe around them. We can setup bad weather, ice on the roads. We can setup mechanical car failures. These are things that rarely happen and so you need refreshers to ensure you do the right thing should they happen to you.
I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car.
I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.
Yeah we agree?
The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.
Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...
Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.
Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.
Big is different, and scaling this kind of thing to majority of vehicles on the road can cause all sorts of interesting problems.
I’m not saying it’s inevitable; sure, we can and most likely will improve things on the long road to majority AV. This simply occurred to me and I hadn’t seen it articulated before so thought I’d share.
That said, I don't know if the average human drives acceptably, and I'm very skeptical of a "99%" estimate, but I will say that I would prefer a fleet that consistently drove at the 40%ile of human quality vs. the current human fleet that follows the normal distribution.
If self-driving cars reach 40%ile quality, and enable us to stop the 20% worst drivers from driving (or average drivers when operating at 20%ile due to being drunk or tired), that'd be a huge win for safety.
Right now it's socially unacceptable to increase the difficulty of getting your license, or to take it away for poor performance, because cars are a necessity or near-necessity in most places. If we could provide self-driving vehicles as a fallback, perhaps we could make it easier to permanently lose your license than—checks local laws—repeatedly killing people by driving while intoxicated[0].
[0] https://www.idrivesafely.com/dmv/indiana/laws/dui-and-dwi-la...
But I also recognize that many people, having the suspended license, must now choose between never leaving home or driving with a suspended license.
I feel like better public transit, more than Self-driving cars (which will be expensive to actually own) is the answer here.
We need to lower the cost to an individual of losing driving privilege, so that we can lower the cost to society from bad drivers.
Autonomous vehicles don't get drunk or sleepy, don't speed, don't leave the scene of an accident...
This one could be fixed tomorrow by adopting regulations that other advanced countries have had for decades.
In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases.
For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.
Not to mention, I said "at least" DRLs because DRLs are a watered down version of what the European studies show as safer, which is headlights on all the time. In the US, the brightness of DRLs is limited, so the studies are shit to begin with because they're not even using the right variables to find the safest solution.
Also bikes absolutely should have lights and are required by law to have them in my country (and to have them on at night, dusk or in reduced visibility conditions). E-bikes and e-scooters also have lights which are typically always-on regardless of lighting conditions.
Pedestrians don't normally have lights (although I've seen joggers wear hi-vis vests or head lamps, especially during early morning or late night runs) but pedestrians also don't move as rapidly and suddenly as vehicles. Plus in urban environments drivers are expected to look out for pedestrians, especially in narrower roads. "Child peeking out between parked cars" is a scenario covered several times during driver ed and the practical exam includes one emergency break without prior warning (tho in practice learners can make an educated guess about when it might be coming up, e.g. being led to a low-traffic street and instructed to "pick up speed a little").
Is it? Seems like heavy enforcement could pay for itself in terms of fines.
But the better question is why would you need to have overpaid humans drive around in cars to catch speeding violations? In most of Europe you almost never get stopped by cops for traffic violations. Most speeding violations are caught by stationary radar traps, a machine can run the plates and send you the ticket by mail, including a pretty picture of the driver of the car if you want to dispute who drove it. Sometimes there are similar traps activated by passing a red light. It'll even tell you how the long the light had been red when you passed it.
I find it remarkable that we haven't done so with cars as well. It seems like a win-win-win? Automakers (and service centers) get more money replacing more headlights, the public gets safer roads, and politicians get an easy win.
baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles.
Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?
Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win.
When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis.
We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers.
However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice.
For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.
Indeed and the most individual form of transport is walking and most cities in the world are built around walking. Only the US lays its cities out to require cars. It never really laid its cities for horses and carts (with the exception of Salt Lake City.) Before the car, cities were being built around the streetcar, and before that around walking. It's not like people lived in suburbs and went around in horse and buggy lol.
I don't know where this comes from, other than the usual "US bad". Go to Johannesburg and live in a regular estate without a car.
I'm not familiar with South Africa, but Australia also copied a lot of US auto-centric code regulations, so have no doubt that they did as well. But they very much aren't the norm. Most of Asia (outside of Middle Eastern cities and even here it's a mixed bag with Oman being different than the rest) and Europe are built around pedestrians.
If you think I'm just angry at the US due to some internet lefty baggage, then I don't know what to say. Japan shows that cars and pedestrians can coexist fine when you don't cater to just the car.
Also relevant is when Anthony Levandowski at Google / Waymo caused a freeway incident through unsafe testing: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s...
While at the time the DMV did not require reporting, later when Levandowski was on trial Google / Waymo hid the video of the incident when it’s existence was finally reported on.
Imagine driving by a playground and, instead of a dog, you see a ball roll across the street in front of your car, but you can already intuit that it is rolling fast enough that it won't be an obstacle in your lane. A human driver can intuit from the context (playground + ball) there is a chance a child may come running after that ball, from between those same cars.
While self-driving tech may be faster at 'seeing and classifying'* objects, is it able to predict from a larger context? I haven't seen much to indicate it can. I think that's where a lot of the edge cases are going to come from. Driving is more than just 'see object and make a decision'.
*Because most of the tech is relatively opaque to the public, this performance seems to be generally taken on faith. But what the Uber accident in AZ showed is that (with that system, at that time, at least) the self-driving tech really wasn't very good at classification in real-time.
It is not hard to imagine that self driving cars are normally better except for some situation. If we can know those situations we can also talk about hybrid where we don't allow humans to drive where they are bad, and don't allow cars to drive where they are bad. However someone with real numbers needs to talk.
Every single accident involving a self driving car in California must be reported to the DMV. In addition, miles driven and disengagements are reported. All that information is available today online (e.g. accidents [1]).
> nobody is talking
No one talks data about the biggest player Waymo because "human driver causes an accident" is not news.
In September, there were three crashes involving a Waymo car. On September 3rd and again on the 11th, a driver hit a parked Waymo car[1]. On September 30th, a car rear-ended a Waymo car stopped at a red light[1].
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.
Did the bike lanes have a "no parking in bike lane" sign? Because (and I learned this by getting the question wrong on my CA license test when moving here) it's not illegal to park in bike lanes in CA.
> That seems like a comically bad baseline.
Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k.
The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline.
If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die.
We should do our best to keep standards high and increase them as technology permits, but there is no reasonable way to avoid using the current numbers as a baseline.
Also I expect that a single autonomous taxi can replace more than one private car.
I realize I don’t have a real concrete sense of just how many of these there are. Like is this a whole thing already?
Edit: thanks for the responses…. Good gravy…
In SF yes. Even small amounts of driving in certain areas will have multiple daily interactions with these vehicles.
After evening rush hour has concluded, they're a plurality of vehicles on the road.
On the most recent drive, I was in the right lane on the freeway and an AV was merging from the on ramp. It was driving extremely slowly and did not react to me (IIUC I have "right of way" and it should either speed up or slow down) so I basically had to change lanes to avoid it merging into me.
They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.
2) move to a location where you're statistically most likely to pick up your next passenger, to reduce average wait time
There was no selling point related to the environment backw when the hype about self-driving cars really got going, I'd say 2016-2018-ish, you weren't getting people talking about taking the tram instead of getting driven around by these things.
Cruise specifically operated in SF where I agree they have been a very common sight.
I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.
That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer.
By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.
The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.
Can't wait for them to be able to take freeways over to Oakland and down to Cupertino.
If you tip in Uber/Lyft, Waymo is always more price competitive.
I find that late night you often will not be able to get an Uber. I think drivers have been ceding ground to Waymo's obvious night driving superiority.
Self driving cars are useful to replace various maintenance or delivery trucks in cities, and farm transport. However mass transit is better for most things people are thinking about them for.
I love autonomous cars, but its not scalable at all. Its obvious to me that public transit is the real future as the population grows.
For existing city infra and politics that we have, I think self driving is def the best way to go. Suggesting that an individual should lobby their gov't to fix public transit seems like lower probability of success than voting with their wallet for longer self driving trips.
Public transit isn't one of those things that can be incrementally fixed. Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better, that's why its so appealing imo.
[1]: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7999510360_8e46299621_z....
The ideal transport would be a cocoon just big enough for you to fit in that picks you up at your door and gets you to your exact destination with minimal energy overhead. I'd argue a self driving car is much closer to that ideal and we can iterate our way much easier to it than public transit.
This type of design is terrible for average health outcomes [1]. We should not be optimizing for this. Walking to the bus stop is a good outcome. We should optimize for better more frequent bus routes, but "door-to-door" is unnecessary and counter-effectual.
The rest (iteration speed, filling a bus to the brim etc.) are just political problems just as intangible as "lets build better roads (public infrastructure) for autonomous cars", so we can put that aside.
[1]: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/us-neighborhood-wa...
On filling a bus, I think its a fundamental shortcoming of having fixed routes that they'll never be as efficient as point to point transport, especially electrified transport. i'm not really making a political argument.
Right now, nearly 100% of travel is with "personal cocoons", totally unnecessary (other than for political reasons) and creating immense downward pressure on health and social outcomes. In terms of levers the government has on health and social outcomes, transitway design is a big one, and it should use it.
The fact that its done badly in America is a political problem, and if you have any political power it should be expended fixing that, not rolling back public transit.
People love the equity argument for public transit. Non personally owned, ubiquitous, driverless, cheap, efficient and most importantly convenient cocoons would increase equity a whole hell of a lot more than the traditional definition of public transit imo
Maybe if you were to throw infinitely scalable roads in the way of Boring Tunnels, but now we are off in la-la wish land.
Just seems like a lot of work for what is a solved problem (atleast in the Pareto sense).
Fleets of driverless cars lets you do traffic shaping in time and space. Plus the marginal energy cost is basically nothing. It's basically all fixed cost BUT it's not like a transit project in the sense that you don't have to allocate a bunch of capital ahead of time and wait 10 years and then maybe get what you wanted (or not). Driverless cars are helpful the moment the first $200K car hits the road.
As the population grows the driving times will get worse much faster than in transit because again, spatially, it just doesn’t scale well.
If you take 20-30% of everyone on a BART train and put em in autonomous cars with human drivers in the mix (like in the marginal $200K case tomorrow), what you have is abject chaos on the streets.
Every negative you mention about public transit is a political problem (ex: other first world countries can deliver public transit project in a matter of a 1-2 years and at a fraction of the cost).
population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? we have very slow population growth and we can scale our way out of it with existing infra. more driverless cars = less parking = two more lanes on most streets. that can double throughput.
yes public transit is a huge political problem - so whats your solution? because the tech for public transit has existed forever so why isnt it better in the US? You cant just blame politics and then do nothing. You also cant say "we just need to advocate!" because, well, if it were that easy it would have already happened. Driverless cars are a good solution precisely because it uses existing infra and I think the political hurdle can be much much lower.
well then you can definitely put away your dreams of a magical $2.50 pod travel. You need people, more people, young people to build all that. And if we're saying flat and low population growth that dream is over, all conversation can stop.
But if we can turn things around on population, public transit is the only way things scale. Personal travel pods/cars are a current stopgap that only kind of works for our current population levels. Please re-measure car travel times at 5:30pm on a Wednesday evening when 80% of all trips happen, like I've mentioned, the remaining 20% are highly inconsequential to overall transportation design.
you seem to think there are only 2 worlds: 1) population is exploding and everything has to scale 10x or 2) population isn't growing and apocalypse.
There is a 3rd outcome: slow, moderate growth at 2%/year and things need to scale just a little.
It is worth noting that personal vehicles are getting larger, so the amount of ridership required for a bus system to be more efficient than cars is only going down for the foreseeable future, even before getting into second order effects.
Except for energy consumption. If we were in a world were fossil fuels were unlimited and climate change was not a thing, maybe I would agree with you.
But we are not. We need to get much more efficient with energy, and cars just can't do enough. Better accept it earlier than later and start building public transports wherever it's possible.
Who cares if the energy requirement of public transit vs an EV has a huge delta (spoiler: there isn't a huge delta in terms of energy per passenger mile). They are both super low and efficient.
To you, now. But the biggest problem of humankind right now is energy. Consequences of our use of energy are climate change and biodiversity loss. But even ignoring those consequences, we are going into a world where we will have dramatically less energy. Not in 100 years, in the next few decades. So you will live in that world.
> the energy is negligble
What does that even mean?
Bikeable/walkable cities are not an argument against quiet, cheap, ubiquitous, efficient driverless EVs.
https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7999510360_8e46299621_z....
The only scenario where AV may scale better than cars is if we're talking about autonomous buses, and that will only perform better if they are given the other features of public transit, such as dedicated lanes, which require set routes, and we're pretty much just talking about public transit in general at this point.
I live in a semi-rural area that used to have a trolley line to the next town where one could catch a train into Boston. It's also a challenge to optimize school bus routes in a sparsely populated area, and AVs could help with that.
I wish they hadn't, because my commuter card works with the shared rides. So even if a shared ride was the same price as a normal Uber/Lyft (or even more) I'd do it just to be able to use the commuter card.
Honestly (and since this is a hacking forum) I have a theory that if you could hook the Lyft/Uber app with Frida or a modified kernel you could push through payment using a commuter card on regular Lyft/Uber rides.
However, if you’ve only experienced terrible public transit then it seems like you need fundamental change rather than simply doing the same old things just better. Self driving seems like a solid fit for 2am, but driving empty vehicles only makes congestion worse.
I am not in great shape but I know which I prefer.
You cut it in half because you can walk to the closest stop and cut it in half again before you’re starting at a random point not the worst possibility so 5280/8/2/2 = 165 feet. Except we don’t exit buildings or get on busses in the middle of the street so it’s not random.
1/8th of a mile is every 660 feet, but the farthest you can be from one is the midpoint so 330 feet. However for every trip starting at the midpoint there’s another at and the bus stop thus the average would be 1/2 that distance again or 165 feet.
Assuming a 1D world, you can beat this in practice.
As to unbearably slow, there’s this idea of express busses and buss only lanes etc. The core of cities really isn’t that big, it takes forever because traffic is slow or mass transit is infrequent.
Ideally you want a grid where bus lines are near intersections so going from North to East means crossing 1 street so you can go anywhere with 2 waits and a street crossing.
Edit: ca. 2008 the policy was 800–1,000 ft for bus stops and 1,000–1,200 ft for street car stops. On grades between 10–15% the standard is 500–600 ft for bus stops, and on grades above 15% the standard is 300–400 ft. Trunk routes have 24x7 service, and (I can't find it now) there are standards about the amount of service on the other routes but it's something along the lines of 80% of residences are supposed to have frequent service ~18 hours a day and reduced service in the wee hours. Currently the tightest headway I can find is 8 minutes for travel during peak hours along the busiest routes.
Muni is often inefficient but it can get you pretty much anywhere in the city (including places you can't walk to like Treasure Island) for most of the day.
Edit: For reference San Francisco is roughly 7 miles by 7 miles. So you're talking about transiting halfway across town.
Cars (with or without drivers) are competing for the same right of way as the bus, so more of them will simply slow everyone down. A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people? A self-driving car can fit, what, 5? The current quantity of Lyft/Uber/Waymo/Cruise vehicles already has a negative impact on traffic. Put enough self driving cars on the street to make up for the capacity that buses provide and you're going to make traffic much, much worse.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dolores+Park,+Dolores+St+%26...
I'd argue that we'll be able to make this much better with driverless cars than with public transit.
In a completely empty city, the first car handily beats transit. Of course.
In a traffic-laden city, separated PT tends to determine how long it takes to travel instead. 12AM it takes me 25min to get into the centre of the city - at peak hour it's more than an hour. Curiously, the train also happens to take approximately an hour to get into the city.
If public transit exists, it becomes the upper-bound for traffic travel time as if it takes longer than that people start to take the constant-time PT trip instead of the variable car trip.
In a software sense you can usually view decent PT (ie. not busses stuck in traffic) as having a high but constant time cost, whereas cars have a low but increasing cost corresponding to the traffic load (with non-separated transit incurring the same costs but being worse due to traffic stops :()
I want to have my cake and eat it too and I think we can with driverless cars. Lots of software tricks we can do with a network of driverless EVs + city traffic lights to dramatically increase capacity.
My roadmap for SF would be:
- allow waymo and others to scale driverless cars
- stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)
- give the same per passenger subsidy to riders of driverless cars that current public transit passengers receive per trip
- require that driverless cars in SF should send realtime destination info to the traffic light network
- remove parking spots on high traffic streets effectively creating two more lanes
- allow bus lanes to be exclusively used by driverless cars
- tax driverless car rides based on occupancy+distance+time of day so you can traffic shape
Meanwhile the solution you've put forth is almost entirely political and even were there general acceptance of privatizing the roads that sort of project would be mired in just as much NIMBYism. Even then you're talking about, what, refunding federal monies that have already been spent? Levying a new tax (which will require a 2/3 voter approval), subsidizing private corporations, and kneecapping transit? And for what? A system that has a fraction of the capacity of the existing bus and tram infrastructure?
Beyond the gall to suggest privatizing our roads, you're suggesting handing it all over to Google? Really? A corporation with a track record of zero customer or long-term product support is not in a position to run our roads.
- cities already pay private companies to help manage the traffic infrastructure so it doesn't seem too crazy. Seems hyperbolic to claim that's "privatizing roads"
- subsidizing private corps - ok maybe we shouldn't do this. but we should stop subsidizing public transit. it should have to compete with private alternatives now that we have them. previously there were no alternatives to public transit so we kind of had to subsidize it for equity, but now I think private enterprise (given fair competition) could deliver the same outcome. Instead of subsidizing the method (public transit) we should subsidize the outcome we want (equitable access to transport - which might mean that you need to provide low income rides as a ride share provider)
- on the money spent on the SF subway and bus lane, you're right, we're not getting that back. But we can just stop doing those going forward.
- regarding van ness bus lane, I didn't know it was because of the street lamps. But that actually proves my point. Basically to make any improvement, we just have to steer clear of new physical infrastructure. I'm suggesting no new physical infra, just software.
- regarding the tax on driverless rides, we kind of already have it. SF has a 3.25% tax on all ride sharing rides. We'd just need to update that to price the tax dynamically to help traffic shape. And if we don't get that piece, it's not critical.
- on giving it to Google. Fine... not them then. Whoever can provide the best service for the lowest cost. Perfect for free markets. In fact, if we make the API to traffic system standardized, you could plugin and hot swap different providers. You could even back test new providers on historic data to see what their performance would have been like and swap to new providers as they demonstrate their improvement over the current system
- cars have a fraction of the capacity of buses - yeah only if they are fully utilized and you're not counting getting to and from the bus station nor the loss of productivity waiting for a bus
- Build a real time monitoring system of people travelling on these services to allow instant arrests by diverting the vehicles.
- Sell all the data to advertisers and unscrupulous individuals, who may or may not be stalking someone.
- Allow authorities to use the cars as weapons to kill dissidents and other threats to government.
Building something this complex and all-encompassing goes 90% of the way to building a dystopia.
As long as we're throwing out fantasies, I'd like us to spend $2B more, and have the Chinatown subway run all the way out to Fisherman's Wharf and the Marina district, and also expand capabilities west out to the avenues.
I'm amazed we got the Chinatown subway and I'm excited to see the city develop around it!
Like I just implicitly assumed that that is way too much money for the value it provides but admittedly I didn't think much about it. Can you quantify how the benefit might be worth that much?
I think Cruise Automation has roughly raised that amount over it's entire lifetime. Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.
Subway lines can pay for themselves across hundreds of years. It’s the best kind of investment for cities because it operates on their timescales and use ultra cheap bonds responsibly and it doesn’t interfere with free markets.
just pick the low hanging fruit first and let driverless cars operate freely with data sharing. then build your pyramids.
Cities taking advantage of people with ultra low risk tolerance to make infrastructure investments at ultra low rates that only make sense with very long time horizons is dependent on markets.
Ahh, so by ‘we’ you didn’t actually mean a group you are part of but instead other people.
The crazy thing is bad transit needs a larger subsidy because people don’t want to use it. So good systems get better and bad systems get worse.
Bad service is much worse on transit though.
People in NYC don’t just save money using the metro vs a Taxi they save time.
It can actually fit 150.
Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.
And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.
So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.
e.g.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/15-month-old-baby-riding-in-vehicl...
https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/02/man-flashes-gun-drives-bac...
https://sfist.com/2023/06/27/chp-investigating-alleged-road-...
https://sfist.com/2023/09/06/road-rage-shooting-on-i-280-in-...
https://news.yahoo.com/sf-road-rage-suspect-leads-040649333....
Making the news isn't really a good indicator of risk here.
OTOH, stealing a phone, smoking meth, or disgusting excretory things outside of a bathroom would be unthinkable. I would not worry if I left a cell phone on the seat if my pickup in Waxahachie or Hurst with the window down all day. I did leave my wife's cell phone in the seat of my pickup with the windows down when I ate in a restaurant in Waxahachie a day or two ago. She made fun of me for it, and I replied "It's Waxahachie."
BTW, the last car dealership I passed on the way home (before I stopped for dinner and answered this post) is called "Lifted Trucks." Seriously. You can look them up on Google Maps in Hurst, TX. LOL. This is Texas.
Transit looks worse just because the people most likely to do that have 'mental issues' (possibly drug caused, but there are other causes) that also mean they can't keep a job and thus can't afford a car. However even then they are a small minority that you see because you are paying attention not because it is very common.
True.
When public transit advocates dismiss such inhuman conditions as a non-concern, I can only laugh. The average driver in America will never be shot at in any point in their entire life, but by your own admission inhumane filthy conditions are so common on city buses that you saw all of the above behaviors, excepting only the assault, during a short stay in Paris. I prefer the very infinitesimally small chance of getting into some sort of Mad Max scenario in my car to a 100% chance of encountering disgusting filth on a city bus. Most Americans agree with me. Most people who say they disagree actually have no choice and when they say they prefer the bus they're just coping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
If America had a civil and clean population like Japan, then the situation could be different. Clean city buses would be inoffensive, but that's not the reality we're dealing with. The deranged antisocial population of America is substantial. Maybe you'll say that we should fix that. You bet your ass we should. But until that happens, don't expect people to put up with city buses when they have any other choice. Just because you're okay with wallowing in filth doesn't mean the rest of us should be.
Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems. Fair play but I don't think any public money should ever go to solving problems in this way.
Then people will continue to drive, no matter how much you whine about it. If you can't make city buses safe and clean, then people won't use them.
> Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems.
In fact, owning and using a car is an effective way to avoid the filthy of city buses. You seem to think this is a mistaken belief, but you're simply wrong. You will never persuade Americans to give up their cars and use buses instead unless you acknowledge the problem of filth and fix it. You can't gas light people into thinking the filth is fine or their cars aren't an option. Denying the problem and trying to shame people who acknowledge it will never get you to the state you want society to be in.
Frequent, accessible public transit is the main point. Anything else is more of an excuse, honestly. Nothing puts people off more than the bus being 15 minutes late on a half-hourly schedule. 5, or even 10 minute frequencies are required to get the level of service you need for people to reliably use public transit in a "turn up and go" manner.
You see the same effect in any pace where the general public visits. Walmart at 6pm is a very different place than Walmart at 3AM not because the store is different but because you’re self selecting for people who don’t need to be asleep at 3AM.
The number of empty bus seats I see go by is astounding Those buses take up a lot of road space and block arterial traffic when people are boarding.
When living in London a few years ago (clearly a major city), the wait times between buses were pretty short. They might have been about 6-10 minutes for some of the more central areas (rough guess from memory).
I'd be surprised if they were "every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) though".
Meanwhile, in Melbourne and Sydney though (substantial cities, but not London sized) the buses are more like 1/2 hour apart.
In Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia) the buses are 1 hour apart, and seem to stop about 7pm each night.
Dynamic means you call and 1-15 minutes later a bus comes. Then it takes you to your destination, but you have no idea when you will get there because sometimes it takes long detours for someone else.
Frequent predictable routing means when you feel like leaving you just walk out the door confident that the bus will be there soon (even if you see it pulling away just as you arrive), and you quickly learn which buses to transfer to, to get where you want to be.
I’m a fan of public transit and have experienced many good public transit systems. The unfortunate truth is that in any neighborhood with less-than-extreme population density, you have to shape your life around the system by living and working near core transit lines to get reasonable travel times. That works great for people who can do that (I’ve done it myself!), but a better system could aim higher to serve the entire public. The American built environment simply can’t be adequately served by traditional bus networks.
Add bus lanes and smart traffic lights (giving busses permanent green waves), this stops being the case. Busses should never be stuck in traffic. That's bad for scheduling and makes them needlessly unattractive.
I'm generally pro-transit and continue to vote for it, but in many places and routes a car is often more convenient if one can afford it.
Can we pretty please stop acting like this is a complete enigma that nobody else has managed to figure out?
It's not just a matter of "fix service", it's you need to completely rebuild the city with 5-10x the population density.
Which..is exactly what is going to happen [1]?
[1] https://www.californiacitynews.org/2021/09/california-says-g...
There are even some suburbs full of single family homes, with yards, which still have buses every 8 minutes all day long, and long-distance commuter train service every 20 minutes.
Yes the US needs more density for this to be feasible. But San Francisco isn’t that far off on the density that it would needs
Also, SF is still pretty unique compared to most American cities. So you might be able to do this stuff in SF, but not so much in places like Houston.
Lots of people have been trying to get decent public transit in US cities for decades. There is so much resistance it often seems impossible.
So, yes, obviously public transit would be great. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's just not an option for most people. "Talk to your local politicians about fixing service" sounds delusional to be honest.
Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?
I'll take the bus when the bus route is convenient, which is usually, and I'll take Uber/Cruise/Lyft when I'm in a hurry and it's not. I prefer public transportation but I'm more practical about it. Which includes electric scooters (Spin/Lime), or vespa scooters (Revel).
There are a large number of homeless people openly doing drugs, and there is some poop, but I find these descriptions to be generally inaccurate.
Don’t get me wrong, the situation is bad, but based on descriptions like this I was expecting far far worse.
- Every billboard on the way to the hotel from the airport was for AI (which not the case a few months ago)
- Uber driver interrogated me all the way to the hotel on the value prop of my current project at work
- Went to grab a burger and had to dodge 2 people screaming at me, walked passed a man crying because I believe a friend had just gotten hit by a car.
- almost stepped in human fecies
- On my last night, took a cruise back to my hotel (thanks to a friend). Honestly it was quite fun.
Nothing in my comment was exaggerated, just edited a bit to make it more coherent. The reality was actually more dystopian.
And I do mean that last line seriously, I had a blast!:
> SF today is so aggressively dystopian that it's sort of hard not to enjoy the experience.
Cruise's failures, in my view, have come broadly at the long tail where their cars stall out entirely in the road due and it cascades to other Cruises.
Did you make sure to reply like this to poster I replied to as well?
dopamean's partner: "Hey dopamean, in my experience, the grocery bags full of canned goods are heavier than the ones full of chips. Let me take the heavier ones and you can take the lighter ones!"
dopamean: infuriated "How could you possibly know which bags are heavier? It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with 'in my experience' you attempt to make it sound like you're just talking about your personal experience but then you go on to say something that sounds objective and _could_ be measured but wasn't! Did you weigh each bag to determine their objective heft? No!"
dopamean's partner: distraught "I'm so sorry, dopamean! I will never again share informed personal experience with you about objective matters without first conducting a rigorous measurement program beforehand to confirm my priors. Thank you for showing me just how much better I can be! I can tell you're so much smarter than me and I can learn so much from you."
dopamean: angrier than anyone has ever been "Oh 'I'm so much smarter than you' am I? You fail yet again! Did you measure my IQ, did you measure yours?? Have you learned nothing!? I could easily be 3 or even 4 standard deviations below your IQ!"
Fin.
I spent a year in the bay area, working in the city for about half of it. It completely destroyed any joy I got from driving. I've been back in Ohio for 10+ years now, and I still hate driving.
It was that bad then, and I hear it's only gotten worse.
When I do have to get from SF to Santa Clara for a 9 AM meeting... the joy indeed slides away.
* Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic. There was zero chance a human would pull that off. Not enough time for a head check or mirror check. There wouldn't have been an accident but the Waymo clearly has insane reaction time and vision advantages - and uses them.
The question is how many accidents (if any) self driving prevents with respect to average human drivers.
They will not function in high grass, I guess from my experience with different parktronics.
The best "off road" demonstration of self-driving and/or AI assistance I've found is this: https://media.jaguarlandrover.com/news/2016/07/jaguar-land-r...
Note they avoid going into grass. Human can deduce trails from grass profile, AI? I don't think so.
Will you count an inability to reach a lakeside as an accident? I guess, no.
AIs need training before they can do things.*
*They just might be learning to do things without being trained based on the emergency behavior I see in LLMs.
As for "emergency behavior" (emergent behavior, I guess) - we do not know how LLMs are trained. Thus, what you consider "emergency behavior," could very well be a part of training.
[1] It tends to be more conservative than human drivers, and in weird ways. If a pedestrian seems at all to be moving in the direction of traffic, even if they're on a sidewalk and just meandering a bit, the car will try to evade (not violently, but it will brake a bit and pull to the outside of the lane).
I haven’t had a phantom breaking issue in a long time either, I’m not sure if this is because of the FSD package or if the underlying autopilot system has improved.
As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky.
No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!
Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty.
Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement.
Welch Labs has a good introductory video to this topic: https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM
Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly.
This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years.
And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver.
Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on.
Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents.
Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.
In a similar vein, if we put geo-informed speed governors in cars that physically prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit, fatalities would also likely plummet.
But people haaaaate that idea.
If it was 100% accurate and you couldn’t get a speeding ticket if it was active I’d be all for it
I initially read this as "20% of the speed of light", and though you were being sarcastic.
Because what you actually said is true too, and hints at why "it would be safer" is not a good enough reason to implement something.
I'd greatly prefer just automatic enforcement of speeding laws rather than doing things to try and prevent people from speeding.
The toll roads could trivially automatically enforce speed limits. They already precisely know when each car goes through each gantry, they know the distance between each gantry, so they know everyone's average speed.
[1] https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
Which for Tesla's FSD is obviously not the case.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-...
Has FSD had a fatality? Autopilot (the lane-follower) has had a few, but I don't think I've heard about one on FSD, and if their presentations on occupancy networks are to be believed there is a pretty big distinction between the two.
With human drivers -- are we blaming Tesla for those too?
You do you, but I'm here to learn about FSD. It looks like there was a public incident where FSD lunged at a cyclist. See, that's what I'm interested in, and that's why I asked if anyone knew about disengagement stats.
> https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_Da...
The Reporting Entity’s report of the highest- level driving automation system engaged at any time during the period 30 seconds immediately prior to the commencement of the crash through the conclusion of the crash. Possible values: ADAS, ADS, “Unknown, see Narrative.”
Stuff people made up is a bad reason to blame a company.
> The new data set stems from a federal order last summer requiring automakers to report crashes involving driver assistance to assess whether the technology presented safety risks. Tesla‘s vehicles have been found to shut off the advanced driver-assistance system, Autopilot, around one second before impact, according to the regulators.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/15/tesla-a...
Especially because the first sentence you quoted strongly suggests they do get counted.
Nah, that would be illegal. Their statement leaves plenty of room for dirty laundry though. I'm sure they won't disclose disengagement data unless forced, but they have plenty of legal battles that might force them to disclose. That's why I'm asking around. I'd love to rummage through. Or, better, to read an article from someone else who spent the time.
Musk has violated many rules regarding investors.
Yes, I'm addressing that point directly, specifically the fact that this "unthinkable number" is misleading regardless of the number's magnitude.
If I had claimed that the 500 million number indicated a certain level of deaths-per-mile safety, that would be invalid -- but I spent 3/4 of my post emphasizing that it did not, even though you keep pretending otherwise.
California companies with real self driving have to count their disconnects and report all accidents, however minor, to DMV. You can read the disconnect reports online.
As an aside, public acceptance of driverless cars is another story. A story filled with warped perspectives due to media outlets stoking the audience emotions which keep outlets in business — outrage, fear, and drama. For every story covering an extreme accident involving human drivers, there might be 100 stories covering a moderate driverless accident. No matter how superhuman autonomous cars perform, they’ll have a massive uphill battle for a positive image.
Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way.
It’s not really a fair comparison.
What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.
But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.
the bigger problem here is that the machine may not realize it isn't fully understanding the situation; I think that's the more common situation : a computer situational model doesn't match reality, but the machine has the confidence in perception to proceed, producing dangerous effects.
Waymo vehicles impress me, I've seen them perform skillfully like you describe.
I hate that they use giant SUVs, really inappropriate car for small city streets even if people love SUVs.
https://waymo.com/contact/ is the place to go.
Jaguar iPace: 4800lbs, 79inch wide, 183 inches long
Pacifica: 4500lbs, 79inch wide, 204 inches long
Toyota Highlander: 4400lbs, 76inches wide, 194 inches long
Chevy Bolt: 3500lbs, 69inches wide, 163 inches long
The iPace might be great for LA but for SF it's totally inappropriate.
Some over-cautious stuff like mentioned above but also some lane changes and adjustments that were better than what I would do.
I still prefer to drive myself so I’ll probably turn it back off at the end of the month, but I’ve got high hopes for when I’m older.
At this point I trust its microdriving (lanekeeping, distance management, speed control, collision/obstacle avoidance, etc...) more than my own for sure. The higher level stuff is still a mixed bag (will it get stuck at that merge, can it make this lane change in time, does it understand that this other car is going to yield or will it stop, etc...).
FWIW: Stationary junk in the freeway causes accidents with human drivers every day, all the time. People are absolutely terrible at dodging crap in the road. But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd *never* drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would.
Basically: no, you'll never get the evidence you want to "prove" the logical construct you've created. So Teslas, to you, will never be "safe". But in the real world they obviously are.
You're making guesses about my standards that aren't warranted at all. They absolutely can be met.
First off I'm specifically worried about large objects, a meter or larger.
And let's see, autopilot has done 3 billion miles? Okay, if FSD can manage 1 billion miles of freeway driving with zero or one crashes into large objects, then I'll be convinced they're solving the problem.
That should be fair, right?
> But in the real world they obviously are.
Obvious according to what?
Autopilot wasn't, because it managed to hit entire vehicles repeatedly. There is (or was) a specific warning in the manual that it might hit stationary vehicles when going over 50mph.
What makes it obvious that FSD avoids this specific problem?
> But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd never drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would.
You made this up about me from nowhere. Please never do that to anyone.
I've personally watched my car go around trash cans and bikes in the road, and (obviously) stop for halted vehicles. So, you'll abandon this argument and concede the point? I suspect you won't, because my anecdote isn't enough for you, and those obstacles aren't sufficient proof, etc...
I think I'm more right than you want to admit. There's nothing I can say here to change your mind, and so coming here and demanding "evidence" isn't really an argument in good faith.
And an edit just to pick on this bit:
> Okay, if FSD can manage 1 billion miles of freeway driving with [emphasis in original] zero or one crashes into large objects, then I'll be convinced they're solving the problem.
That's simply a ridiculous argument. That level of safety is way, way, WAY beyond anything you get from existing transportation systems of any kind, period. A quick google shows that in that "one billion miles on the freeway", you'd expect not merely the "one accident" you're demanding, but in fact TWENTY FATALITIES (I couldn't find statistics for mere collisions, but needless to say it's going to be at least an order of magnitude or two higher).
So basically you're sitting here and glibly demanding that this product be 200x safer than its competitors before you'll consider it acceptable... and getting huffy when I call you unserious?
Are you trolling with this?
I'm asking if it can reliably do that. Of course I need more data than one person can collect. I am not being unreasonable to ask for more data than your personal experience. Most people with autopilot never saw this problem either.
And specifically I need to know about freeway speeds, because speed is an important factor.
There is plenty you could do to change my mind. If you link to something published by tesla or a government body showing autopilot and FSD accident rates by type then that would be more than enough.
> So basically you're sitting here and glibly demanding that this product be 200x safer than its competitors before you'll consider it acceptable
I'm not asking for a lack of fatalities. I'm asking for a lack of hitting stationary vehicle-scale objects on the freeway.
Do you think that particular kind of accident is responsible for a majority of fatalities, or something? My expectation is that it's a very rare kind of accident and I also feel like it's a good canary.
Also the freeway fatality rate is about 5.4 per billion miles, not 20.
> I'm not asking for a lack of fatalities. I'm asking for a lack of hitting stationary vehicle-scale objects on the freeway.
Exactly! You've constructed an impossible gateway to understanding; I either find a statistic to fit exactly your imagined failure mode or... I'm wrong, and you don't need to change your opinion.
I'm, sorry, I truly am, that I don't have a statistic to hand you showing the frequency with which Tesla vehicles with FSD beta hit 1m+ stationary obstacles on high speed roadways. I don't. And I won't, and likely never will.
So, again getting to the point upthread: you're safe. You can't lose this argument framed like that, and I concede that point. I'm just saying that that's not a very serious position to take if you're actually interested in genuine safety using metrics that other people care about.
> Also the freeway fatality rate is about 5.4 per billion miles, not 20.
Not the headline I saw immediately, but sure. That sounds plausible too. The fact that you want to claw back an error factor of 200 by 3.5x is also good evidence that you aren't taking the discussion seriously.
I don't. Again, I wasn't talking about total accident rate at all. I was talking about a much smaller number. The "200" is nonsense and that was just another reason it's wrong.
> So, again getting to the point upthread: you're safe. You can't lose this argument framed like that, and I concede that point. I'm just saying that that's not a very serious position to take if you're actually interested in genuine safety using metrics that other people care about.
Ugh. Look, I can wait for general safety statistics, but it will take longer. Those will exist, and they can convince me if they're within 2x of humans.
Maybe it's unfair for me to want specific statistics here, but it shouldn't be so hard to get them.
But it's just as unfair for you to act like a single person's anecdotes are enough. You can't just say it's "obviously" safe and treat that like a real argument. Of course the discussion is going to go the same way every time if that's the level of evidence you expect people to accept.
And I thought you were claiming that no evidence could convince me because I'm unreasonable. If your real claim is "nobody has bothered to collect much evidence, therefore there is no way to convince you without doing that job" then yes I agree and I don't think that's my problem.
This was the turn - https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7337193,-122.4350752,3a,75y,...
They definitely pushed the "aggressive" lever up a little over the last month.
I think it's one of those cases where it's sort of obvious it can calculate trajectories and speeds much better than a human, so it's a safe manoeuvre in theory, but it "feels" bad as a passenger.
Same thing for where it can see that it can squeeze through a tight "lane" but a normal human driver would probably wait until the oncoming traffic had passed.
Human drivers are often conservative because they don't know the speed/acceleration of a potentially colliding vehicle.
We look at something and estimate (How fast? Speeding up or slowing down?), but we don't know.
If you could put an actual number on it, I think you could drive a lot more "aggressively" and still be perfectly safe.
These cars estimate rather than ‘know’.
(Vehicle) Lidar/image multi-point calculation against a precision chronometer
(Human) Parallax and object size change estimation against an extremely irregular, low-precision chronometer
A brand new top of the line passenger jet would say e.g. "Caution: Acceleration" because it can work out the velocity of the plane, from there the acceleration and the remaining runway length (it uses GPS to identify the runway it's on) and take off speed and conclude we won't make it. Humans only decide that after it's far too late. Because it's much earlier the annunciation allows pilots to abort takeoff and investigate from the safety of the ground - in the Irish case they'd typed the wrong air temperature in and thus the engine performance was much worse than expected, with the right air temp it would have flown just fine
While humans do and will behave differently around these vehicles.
If your sensors can distinguish a Vespa from a sports bike reliably, compared to all the other things that an autonomous vehicle has to cope with programming it to treat those two as different categories of vehicle shouldn’t be particularly hard.
E.g. bicycle vs motorcycle vs Miata vs BMW 8-series vs Suburban vs tractor-trailer
Because that bounds agility, acceleration, and stopping distance, at least to the precision that it would differ in the next 10 seconds.
10 seconds? 10 seconds is an eternity.
Some vehicles of similar size might be more than 1/8th of a mile apart in straight line performance in 10 seconds-- let alone the difference once we've got multidimensional vectors.
(But, they can be quite different on the timescale of a second).
If you can't tell apart a bicycle from a 4-cylinder racing bike, let alone a vespa, that's what happnes. And Tesla can't. It also can't read hand signals given by cyclists. It can't tell apart a donkey and a horse.
If your goal was to interject an anti-Tesla offtopic comment to the general discussion of vehicle dynamics, it was unwelcome.
As you say, this is something they are constantly tweaking to find the perfect middle ground. That being said, maybe people are extra hyper aware of the turns when it's a self driving car, and wouldn't bat an eye or pay attention if it was a normal taxi driver?
“Your Honor, the pedestrian would have never been struck if the driver had set the system in its most conservative mode as we suggest on page 1,047 of Terms and Conditions.” /s
So, if you make it have the same aggressiveness on "average" by having it take advantage of its superior capabilities, those situations are going to feel sketchy to a person.
A self driving car might calculate it can squeeze through a gap in oncoming traffic but doing so probably will cause human drivers of those cars to slam the breaks and create a large crash.
So unless they’re driving on a road where only self driving is allowed they’ll probably need to be much more conservative than they can be.
Also thinking about it, the first roads to become robot-only driven will probably be inner city streets where pedestrians abound, so no aggressive driving there either.
You say this but as a motorcyclist I've learned to have my eyes everywhere. I suspect many others would say the same. You acclimate to the vehicle you most often control: if that's some woolly handling sluggish SUV then I suspect, no, you probably wouldn't have done well in this situation, but if you were more used to driving a vehicle that requires more attention I suspect you'd do better.
If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question.
Sometimes I'm riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I'm like "dang, why did I doubt you, robotic overload?"
The best part is that it works the same way in the day time vs the night time.
Magic.
My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.
Any info on this? I would love to learn more about what they're doing.
Why do you believe that Tesla vehicles are driving millions of miles a month on autopilot?
I suspect that autopilot accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of Tesla miles-driven. Mostly because it sucks, but also because of how hard it is to not miss a nag on a long road trip, with the result that you are locked out of autopilot until your next stop.
(Yes, even when paying attention to the road, with your hands on the wheel. Hell, autopilot locks you out if you exceed 85 mph for more than a few seconds by pressing the accelerator, such as when passing. This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph.)
I love the performance of my Model S Plaid. Autopilot, however, is a joke.
Where do you drive where the speed limit is 85 mph?
Once traffic rules are enforced by autonomous cars that don't let you go over the speed limit, we can start raising the limit to more realistic levels. I guess currently it is priced in that everyone goes over by x km/h.
Bloody noghtmare fuel that, but it's been the inexhorable direction manufacturers and Governments have been pushing for for a while.
Stop making things that enable people more than it constrains them. The act of velvet glove societal manipulation is pretty damn obnoxious once you realize it's a thing.
Edit: Looks like back in January they were adding 10M cumulative miles driven per month (roughly) - https://insideevs.com/news/633328/tesla-fsd-beta-now-active-...
Surprising, but it is what it is.
Millions of miles per month doesn't surprise me at all.
This has been my gripe for a long time. I feel like many in tech have conflated two problems. With current software the problem of perception (ie "understanding its surroundings") is largely solved*, but this shouldn't be conflated with the much more difficult problem of self-driving.
*for sure, there have been issues with perception. A glaring example is the Uber fatality in AZ.
Also, we can drive just fine with two cameras and a neural net, no LIDAR.
In engineering, you don't add something unless it's necessary, not because "well we may as well have it."
And no, a neural net and two cameras are not "just fine". The day cameras will be as good as your eyes and your neural net will be on the level of human intelligence (AGI) then maybe it would be possible. But until then you will need to rely on extra hardware to get there.
Go check on youtube how FSD behaves in city with 1/10th the complexity of SF/Waymo. And remember the difficulty is with the long tail of unexpected events.
Even your basic non-fancy non-AI car these days have a variety of sonar/radar assists to help out their cameras. Tesla is just being cheap (and getting people killed because of it).
A driver (bot or not) needs very good reactions to bad situations observed in the field. And ideally a good sense for when a situation is one step from trouble. As a driver, if I can’t see through a bus then I’m going to assume a crazy pedestrian is waiting to jump in front of me.
(A lot of drivers are quite bad frankly and don’t do most of the stuff you’d want someone to do if they’re directing a one-ton blunt weapon around town at 35mph.)
I'd say 90% of driving is good/safe driving is mental, with at least half of that bening based on the decision making capability. Yet our tests are mostly focused on physical ability with a small amount of memorizing a subset of the rules.
The multiple choice and practical exams are not done by the school, but by an accredited / governmental institution. Each have a ~30% failure rate.
Counting 1 lesson unit as 45 minutes it’s definitely not quite as rigorous as a PPL, but certainly in the same spirit, I’d argue.
Being completely honest, I did not feel totally comfortable behind the wheel until maybe a week or of actually driving myself, post-license. (Not that I didn't have a lot more to learn, obviously)
During that week, I could have easily gotten into an accident and did have one or two closer calls.
I would not all be opposed to maybe an additional ~10 hours of more rigorous behind-the-wheel driving, or a very good-quality sim for that same amount of time.
But realistically, I'd imagine making this a hard requirement would hit some massive walls. Good simulators are expensive, everyone wants to drive, and states have very limited budgets for this sort of thing.
Such as?
Exactly this. When I saw Tesla releasing their half-backed crap I feared they will damage the public perception so badly that we wouldn't have self-driving cars for years.
The competition:
Uber kills someone and turns out they disabled "breaking due to objects in the way" because it makes it jerkier.
Tesla is often killing the drivers because they marketed it as "auto-pilot"
Cruise rolled over someone for 20 seconds.
I would have to agree. I honestly hate regulatory capture in most industries, but perhaps Waymo's "unit tests" should be turned over to the DMV and made as the gold standard driving test for AI drivers.
The variable that differs is time to pickup. I've found Waymo is generally pretty good for me in off-peak times - perhaps on average 2-3 minutes further away on average. But I have got the odd "20 minutes away" and I then just order an Uber.
But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are the same distance away. I love playing my own music and just being in my own world without another human to consider. It is truly a relaxing commute.
Not to ruin your commute, do you know if there are interior-facing cameras monitoring the passengers?
It's possible, but I don't think it's something you can assume. Having to pay for a chauffeur isn't cheap, and that's what you're doing with Uber. A robotaxi avoids that cost since it drives itself.
Currently they have ~250 cars in SF, and 2,500 employees of which about 600 are engineers.
To break even I'd say they probably need at least 12,000 cars, assuming they don't hire any more engineers and the other 1,900 employees are costless. This also assumes that the cost of the Waymo is exactly the same as a regular car, which at least today, isn't even close. And that the server infrastructure is free, and that insurance is comparable. It's probably also too early to know what the maintenance cost of these systems is compared to a vanilla vehicle.
In fact, this is the way economics work for many forms of automation: you're replacing a large amount of labor time with a much smaller amount of engineering time. The engineering time is more expensive of course, but the much smaller amount more than makes up for the increased cost.
All things being equal (or anywhere near equal), I'll pay the human driver rather than the bot.
And it will be offered, when Waymo's onboard AI detects you're on a date, verbally, so the date can hear.
So even if you give to charites in a meaningful way, you'll end up doing it again or look crass and be embarrassed. And as with many of these "at the till" charity collections, there is a fee given to the collector.
Who will be Google! Plus, not only do they get to track your co-riders, eg who you associate with, and where you go, and even all conversation in the car (anonymized, of course), now they get to track your charitable predilections, by offering choice.
(I know it's sarcasm and you're spot on about the charities lmao)
You own the phone. And they mostly get in trouble for lying about the things they record on phone, not for doing it.
But they own the car. And is it illegal for a cabbie to listen, and then tell their boss a stock tip, or that the Jones are buying a new house?
To add distance, they could real time listen in car, process locally, and only upload highlights as tags/text, so no recording. They could also process live, and then offer services in ride, eg "notice your hair is shaggy, Google Maps says this is a good barber!", and of course if you want that referral, as a barber, Google Maps you pay.
Google can't help itself. It is like a kleptomaniac, it knows it shouldn't, but for those voices in its head(managers), do it.. do it! You know you want to, you need to, you should!
Oh it's so shiny oh god...
And it relents, turning all pure dreams into ashes.
Waymo will be the ultimate platform to know even more about you, and to monetize it further.
If the Sounder would run like the ferries do (say every hour until like 8PM and then a couple more trips before midnight) it would really take the hassle of going to the city for much more people than robo-taxis ever could.
You shouldn't be asking for a couple of trains between 8pm and midnight. They should be every half hour, or more! Midnight until 6am on Saturday and Sunday could be every hour or two.
(I live in Copenhagen, half the population of Seattle. Commuter trains run every 20 minutes from 5-24h, every 10 6-18, all night on Friday and Saturday nights. Other trains also run, and the metro is 24/7.)
There is so much thing to undo and people are so overly sensitive of the value of their property it is nearly impossible or would take centuries to fix.
Honestly I think busses are far superior due to not having so many dependencies.
I've ridden the train in Copenhagen. The stops are near things! Stores and parks! Apartments and hotels! Shopping malls! Like, actually right there! There's a few stops like that in Seattle, but they're also the ones with junkies nodding off, con men "looking for some gas money", and other anti-social behavior.
But you are absolutely right, Tacoma and Everett are 3rd and 4th largest cities in the state and are in the same metro area as Seattle. The north line is actually worse, only 2 trains a day (plus 2 Amtrak Cascade trains) even though there is major Ferry terminal connection at Edmonds (and a smaller but significant at Mukilteo). The Sounder service is dismal and needs to be improved (thankfully we are getting more service on the Amtrak Cascades which runs the same corridor but goes all the way to Portland and Vancouver BC. but not nearly enough)
That said, the bulk of the population in the Seattle metro area is serviced with the Link light rail. They are almost done with an extension east to Bellevue (turns out building rail on a floating bridge is hard) and eventually it will reach both Tacoma and Everett. Then they will get the frequency they deserve.
As for me, how do I get home. My ferries actually run all night (although with up to 3 hour gaps in the middle of the night) and frequently enough. If there isn’t a bus on the island, I usually just call my partner and she picks me up at the terminal, sometimes I also meet someone I know in the ferry.
The funny bit is that I actually immigrated here from Europe, and my tiny European island in the North Atlantic actually has way worse public transit system as Seattle. So for me this is a huge improvement. I’m actually going home to visit and am planning to see a friend of my play at a concert it a town 40 min from the capital, but there are no buses, so I actually have to call my mom to pick me up when the concerts are done.
But the population of the whole country is 1/100 of Seattle. Buses in some place during the day, and taxis at other times, is proportionate to what's available in Copenhagen.
I grew up in a small village in England. Choices for a night out were staying over at a friend's house (much preferable) or splitting the £15 taxi between several teenagers, which was a decent price as far as our parents were concerned. (Or walking for two hours and keeping the money, don't tell mum.)
Not quite that tiny. Iceland. The public transit system inside the capital area is decent (probably better then Spokane’s despite being similar of size) but after midnight it is really nothing, and on the weekends the frequency gets kind of bad (not North America level bad though). However ones you go outside of the capital area the system really sucks. Despite receiving over a million tourists which more then justifies an airport train, there is only a bus every couple of hours to the airport and adjacent towns (with a pathetic shelter).
Most US towns are basically uber/taxis only at that time. I live in Austin where you could theoretically be one of the lucky 1% of the population that both lives near a train station and wants to go somewhere near where that train station is. Even then you can’t use the train past something like 11pm on weekends. Capmetro’s hours are a pretty decent source of consternation for us here
The Seattle area has a newer, dedicated light rail system (Link) that runs every 5-10 minutes from about 5AM to about 1:00AM. The stations are located much more conveniently and frequently, because they were placed based on where a commuter train should stop, not trying to piggyback on existing freight lines. There still isn't as much parking as there should be, but at least the stations are placed so that more than a tiny handful of people can get there without driving and parking.
The South direction is a little better (and is improving even further with more Cascade runs on the horizon) but it is the same story. For example, Pyuallup and Sumner are both decent sized towns wit centrally located station, which won’t get light rail and the 1 line won’t reach Tacoma until 2035 at least. There is also a decent transit center at Lakewood, however I would argue it should probably be better to run the 620 all the way to Tacoma, from where Olympia people could jump onto a Sounder or light rail.
To me (European) that would cost a fortune... probably doing that distance for a night out would be something to do by local train or bus service.
Well worth it to me because i dislike traffic and parking that much. However i bet i could find a park and ride that's easy and save myself a decent chunk. .. not sure how to find a _safe_ park and ride, though.. heh.
Autonomous rides would be great for me though as they represent stability. Getting a driver was always a mixed bag. Would they be creepy? Talk a lot? Drive poorly? etcetc. Down in Florida i had one break the law several times and in general drive like a maniac. I don't take that many ubers/etc, but the ones i have have really felt like a mixed bag. A dice roll on all the variables, more bad than good.
A couple of weeks ago I came across a biker partially lying in the road, trapped by his bike. I parked my van at an angle, so if it was hit from behind it should roll past him. I jumped out and performed an assessment (I'm a qualified, OK: certificated first aider). I diagnosed "pissed" and ascertained he was unharmed. We got his bike in the back of the van with the help of some concerned pedestrians who initially thought I'd hit him. I drove him home.
I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain. What sort of sensors do these Waymo things have? They will have to be really, really clever and seriously expensive.
I don't deny that eventually a vehicle with enough decent sensors and some fancy processing will outperform me but I've managed 30+ years on the road with just a few scratches, a broken wing mirror and a rear ending from an articulated lorry.
I've managed to return a hire car around Napoli (Italy) after a couple of weeks without any issues! That may not sound too impressive but have a look at the state of vehicles around St Antonio Abate etc - it looks like the locals play bumper cars. May I also note that I'm a Brit and we drive on the left. Italians don't. So I can adapt to local conditions. I have also driven across large parts of the rest of Europe and the north Americas. I can adapt to local driving styles from the "use your entire car as the indicator" as seen in the Amalfi coastal area (int al) to "no after you" as you tend to see in large parts of the UK and Eire. I can deal with all the different regulations. A classic European one you don't see elsewhere is the white diamond sign with a yellow centre that indicates that you have right of way until it is cancelled with black stripes. Then there is the French "priority to the right" thing (which has also pervaded the UK somewhat wrt roundabouts).
I can negotiate this with ease: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5628345,-1.7713341,110m/da... and this on a wing and a prayer: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@48.8654026,2.3222455,464m/dat...
I'd love to see a Weymo navigate those.
However you finish with an assertion with no evidence. Care to elaborate? What on earth does this actually mean:
"Waymo provided a larger margin of error for the board rider than a human could possibly have."
I believe that we will get there and sooner than skeptics believe, but we are so far away from machines having driving skill equal to that of the average human driver, who happens to be driving while distracted 99% of the time.
But can they look at a driver's face and realise that they are distracted with their phone and haven't seen you?
These are really sophisticated systems and they've really thought of a lot of issues. All of these companies have hundreds, if not thousands of engineers who have been working on this problem for over a decade, as well as an army of lawyers trying to get things into compliance. I don't think "well it can't do x as well as a human" is going to hold up in 10 or 20 years when these systems are clearly much safer. Human driven cars will eventually be uninsurable.
So do a lot of tech companies that make a lot of dangerous, fraudulant, or just bad products, or that try to develop technology that never comes to fruition.
The tech is impressive, but that doesn't lead to an assumption that it must be able to do whatever is needed. I've seen enough tech hype cycles to know them when I see them. In the end it will have great strengths and great weaknesses, and we should learn what they are.
But 'looking at gestures' isn't the same thing as having a real-time interpretation of the sensors. This, to the point of another comment above, may be conflating 'perception' with the larger problems of 'self-driving.'
Humans see a gesture and understand the meaning very fast because we process a lot of communication on the subconscious level. If you read the safety report of the Uber incident, it shows that the self-driving system could 'see' the pedestrian, but it struggled to effectively classify them. To be fair, that was years ago and another company, but we (as the public) don't have much insight into how good (or bad) the software is.
So 'seeing gestures,' 'correctly classifying gestures', and 'correctly classifying gestures in a time-sensitive manner' are varying levels of difficulty. The last one is the one that matters for safety-critical operations, and the requirements change with the velocity of the vehicle. IMO, there should be a regulatory framework that addresses a baseline of performance on these systems.
(one study - 100% reduction in the frequency of bodily injury claims and a 76% decrease in property damage -https://www.ktvu.com/news/waymo-says-its-driverless-cars-saf...)
I estimate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allowed to drive given their current driving standards. Possibly more could be allowed after additionnal training and showing better driving standards knowing their license is at risk.
Also, I was under the impression that in most countries on this planet, the priviledge of being allowed to drive a car is handed out with the drivers licence, which in most countries, you actually have to have training and a test for. I also thought it was normal practice that these licenses also get revoked, based on tickets...
The only gripe I have with the system is that elderly are not automatically subjected to a regular test of their mental faculties and remaining sight. I am getting sick of 90 year old grandmas killing 3 year olds "by accident".
That is a tricky one.
> Also, I was under the impression that in most countries on this planet, the priviledge of being allowed to drive a car is handed out with the drivers licence, which in most countries, you actually have to have training and a test for.
Training which varies a lot depending on the country. I did a lot of hours + 3000kms under supervision of my father + dedicated classes with emergency from 90kph to 0 braking on varying surfaces, including having 2 wheels on gravel and 2 wheels on pavement to be able to handle situations where the car would naturally go sideways. My Mexican partner in comparison took a handful of classes using an automatic car and only passed the test using a simulator and there you go she had her license.
> I also thought it was normal practice that these licenses also get revoked, based on tickets...
It needs an absurd amount of them for it to happen and we should still require periodic tests and knowledge refresh of the rules of the road.
> I am getting sick of 90 year old grandmas killing 3 year olds "by accident".
I am pretty sure they represent a marginal fraction of the accidents/killing compared to distracted drivers.
And yes, I know that the standards of different countries are vastly different when it comes to obtaining a drivers license. I could have bought a drivers license while in south america. I am writing this because I am blind. Entertained the thought just for fun and to be able to show how broken the system is.
In Germany, if seniors end up in traffic incidents, they are in a vast majority of cases ruled responsible for causing them [1]. They may not be the group that causes the most accidents, partially because they drive less than someone in their 40s commuting for hours every day, but the difference of at-fault cases is nonetheless significant.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verkehrsunfaelle-senioren-1...
Your super-claim that you are indeed empathic because you're concerned about everybody else does not justify the lower-level empathy violation.
You have been P.C.'d
Well I may not have phrased it correctly but I am not claiming that. Lack of empathy is one of the various causes of a majority of drivers being unfit for driving.
I don't know where you are but in the UK the driving test is pretty tricky. I failed it twice before passing and that was before it had the theory test added on. That was 30 years ago.
We all have our own perceptions of other drivers but you do need to try to think in their shoes. Today, whilst driving home I noticed a police car lights to the left and decided to indicate and move from lane one to two to give them room. The land rover behind me decided to undertake me and blunder through in lane one. Now the LR made a perfectly legitimate move - stay on track. They then undertook me (naughty). They did their thing and came across as wankers.
I doubt the public and their political representatives (absent regulatory capture) would turn over control to a mere average robot. Do you think, for example, most people would be okay in a drone airliner that is equivalent to the average pilot? I suspect most people would balk at the idea. A large part of the public policy piece is about trust; humans have evolved to understand and predict the behavior of other humans which leads to mental models about who can be trusted and who can't. We don't have those same evolved intuitions about robuts and, when combined, with our natural risk aversion biases, it's going to take a lot more than "average performance" to get society as a whole to fully trust robotic safety critical operations.
Yes trial attorneys will keep the bar very high for safety. As they should. But the bar in not infinitely high. Tech companies are salivating to disrupt the transportation market. They want a piece of your car payment, your insurance payment, your taxi spend. Insurance converts the minute risk of large accident costs into fixed premium payment. Lobbying helps convert financial capital into political capital and then into regulatory change. Our political process tends to follow the desires of the top 0.1% more than the bottom 40% combined.
Our current regime of car infrastructure was once unthinkable. Entire neighborhood were bulldozed to make way for highways. Yet today the government paying for highways, roads, and mandating each building be surrounded with amble parking is the status quo.
Rail is a much more efficient way to move troops and equipment. Modern warfare requires lightning fast movement which means cargo planes. Eisenhower himself used a “New Look” policy of relying heavily on nuclear weapons so that the army could be scaled back.
Good tip!
As opposed to what? You don’t have RADAR, or LIDAR, or echolocation, or any other way to “detect” a person in the road. You have human vision.
This is the idea behind Tesla FSD. If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough. We have cameras that can approximate human vision. All the other companies using sensors are doing so as a crutch, because they didn’t have the chops to solve the vision problem.
and why gimp ourselves. if we had an extra sense to navigate with we would 100% be using it.
LIDAR is simply a sensor and a very inferior one, in general, when compared to my visual system. For starters it needs something to interpret it. My eyes have a 52 year old brain stuffed with experience behind them and it isn't always a hindrance!
I can reason about other people's driving style and react accordingly. I can also describe my actions and reasoning on internet forums.
I really do not want an inferior sensor such as LIDAR inflicted on me, nor would I want it to be the sole source of information for something that conveys me.
My office has an entrance onto the A37 in Yeovil (1) Bear in mind we drive on the left in the UK. Picture yourself in a car next to that for sale sign and trying to turn right. That white car will be doing 20-40 mph or much more. In the distance is a roundabout (Fiveways) which is large enough to enable a fast exit and people love to accelerate out of a roundabout. As you can also see this is a hill so the other side is quite fast because cars have to brake to keep down to the speed limit of 30 mph. That's just one scenario.
Anyway, back to your idea that Tesla FSD (Full Self Driving) ie RADAR, LIDAR etc is equivalent to "me" is debatable. I do have my limitations but I can reason about them and I can reason about what FSD might mean as well.
You assert: "If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough." People and computers/cars/whatevs do not perceive things in the same way. I doubt very much that you have two cameras with a very narrow but high res central field of view with a rather shag peripheral view which is tuned for movement. Your analogue "vision" sensors should be mounted on something that can move around (within the confines of a seatbelt). Yes I do have to duck under the rear view mirror and peer around the A pillar etc.
I have no doubt that you have something like a camera with a slack handful of Google Corals, trying to make sense of what is happening but it is really, really complicated. I actually think that your best bet is not to try to replicate my or your sensors and actions but to think outside the box.
Have you ever considered a drone?
Cheers Jon
(1) - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9471642,-2.6382854,3a,75y,...
I like how it's indicated with road paint here in Switzerland, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/wp6clo/who_has...
Attributing every great outcome to "talent and sweat" is dangerous in safety critical domains. Often it's (at least partly) luck, and missing that distinction (combined with a lot of human biases) can make a team confuse "being lucky" with "being good". The problem with luck is it tends to eventually run out.
Someone in the comments also mentions that the destination was in a dead end street, which may be the reason the drop-off is a 5 minute walk away. The 5 minute walk was also apparently indicated when she entered the destination. This along with the pick-up location being on the other side of the road feels like it might be the result of the AI being overly cautious. I'd find that acceptable for an "autonomous car" but not one advertised as a replacement for taxis (which as the presenter mentions are also used as accessibility aids where a 5 minute walk uphill can be unacceptable).
There's no footage of the car stopping at the green light, just her saying it's come to a full stop and then an external shot where it's already stopped. That's not enough information to call the stop "unsafe", even if it was impeding traffic. It also stopped with flashing hazards, assuming Waymo doesn't flash hazards during the entire ride (which I hope they don't). It's not clear why it stopped there but based on the little footage we have it doesn't seem very abrupt so any traffic behind it would have had plenty of time to notice and react the decelerating car in front of them.
The stop seems unnecessary and because it's AI and Waymo didn't provide additional information, it's impossible to say what caused it. The message she saw also indicates it was caused by an error, presumably a navigation issue. Although it is impossible to tell based on the editing, the issue seems to have been resolved within a few seconds. A human driver would have probably decided to just follow the direction of traffic for that amount of time, or change lines to come to a full stop at the side of the road but in an urban environment (not at highway speeds) the behavior is not completely unreasonable. What's more concerning to me is that the AI ran into a problem while in traffic that required the car to come to a complete halt and presumably wait for external (human?) intervention, green light or none.
I'd prefer a car that slowly comes to a full stop at a green light because of a software issue over one that keeps dragging a pedestrian it ran over for several seconds to avoid impeding traffic but the bigger issue with Waymo here is that the car runs into a software issue at all while in traffic.
* Not recommended in SF. But I imagine on the 280 it would be great one day.
I hate “whimsical” stuff like this. Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.
And yet, you aren't willing to accept that they have a different sense of humor without hating them. Ironic.
They can, that is why cars have all this pretty lights in the back! They can warn of several things, like intention of turning, braking, accidents, is amazing.
And it works wonders if the human driver focus on the trafic ahead of the car just in front
- The car is going to turn left (one blinking yellow light) - The car is going to turn right (one blinking yellow light) - The car is stopping (three solid red lights) - An unspecified error occurred (two blinking yellow lights).
It's not exactly a high - bandwidth form of communication. Most of the purpose of the lights behind your car is to remind other human drivers of your continued existence. As you point out, some of this deficiency can be made up by not looking at them.
Imagine a world where you could automatically talk over an intercom with the driver in front of you about traffic conditions. I bet you'd find safer, better-informed driving. Self-driving cars make that theoretically easy and humanly pleasant.
For those interested: _Generally_, Bay Area natives will refer to highways as "280", "101", maybe even "Highway X".
SoCal natives (and many others) will, _generally_ say: "the 101", "the 280", etc.
What is your motivation here? I can see why some think it looks like promotional material.
That's because you asked a question with no valid answer.
Seriously, what would you accept as being an innocent response? Anything equivalent to "I thought it was neat" is apparently not good enough since that sentiment was already in the previous post.
If you want to accuse them of being a shill, just do it directly. (But only if you have a good enough reason to break the rule against doing so.) Don't do this roundabout "what's your motivation" thing where you implicitly reject the innocent motivation.
And why would it need to have "other value"?
> a good way to avoid answering
Since I'm the only one that responded, are you suggesting I'm in cahoots with them? Come on, dude.
It turned out I was wrong about the windscreen wipers. LIDAR from other vehicle tripping the rain sensors.
In any event, I do wish Waymo the very best. They aren't just trying to do something hard, they are doing it whilst getting lots of opposition from SF gov. Whether the business model works - time will tell.
> b) I'm a believer
That is interesting to me. Not that you shouldn't be one, or that such an attitude is new to the world, but I always wonder: Why care about a for-profit company's product? Usually these companies don't care about anything or anyone else.
Pretty sure that's just lidars messing with Jaguar's rain sensors.
i'm sure this is sometimes true, but at least sometimes i'd guess that the route selections would make more sense if you saw the conditions and traffic on the route the car didn't take you on.
_defensive driving has entered the chat_
Seriously, anyone here who rides motorcycles can pipe in, but some of us out there never assume anything on the road and thusly avoid a lot of trouble because of it. Assuming incorrectly is the root cause of probably 99.999% of accidents.
Wonder what it would have done if it didnt have room to pull into the left lane without hitting a car. Or perhaps another skateboarder.
Ultimately, I don't think the driving screw ups were that big of a deal (just my opinion). The big deal though is the moronic lack of customer support. How hard is it really to have a customer support staff a phone call away that can reassure the customer and either debug the issue to get them sorted out or at least offer alternatives. It would do so much to improve the users perception.
So, typical Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service.
Maybe it was a just hit piece though and they cut out some contextual video? No idea.
How can a company with THAT MUCH MONEY be THAT plagued with an issue that everyone has been shouting about for more than a decade ??
I wonder if there is a business model in contracting in Google's customer care. I'm sure someone could do a lot better with Google's customer budget. Google can start off with a few departments, and then have performance based expansion. If it goes too well, they can always get acquired in.
Their peer tech companies - MSFT, AAPL, AMZN all managed to become industry leaders into a completely different sector while maintaining their moat in their original revenue sources.
Google is still only makes money on ads. Google has created a monster products in B2C search, ads and software platforms. But, their B2C services are lagging far behind, and customer service really helps here.
This isn’t to say the Waymo car did a bad job. It sounds like a good choice in the situation.
Waymo has way more sensors. Most importantly, it has Lidar.
Also, isn't there an implicit assumption that all Waymo "drivers" would perform in exactly the same way?
In case it's not clear, I'm refering to California st starting downtown and going all the way up the hill.
Car lanes in the city consume a significant public resource (space) and encourage negative externalities (noise, heat, air pollution, etc.). They should absolutely be replaced with more space efficient options: tram tracks & bike lanes.
You've just described the average Subaru driver in the Seattle area. How is this notably different? Should they be banned from the roads as well?
I have all sorts of thoughts on the quality of driver assist from various manufacturers, but that's out of scope here and better material if I ever do Youtube.
Waymo rides feel much more predictable and human like.
Although note that “human like” and “smooth” rides do not necessarily mean safer, but qualitatively Waymo feels that way.
Cruise cars do not perform acceptably in SF but they probably would if they deployed in the bazillion mid-sized cities out there with wide streets and ample shoulder space.
Wide fast streets come with their own set of problems. For instance, stopping in the middle of an intersection is much riskier, the car needs to see objects farther away, etc.
Waymo's are far, far better. I ride one every day, and trust them more than I trust 99% of Uber/Lyft drivers.
Are they performing worse, or are they just making a better risk tradeoff? Human drivers kill a lot of people every week.
I frequently walk my dog where a lot of cruises operate. I dislike there's no.. two-way communication? with car. I mean that with a human driver if we make eye contact then I know they see me and I can safely (yes yes not 100%) cross the street. With a cruise I have no idea if it sees me, or if there's a bug that will make it drive as I'm in the middle of the crosswalk. They actually make me jog across out of fear.
maybe it's more compelling to say: as an average driver, EVEN I can see that Cruise is far less competent than Waymo.
Still feels like "a LOT" when I finally get home, and I also don't know anyone personally who drives nearly this much. Probably biased by my living in the city.
> driving extremely conservatively
> traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd
> far below the level of most Human drives
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90702355/40-of-san-franciscos-tr...
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/speed-campaign-speeding...
___________
> Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down.
I'd take this further. Given that self-driving cars not a fashion/emotional purchase, we should similarly tech-them-out to improve collision outcomes. Make the car collide with a pedestrian at their feet rather than the torso. Make it impossible for someone to go 'under' the car. promote outside-airbag design to minimize collision impact.
For starters, I support mandating driverless cars for all people with DUIs (at any phase in life), the elderly and those who have been in serious at-fault-accidents. Yes, self-driving cars are worse than the average human driver. But these people are clearly in the bottom 10 percentile.
And as we agree; there are clearly better technologies ( waymo) out there that let us have it both ways.
Can you share your source? I didn't see it in the two links provided.
I think this is really jumping the gun given how limited current self driving tech is. The amount of people who do 100% of their driving in the few cities where Waymo operates is a tiny part of the population. Until commercial self driving cars can function in the remaining 99% of the country this is a non-starter. Maybe in 10 years this will be possible, although there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.
But now it seems their strategy is paying off, at least in terms of developing an acceptable solution. It still remains whether they can monetize it well, but other people will have to more or less adopt Waymo's model or they won't have a business.
Knowing about software, if the key differential factor is how well you can handle a long tail of edge cases, it'll take years before others can compete with today's Waymo in fully autonomous self-driving cars. If you don't have an architecture and culture to obsess about edge cases, it could even be easier to tear down the software and rebuild.
So the city and DMV focussing their efforts on this corner case driving systems seems like dereliction of duty on the City attorney's and DoT's part.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/07/01/ask-the-standard-san-franc...
And the hit and run driver did just drive off
But the big issue is hiding / eliding the data.
With respect this part is not clear. Only that the woman moved 20feet.
The DMV has not made clear whether she moved 20feet from the location of original Collision (ie with the human driver) or she was dragged 20feet as the cruise car kept driving. They’ve let the audience fill in the blanks and we’ve collectively come to the more exciting conclusion.
The city elected to do the easy useless thing first and is patting themselves in the back (people are still gonna be flying due to shitty human drivers tomorrow). This is a problem.
I dont think you can definitively say a person would have stopped and helped.
> Firefighters obstructed the sensors of the driverless car to alert the Cruise control center. He said representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters and “immediately disabled the car remotely.”
- Not be forthcoming with authorities on releasing information/video
- Be misrepresenting the performance of their vehicles to the authorities
This is just not acceptable for a company to be doing. This is not how we disrupt industries. You cannot "fake it till you make it" with road safety when building vehicles that traverse roads safely is your business' entire raison d'etre! That's just unacceptable, full stop.
And, add to it, Cruise has been given a direct and clear path to resuming operations, which essentially boils down to doing the thing they should've been doing already. Like come on! How much more benevolent can we ask a regulator to be in this scenario? One could argue, frankly, that they're being too kid gloves about a company lying to an organization who's primary goal is ensuring safety about safety!
The DMV was not aware of that until notified by another government agency that was investigating the incident.
During the certification process for these self-driving cars, incidents of the cars “misbehaving” (for lack of a better term) were supposed to be reported. However, if a human driver intervened, then it didn’t count as the car itself making a poor choice.
Example: self-driving car approaches an intersection clipping a reasonable speed and the light turns yellow. While a human driver would understand that it’s better to go through than to slam their brakes, the self-driving cat goes “yellow means red soon, stop now”. The human driver overrides and floors it through the intersection. Had the car stopped, that would’ve been a mark against the autonomous system. But since a human intervened, it doesn’t “count”.
This is a good watch on the state of self-driving cars and how policy makers have largely just said “eh, fuck it” in places like SF. https://youtu.be/pmGOjHi-7MM
And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop, this post-collision routine? Afaik, the overall program/system guiding a self-driving is some combination of trained neural-network routines and more standard robotic feedback loops. But "what to do after a collision" seems like one of those corner cases that neither programming approach would or could deal with so what development created this routine? It would have to be pure ad-hoc-ery and that suggests that in Cruise's approach to the last-mile/endless-corner-cases problem of self-driving cars is just that, a series of ad-hoc fixed. And this approach can neither be safe nor can it scale.
And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations. Why didn't the "you've just had a collision" signal not pull a human? (maybe it did and not saying that is their problem but otherwise..) The main explanation I can think of is ... the car's routines are already calling pilots a lot and the team is working feverishly to reduce this. An ad-hoc pull-over routine is intended to reduce those calls back to the pilots. Admittedly this is speculation but if true it reinforces my conclusion above.
And then there's a momentary thought of this, and then I think how bad/hard it would be. Sitting there in a "call center", "Ding!" and you're suddenly thrown in to a car mid-collision, needing to take instant surveying of the situation (like "there's someone partly trapped under the vehicle", "am I in the middle of an intersection/interstate", etc., et al.
Even getting past that I think such a job would play absolute hell on epi, norepi, dopamine, etc., response and those people would burn out, quickly (and I say that as someone who spends a lot of time waking up to alarm tones going off before jumping in an ambulance or fire engine...).
The remote operator cannot manually operate the car under these circumstances and that is by design.
I’m just going to assume it’s a liability thing:
* Cruise gets in an accident and stays in the road, passenger gets out and gets hit. * Cruise gets in an accident and pulls to the curb, passenger can get out on the curb (and if they don’t, and get hit, Cruise can claim it pulled over).
I could see this decision being made (or reviewed by) legal. Which sounds like a truly awful way to build a product.
I agree with you on the adhockery as well. Sounds like it.
Waymo handles this by notifying riders when vehicles or cyclists are incoming near passenger exits.
More seriously, the statement cites four specific clauses that caused the permit to be suspended. The second one seems really interesting as it implies that there was a lie of omission where the others are more or less what I’d expect regarding safety risks:
> Today’s suspensions are based on the following:
> 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation.
> 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (3) – The manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles.
> 13 CCR §227.42 (b) (5) – Any act or omission of the manufacturer or one of its agents, employees, contractors, or designees which the department finds makes the conduct of autonomous vehicle testing on public roads by the manufacturer an unreasonable risk to the public.
> 13 CCR §227.42 (c) – The department shall immediately suspend or revoke the Manufacturer’s Testing Permit or a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit – Driverless Vehicles if a manufacturer is engaging in a practice in such a manner that immediate suspension is required for the safety of persons on a public road.
This looks like Cruise's fault, dragging a pedestrian while pulling over for "safety"?
In general, getting out of the way is the right course of action, but this clearly shows that there are exceptions. I'm not sure that the vehicles are currently equipped for differentiating to even be possible.
I'd expect the car to use cameras and sensors.
That might be the fix in this case, just hard stop for all cases of pedestrian impact.
Remain where you are until a trained professional gives you directions. Fire/police/ambulance should have some way to direct the vehicle.
Imagine having to write the code that "detects" if a pedestrain is caught underneath the car
It could also be a "the software can't anticipate that this would be happening the way a human can because it doesn't have object permanence" problem. That's probably at least part of how a human would do it. But I have a suspicion that we're very, very far away from being able to get computers to do that in any sort of reliable way. So I'm guessing we're probably looking at specialized sensors if we want to handle this kind of situation appropriately.
Basically some sort of self-driving car equivalent of a human driver getting out of the car to check and make sure everything's OK.
I will say that I recognize that the visual representation may not be a 1:1 (in fact quite certainly isn't) mapping of the computer's "world view".
But it was quite ridiculous and definitely disconcerting seeing a level crossing with a train going through it and seeing the Tesla I was in acting like there was a traffic light that was erratically going red, while dozens of semi trucks flickered in and out of existence across the screen in front of me.
But I really don't expect that from the cars that go around without a driver.
Anyone who has ever ridden in a Tesla knows they have no real perception of the world around them. Even just driving down the road they show icons of the things around them, which will randomly appear and disappear or change from busses to pedestrians to cars.
It may have some ability to track specific things in specific ways in a manner that's hard-coded by engineers. But if that's the same thing as an actual mental model of the world then that implies that we've had a significant piece of AGI in the form of many video games for about half a century now and just not known it.
audio is difficult because a human can differentiate a woman screaming from the sounds of construction, etc. And also can tell that it's someone in shock vs someone in pain.
I'm unsure if audio processing is good enough for that yet, but imagine if someone were to try and you could get these vehicles to stop by screaming near them.
Or…insert how many other edge cases? There are plenty of scenarios where it shouldn’t pull over, aren’t there? Training the myriad unique situations and proper responses just feels untenable, at least with current technology.
It's hilarious that the fucking things park themselves if you put a traffic cone on the hood, but if they get into a crash, especially one with a pedestrian? BEEP BOOP MUST MOVE!
Besides that, hard edge cases will always exist and can only be solved by a human (or an AGI?) in the loop. But they are't too common, so just detecting that the situation is not solvable by the algorithm, doing nothing and waiting for a remote operator should scale well enough.
yeah, that's a pretty blatantly terrible cover up, definitely not the sort of behaviour you'd want from a company who's allowed to test experimental tech on public roads.
Yes, very much so.
In previous discussions Waymo and Cruise were typically lumped together — “self driving bad” — usually by the original article even! However, my personal experience both as rider and as former Google employee says that Waymo is holding itself to a higher standard and therefore having higher order problems. That’s a lot of nuance for a flame-y topic but this permit revocation is rather unambiguous and I am having a smidge of schadenfreude as a result.
Edit: There are dozens of us https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38003860
The thing about trains is the rails are only made for trains.
I don’t think it is a good idea to mix human and machine driven cars, especially in city roads where there are cyclists, pedestrians, trucks.
I would love to see AV only lanes restricted to geofenced parts of the cities.
We have been conditioned to think of autonomous driving as the answer to the traffic nightmares in every city, but tech will never ever be able to solve a social problem (just like how building a wider road will never ease congestion). Had even a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into self driving so far been spent towards, say, improving sidewalk quality, making traffic lights smarter, putting sensors along roads, coming up with a standard communication protocol for these sensors, building out public transit, improving urban planning etc. over the last 15 years, we would all be living better lives today. But a VC would rather set that money on fire to have a small chance at a 100x return.
It’s not like Cruise / Waymo could change city planning against the cities will, even if they wanted.
Cities have very weak abilities to raise revenue, and are relentlessly politically attacked whenever they try to raise more revenue via higher property taxes and other things.
Our cities are actually starved of revenue and especially post pandemic at risk of bankruptcy without bailouts from higher governments.
I don't know where this mantra came from but it definitely falls in the risible category of leftist rhetoric. Technology has already solved multiple social problems, most obviously the advent of telecommunications itself solving the problem of coordinating actions at a distance. But more embarrassingly, the solutions you propose in the following paragraph are mostly technological.
People just need to drop this line.
So in that sense, driverless cars will actually help because of kind of nuanced reason. My guess is that there will only be a small number of driverless car companies (tesla, waymo, cruise, apple, etc) and it'll be much easier to add regulations that those companies need to send their destination data in realtime to the traffic light infra. I think that would basically be a non-starter for peoples personal cars.
In this specific case: - is there customer demand? Yes. ppl want to move around cheaply, safely and efficiently - is the technology capable? Yes. I've ridden in a waymo, it's great. - what is the first principle cost of a ride? Lower than uber (which is a succesful business btw). Sure there is extra hardware but that goes down a lot at scale and you don't have to pay a driver which actually lowers your costs more than you think (no breaks, a lot less hardware in the car, etc)
I don't see anything structurally wrong with this business that makes me think it has a higher lilekihood of failure than any other random business. Sure a particular company may not execute well and go under, but I think there will be some sucesfful self driving companies in the future.
I’d love to have better transit options, whatever that looks like (including driverless cars), I’m just skeptical of us getting there on a large scale anytime soon.
I have and it's working. Right now. In a city with crazy traffic. And construction. And techno pessimists putting cones over their lidars. In the rain. 24/7. It's fucking incredible.
Cars already do talk to various traffic lights via underground sensors and occasionally a camera. The investment required to have a fully networked traffic light system with a centralized controller would be immense, and would create an organization with a natural government given monopoly.
Your use of 'correctly' paints a world that seems ripe for more corruption and ultimately worse timings across the network. If you wrote 'better', then I wouldn't have commented. I think I'm nitpicking
Traffic lights are already remotely controlled by city planning departments, it's the software that's missing. My whole point is that driverless cars, where the city enforces data sharing and maybe even some routing, can have a real impact on throughput times.
The best part is that most of this is just software. And not ~$2B to make a 1.7 mile subway line or 10+years to make a bus lane (see SF)
To quote your own example, this will be controlled by the government, which takes a long time to do physical infrastructure projects. So I would lately just assume it's not worth the investment dollars.
Self driving car technology could be (at great expense) be used on all the cameras in a city to get a better picture of where people are really going and thus turn lights green to cause the least waiting.
Most cars sit at a light burning fuel and thus emitting CO2. Then they use a lot of fuel (read CO2) to get up to speed and at the next light that fuel is turned into heat by the brakes (hybrids can do some recharge, but they are not 100% efficient so there is still a lot of CO2 for no work)
Perhaps for the optimum solution, but you can get a _lot_ better (than things are at the moment) without that. There are plenty of cities that use sensors and cameras to adjust traffic light timing throughout the day, and have done for some time (In the 90s I studied the system used in Sydney, which had already been in existence for some time then). But these things cost money.
Also, you don't need driverless cars for destination data - anyone using Google/Apple Maps/Waze, or even any recent car's inbuilt nav system can provide this.
And I reckon that even with the optimal solution in this regard, you'll still end up with traffic jams, as individual cars take a lot of space. Start thinking in terms of mass transit, cycling, and city planning to allow walking to the shops.
Maps/Waze data is a good point and I saw an article recently that Google is providing anonymized data to cities to help them optimize their traffic lights.
The one thing the driverless cars get you is the ability to traffic shape. You could imagine cities granting permits to waymo/cruise/etc only if they support dynamic pricing (or dynamic taxes, whatever) and dynamic routing to help distribute vehicles more evenly in space and time.
On the public transit thing... mainly because shared driverless EVs are basically a form of mass transit and I think a really good one. You can see some of my other comments on why...
One interesting half-way-there solution (and this is a technical solution involving cars, not reducing them as I'd much prefer) would be to have nav apps be able to read the traffic light timings for the intended route, and give you a suggested speed to travel at to maximise green lights and/or traffic throughput. It would piss off cars that want to go exactly at the speed limit, but would probably end up getting them to their destination faster.
In both cases, cities could offer incentive schemes (e.g. points -> $ or discounts off licence/registration fees) to encourage people to 'follow the computer'. Would probably be cheaper than building infrastructure.
So, the entire amount of VC dollars that went into Waymo is ~$5.5 billion dollars.
If you look at the entire self-driving market, it's probably less than $12 billion in total.
San Francisco's yearly budget, is $15 billion dollars. The Federal Gov spends 50 billion dollars per year on maintaining federal highways.
So yeah, you didn't have an epiphany. You just couldn't be bothered to spend 20 seconds thinking about the math.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/in-nyc-su...
Blaming VCs for public policy failures is fair when they lobby to create those public policy failures. In this case, it seems like their efforts (lighting money on fire) are likely to improve pedestrian safety, so it doesn't seem fair to blame them.
Where was this mile-long stretch? 3rd street?
Many (most?) intersections in the Netherlands have early detection systems that change the light _before_ the car reaches it.
But they didn't just do this for cars, they also do this for bikes. And public transit gets signal priority allowing buses and trams to almost always get green lights.
They've spent the money improving transportation of all forms, not just cars.
[1] https://youtu.be/knbVWXzL4-4
[2] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/traffic-lights...
This is an infrastructure issue. Culturally I sort of understand how the US ended up with bad walkability and bad public transport. But what I do not understand is how road infra is so horrible.
Are you saying that they should all be equally safe? If so that would require a level of oversight and control (plus knowledge share?) not typically seen in US government, no?
I agree in principle, I’m not defending them at all. However this is exactly what much of the US wants, given how much de regulation and reduced “red tape” is often argued for.
Until then, we’re going to get some companies that put everyone’s lives at risk. Hell Tesla alone has over promised to insane degrees (the Full in FSD). I don’t see companies having less power any time soon.
Musk has repeatedly stated that Teslas on FSD/AP are safer than humans, now.
You can take issue with the veracity of his claims (and I certainly do, on several levels), but let's not pretend like "no-one is selling this, yet" - let's also not forget, "The driver is only in the seat for legal reasons. The car is driving itself" - that was six years ago now.
There are rules governing autonomous vehicles in California. They must report all accidents involving their self driving vehicles[2], miles driven, disengagements,... Tesla's FSD does not follow these rules.
Tesla's marketing may imply that FSD is an autonomous vehicle. However, today, in California, these are driver assistance programs and not self driving cars.
[1]https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2023/02/17/2022-disen...
[2]https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
> The [human-driven] Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV. The AV biased rightward before braking aggressively, but still made contact with the pedestrian. The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. The driver of the Nissan Sentra fled the scene after the collision.
If I'm right, then Cruise will have to add remote drivers and then we can call them remotely operated cars instead of driver-less cars.
Context: When sitting in the backseat of a Waymo, there is a tablet-sized screen that shows you all the cars nearby. And humans! On one of my first trips (at night), it took me a while to figure out what the white circles were. And then I looked over and saw people in the shadows! It was honestly kinda spooky that the car was much more aware of nearby humans then I was...
Disclosure: Googler, and a big fan of Waymo
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspen...
One wonders WTF they were thinking. Were they so sloppy they just forgot to show the video? Were they hoping DMV would never see it? Either way it's a terrible stupid and short sighted mistake. A major problem for Cruise is convincing governments their technology is safe and responsible. Hiding evidence is not going to help that case.
Uh, 'Mistake' is a really generous word here.
Cruise isn't some amateur one-man startup. It's a multi-billion dollars company with tons of lawyers, advisors, resources, support from GM, etc. It was a deliberate act full-stop. The only 'mistake' they made was probably thinking they could get away with it.
Usually when private companies are developing products that could kill, drugs for example, it is on the company to exhaustively prove the safety and effectiveness before launching it to the public. It seems odd that self driving cars have been skipping this step.
The AVs do not work well in the edge cases - exactly in those situations where humans can apply common sense and behave accordingly. Exactly the cases that sceptics seemed to be worried about, and it turns out that the sceptics were right.
I hope AVs will not be allowed on public roads where I live in the next decades.
A part of the sales pitch for AVs is that autonomy acts as a safety layer.
As with any sales pitch, the interest of the manufacturer is often more in getting people to believe the pitch than in it being true, validating that it is true is a concern of outside parties. Insofar as AV adoption requires loosening existing rules to allow them, that includes regulatory authorities.
Yes, it is.
> Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
Yes, along with a pile of other moonshots. That's what moonshots are for.
There's a lot of profit potential in AVs, and even if you fail at it there is a lot of potential for profitable spinoffs of the research.
And if you fail at both, well, moonshots are high-risk, high-reward.
To add to your comment, the billions "incinerated" in Waymo (~$5bn) is about what New York City pays for a single subway station qua shopping mall.
Honest question: why do you think Google funded this?
yes!!!
imagine if everyone that commutes could watch ads, sorry, use Google's valuable products and services for an extra 3 hours a day
It's just that, in practice, it's almost certainly impossible to reach safe self-driving cars without a period of 'public beta testing', you'll just never get enough data and experience.
Not entirely unlike how there's a period for new drivers where they really aren't safe, but there's no way for them to become safe without going out onto the regular roads and gaining more experience.
[Citation needed]
"It seems odd that self driving cars have been skipping this step." is an opinion referencing well-known current events. You can't expect everyone commenting on this article to re-reference the saga of Cruise in San Francisco; especially when it's frequently covered on the front page of Hacker News.
Furthermore, you should know that a Hacker News discussion is not Wikipedia. These discussions are not the kind of things where every off-the-cuff statement needs to be backed up with references.
You can argue about how much non-public testing is enough, but any roadmap for AV will eventually at some point have to include public testing.
I did not claim they're not testing, they clearly are. My argument is that people that didn't sign up to be test subjects are getting hurt in the process.
It's worth pointing out the discrepancy in human safety trials, is it not? Why should AV testing be less rigorous than pharmaceuticals?
My point is that Waymo has done plenty of testing already. The question is, where do you draw the line? Are cars ever "done" being tested? Just like with drugs, you never know all the side effects for 100%, you can only make the error bar smaller and smaller, but eventually you have to distribute it to the public.
Same with the car, at some point they will eventually have to drive on public road. By your logic, they would never reach that threshold since they're still "testing" it.
Its also a USian obsession. Some other places have been able to actually invest in superior public infrastructure but the US is so focused on techno-solutionism it, as usual, misses the extant and superior solutions. Self driving does nothing to mitigate the sprawl and atomization that wreaks havok on our society, but trains and busses, and density that cannot be achieved with car-dependence does.
Here is Cruise initial NHTSA filing: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2023/INOT-PE23018-11585P2.p... They mention every detail from start to end but don't mention the fact that they dragged a person under the car.
Let me be very clear, if Cruise just collided with a person due to the mistake of another driver, that's cool. However, this is something way worse. Cruise car stopped, and then decided to drive 20 feet dragging the pedestrian under the car because someone on Cruise team designed a rule that says "if there is a collision, move away from the spot after stopping to avoid blocking traffic". No human driver will ever do that.
They are testing their garbage in dense urban areas. Too many times their vehicles just stop in the middle of the road.
If it rains, vehicle stops.
If the light is out, vehicle panics and stops.
Somebody puts a cone on the hood, vehicle panics.
If a single variable not accounted for in their algorithms shifts beyond expected range, it fucking panics.
So much money dumped/wasted into “autonomous personal vehicles”. How about we invest in making our cities more pedestrian, bike, and public transportation friendly? Let’s move people more efficiently rather than further digging ourselves into this hole.
A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.
Cars also don't only exist in dense cities. They're even used, among other things, to get people into and out of those cities
Alternatively if you reject the premise of those questions that this is a necessary phase to pass through to get to the other side, what do you think the impact on progress would be if no "real world" training opportunities were allowed for these companies? Do you think they'd be hampered and progress would take longer, and what would the impact of that be?
Or more succinctly: "You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Sorry, eggs [regular people].
Ends justify the means thinking leads to some dark places (e.g. what kind of medical-technological progress would we be able to make if it was possible to do testing on humans like we do on animals?).
I'm not trying to make a statement or a point with the question. The original question is all that is part of the question. Please don't try to read more in than what is there.
> Ends justify the means thinking leads to some dark places.
For sure, but if we try to avoid any and all pain then we could still be nomadic people. Maybe life satisfaction then was higher, but certainly life expectancy wasn't. Just the death rate of babies and women alone was pretty dangerous.
So, there must be a balance somewhere right?
You're presenting a false dichotomy. Giving self-driving car companies free reign to cheaply experiment on the public is not the same as "avoid[ing] any and all pain" or avoiding all technological progress.
I'm not presenting a dichotomy at all (unless you think the spectrum is binary and is only zero pain or non-zero pain, which I don't), let alone a false one. I'm not talking about just self-driving car companies. This is a broader philosophical discussion about technology in general, and how much pain is tolerable for progress. If you believe zero is tolerable in the case of self-driving, then do you believe that in general for all tech? If not, why is self-driving so different?
Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of self-driving cars is a world where humans don't have to labor for their transportation?
Edit: to clarify because people seem incapable of non-binary thinking, I'm not making an argument that Cruise (or any other tech company or car company or whatever) should be able to have "free reign to cheaply experiment on the public." That's not something I said or implied. I don't think they should and I think this California decision is probably a good one. There, can we talk about the higher philosophical issue now?
Then why are you saying things like "if we try to avoid any and all pain then we could still be nomadic people"? That seems pretty binary to me.
> This is a broader philosophical discussion about technology in general, and how much pain is tolerable for progress.
No, it's about who bears that pain. Is it the public or the investors? Obviously the investors and their apologists would prefer to externalize as much as the cost ("pain") as possible onto the public, and shame the public into accepting it.
> Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of self-driving cars is a world where humans don't have to labor for their transportation?
That's actually an irrelevant distraction, especially if for someone who rejects ends-justify-the-means logic. Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of unrestricted and unethical experimentation on humans is a world where many more diseases are cured and life is greatly extended (for some, at least)?
> Then why are you saying things like "if we try to avoid any and all pain then we could still be nomadic people"? That seems pretty binary to me.
Good question and thank you for the opportunity to clarify. My position/current opinion is that practically nothing in life can be done without some sort of pain or "harm" to self or another person. For example if the standard was "no harm", then there's no way we could have cars or motorized transport, or even bicycles for that matter. That doesn't mean that any and all pain is acceptable (that would be the binary view), but that basically it's a question of balance, not one of binary "yes" or "no."
> No, it's about who bears that pain. Is it the public or the investors? Obviously the investors and their apologists would prefer to externalize as much as the cost ("pain") as possible onto the public, and shame the public into accepting it.
I don't agree that is what the broader discussion is about, but I would certainly agree that "who bears that pain" is highly relevant to any concrete example, and certainly humans are much more accepting/tolerant of damage/harm that they don't personally have to bear. I would agree that investors should not be unilaterally making decisions on what harm is acceptable.
> That's actually an irrelevant distraction, especially if for someone who rejects ends-justify-the-means logic. Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of unrestricted and unethical experimentation on humans is a world where many more diseases are cured and life is greatly extended (for some, at least)?
This is a interesting point, and one I'll continue to think on. My initial reaction is that ends-justify-the-means isn't/shouldn't be binary either. Some level of ends-justify-the-means is necessary for nearly everything unpleasant we do in life. For example, I just cleaned the toilet (which I hate doing) because the ends justify the means: if I don't clean it, it will get disgusting, and having a clean toilet is great so I make the sacrifice.
That said, the broader understanding and common meaning of ends-justify-the-means is absolutely one I reject and I suspect we agree fully on: There are potentially great ends that don't justify unethical means. An example of ends-justify-the-means would be the Unabomber justifying his terrorism because on the other end would be a better world. I find that horrifying and very, very wrong.
> Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of unrestricted and unethical experimentation on humans is a world where many more diseases are cured and life is greatly extended (for some, at least)?
I would not disagree with that, and I would agree that this is not on its surface a good reason to do the experiments. I think the non-binary part comes in on how we define "unethical" however. To some people unethical would include allowing dying cancer patients the option to try potentially life saving but still experimental drugs. To me, very little is unethical so long as the person is a capable adult, is fully informed on the process, has the ability to withdraw at any time, and provides full consent. There are quite a few people who would disagree with that however, so in practice I think we still end up at the spectrum rather than the binary.
The problem in this case happens to be that the AV tried to pull over instead of stopping in the middle of the road, so not sure this is a great criticism to make.
There are tons of companies that would love to help (get paid to) build out public transit infrastructure in cities. You think any major city would have trouble attracting bids to build tram systems, subways, or even buy more busses?
Look at your local leaders, how many of them are pro-public transit? How many of them have a long history of blocking projects because they want to "preserve neighborhood character" or some other lame excuse?
I don't hate public transit or anything, I cycle and subway in NYC all the time, but the level of investment the US needs in public transit is an order of magnitude above the amount that investors have spent on autonomous driving.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/in-nyc-su...
[0] https://twitter.com/Cruise/status/1716877217995894934
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autono...
You could, however, argue that staying in place was the right thing to do; continuing to drive to get the woman out from under the car may have injured her further. A follow-up article[0] suggests just that, and emergency crews ended up lifting the car off of her instead of trying to tow it.
If this is indeed why their permit was suspended, it seems like a questionable reason. Some of the other dumb things Cruise cars have done seem much more obviously egregiously bad. But in this case the crash may have been unavoidable (by human or robot), and avoiding injuring her further by not unpinning her may have been the right move.
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/cruise-driverless-tax...
It's highly situation specific, and I'd expect the emergency personal to make the judgement call on how to free the person (potentially by taking control of the vehicle, or other means).
(I have my comments appear on a several minute delay because I know I sometimes submit a comment before I've made sure my intent was clear, but I maybe I took too long this time. It's a bad habit, and I know I should slow down, but... yeah.)
Honestly, I don't think this tech will be able to ever be fully automated without controlling the environment as well (dedicated lanes). There's just too many variables you can't account for, and too much risk.
I'm not saying that means we should just put them on the road, consequences be damned, but I'm curious if there are alternative ways to prove them without risking bystanders' lives.
True, but I bet either a Cruise or a Waymo would have stopped rather than hit that woman crossing the street, and they definitely would not have fled the scene like the human driver did.
"But the DMV also said it was not made aware that the Cruise vehicle then tried to pull over while the pedestrian was underneath it."
Kind of proves my point. Stopping completely would have been more ok. The issue the DMV took is that it then pulled over, and that cruise withheld that information.
They do! https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/09/why-drivers-in-c...
And people getting away with it -- even with video evidence -- seems to be an indication of police corruption. Which creates further incentive to do the wrong thing here.
So a pedestrian was crossing a crosswalk when they didn't have the green light. It doesn't really make sense why neither the human driver nor Cruise car slowed down in that case and kept driving normally. Both should have stopped despite having the green light.
It may not be the performance of the vehicle in the incident that led to the suspensions so much as Cruise's performance in the investigation of the incident (or information about Cruise's prior behavior on safety info that came to light through the investigation.)
I think the bigger issue is the decision to move the vehicle after a collision involving a person not in a car. I've not had the misfortune to be in such a collision, but in the collisions I've been in, I would get out, and inspect the situation before taking any further action. Moving out of traffic is a good thing to do, but especially if there's a person, it's important to consider the situation before further movement. Even if it were just a vehicle to vehicle collision, I'd want to check if someone needed urgent medical attention, and acknowledge the collision with the other driver, make a plan for where to stop to discuss, and check for and clear any obviously sharp debris that may pierce tires of my vehicle or others' vehicle. A lot of that is outside the capability of an automated vehicle... but maybe human review before pulling to a safer place is a good choice especially if a person outside of a car is involved in the collision.
We should be suspending all bad driver’s licenses, AI and human alike. Today we give people passes for crashing while driving badly, and we should not.
"When the AV tried to pull over, it continued before coming to a final stop, pulling the pedestrian forward," the company said.
This poor woman was involved in two accidents really, and it is fair to shut down Cruise until they address this failure scenario of driving on top of a victim in road.
The first picture in the SF Chronicle article is harrowing: https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/34/54/62/24300697/3/1100x0.jpg
These autonomous cars have done some truly dumb things, but I don't think this incident is so obviously bad.
Meanwhile, the human driver who actually hit her first, and then fled the scene, still hasn't been found...
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autono...
While not impossible, it's hard to imagine a human-driver scenario that would look quite like that, regardless of how legal accountability might resolve. Would a human driver stop their vehicle on top of the person they just struck? Would they then ignore the person they'd trapped and wait for a bystander to intervene?
I'm not suggesting that this scenario necessarily warrants the suspension, or that most of the same problems might not occur in some human-driver scenario, but it points to some of the subtle differences of human vs automated drivers that come up in exceptional situations. There are a lot of exceptional situations when driving and it very much matters how automated processes navigate them.
"“When it comes to someone pinned beneath a vehicle, the most effective way to unpin them is to lift the vehicle,” Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the department, said in an interview. Were a driver to move a vehicle with a person lying there, “you run the risk of causing more injury.”"[0]
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/cruise-driverless-tax...
It's not hard to imagine that it's simply unequipped to know something like that, and it does seem fair to require that it become so equipped.
Huge supporter of autonomous cars, still feel like this is completely reasonable to require a solution for.
Updating my comment to include this:
“When it comes to someone pinned beneath a vehicle, the most effective way to unpin them is to lift the vehicle,” Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the department, said in an interview. Were a driver to move a vehicle with a person lying there, “you run the risk of causing more injury.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/cruise-driverless-tax...
If you pay for one year in advance you get two months for free.
Cars were here yesterday, people loved them for their freedom. Cars are here today, people love them and build communities around them. Cars will be here tomorrow, and people will still love them.
When you need to go further or out of the city, by all means, jump in your environment-destroying metal cage but you don't need it daily, I guarantee it. Please don't cite extreme exceptions like disabled people or families with 10 kids.
In the Top 10 US cities that have the density to support this, sure. Head out to the Top 100s and this reality falls apart very quickly. There's no economic incentive for businesses to be so well distributed through a dense urban core. There's differential zoning and mixed use that form the backbone of those cities economies.
The idea that we can just total re-engineer our cities and our social lives all across the country to solve a traffic problem that is not at all distributed the same way is insane to me.
Most deaths happen at night. Most deaths involve alcohol or drugs. Other common factors are speed, youth, and bad roadway configuration. A tree in the wrong place is lethal. Bad guardrail installations are lethal.
There is so much more to do than to put everyone on a bus and pretend that 15 minute cities are going to work.
I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (the 244th largest city in the US) without a car. If they built a Trader Joes downtown I would have 0 issues being car free. The city has built a number of fully protected bike lanes downtown that I hope get expanded further into the greater community, and seems to be doing a good job of making the downtown denser as well. It certainly can be done.
I live in a very very very similarly sized city in OH and I feel exactly the same way (down to the trader joes even). I do have a car and I often wish I didn't need it. My city is small enough that not only is a 15 minute city a feasible option, it could be a reality today with a couple small infrastructure changes.
We engineered them to be human centric. It's just that the humans had easy and reliable access to affordable cars and fuel. So, naturally, the market did what it does. When you say it's car centric you intentionally ignore any benefits or efficiencies that were created in that decision and equally imply that it was a top down decision.
> I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (the 244th largest city in the US) without a car.
Do you own or rent? Are you a college student or a resident?
> If they built a Trader Joes downtown
Why do you suppose they haven't? Should the government compel them? Why them and not some other chain? What if two chains want to compete for that footprint?
> number of fully protected bike lanes downtown
Do you bike in the winter?
> and seems to be doing a good job of making the downtown denser as well.
The population of Ann Arbor has been steadily increasing for the past 80 years. The last 20 years have shown no change in that steady rate. Any recent changes are very unlikely to account for the very slight continual trend.
https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/government-funding-for-high...
"Higher funding has been made possible by burgeoning state tax receipts as aggregate incomes, spending, populations and tax rates have trended upwards. However, this close link with tax receipts has made highway funding growth responsive to economic conditions and unemployment."
So.. higher incomes, more populations, more tax receipts. Specifically, highways are a function of _human demand_. There isn't some grand conspiracy to build roads just to make a handful of companies in Michigan happy.
I don't hate cars! I just don't want to have to jump in a car to go somewhere I could easily walk
Where I live I sometimes walk, sometimes bike, sometimes take the subway, sometimes use my car, and sometimes use my truck.
I'm nowhere near rich enough, but having your own private jet would also give you a lot of extra freedom.
However I don't consider these self driving taxis to give you much freedom (because you don't own them).
According to the very article being discussed no, they are not.
This is a political problem though, it's not something businesses can solve.
correct. there's no easy answer, there's no silver bullet. it's on all of us to demand this of our local policymakers.
Would be very possible with good public transit. But that's the point. The average NIMBY doesn't want bus stop in their neighborhood. They don't need it. The only thing it would enable in their mind is people that do need it (poors, browns, etc) access to where they live. You don't spend $650k on a house and $80k on a Tahoe to have poor people riding busses around you.
That's the general attitude in my neighborhood at least when I describe why my old ghetto neighborhood was better in a lot of ways. Zoning allowed businesses nearby. I could walk 5 minutes to Dollar General instead of an hour. But I might have a black guy ask me for bus money, which seems like it would be a horrifying experience for most of my neighbors.
Transit often doesn't get people where they want to go, when they want to go, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable price. If you are missing any of the above then you don't have a useful transit network and the car starts to look compelling. (cars are expensive, but the marginal cost of a trip is very low once you have one)
Worse, when transit improvements are done, often they are expensive and deliver very little useful changes.
With the above backdrop it isn't hard to see their point. That doesn't make them right, but it means if you want transit you have a lot of evils on your side to fight.
You can be taken exactly where you need to go in much more comfortable conditions with much less risk of running into anti-social behavior.
That's why Uber has a market even in cities like NYC or DC.
>door-to-door
Doesn't have to be door to door.
I use Uber all the time when on vacation to get to places of interest and then back to the hotel. Trying to incorporate public transit would have added 30-40 minutes of walking, no idea how much additional time waiting. Saving ourselves an hour or so per day of vacation makes it worth it for us.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/09/08/uber-lyft-...
Dated but it says 66% of riders can find a ride within 5 minutes. I think 5 minutes is a good target.
With how subsidized public transit is, I don't believe these AV taxis could beat it on price... but they don't have to. They just have to make it low enough that the benefits of private travel outweigh the cons of public transit.
People tend to take less public transit when they become wealthier, not more.
Society is not a monolith. The people and companies choosing to invest into self-driving cars are not the ones who would be able to make communities more pedestrian- or transit- or bike-friendly. As much tech as there is in the bay area, Google is not a local duke that can unilaterally make streets less car-dominant.
The people who can choose to make communities more friendly to other modes of transportation are the citizens who vote for representatives and laws, the citizens who show up at local meetings, and very often they fight against safer streets, sadly enough. Democracy is better than non-democracy, but that doesn't mean voters always make smart decisions.
Personally, I would LOVE it if American streets looked more like Dutch streets, or even German streets. But within US politics, wanting safer streets like those is an extreme position. Most people grew up with car dominance, and they're uncomfortable with or skeptical of the idea of actual choice in transportation modes. There's an enormous amount of cultural momentum behind forcing everyone to drive.
You can argue that it is a net negative that a lot of America, and most of the American west, was built and grew in conjunction with the car, but it is not entirely fair to say the only impediment is culture and politics.
These are the same thing.
> It would literally require starting from scratch in many places to design a city around non-car ownership.
No, it wouldn't. This is part of the common set of myths that are promulgated around car dominance in America. There are many, many things that can be done to retrofit streets to be less oriented around car dominance, many of them not terribly expensive or time consuming (though admittedly the very best options do tend to be infrastructure that's expensive and time consuming).
For example, one thing Portland has done in some of its neighborhoods is to create neighborhood greenways, with concrete structures/blockers at some intersections that force you to turn, so that cars can't use the street as a 'through street' for commuting (but it's still possible to reach everywhere with a car for residents). This is fairly cheap and easy to do, it's just a matter of political will.
Here's an example picture (though the exact type of blocking structure can vary): https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/styles/max_768w...
This is a big improvement that doesn't require redoing the whole street or anything, just a few concrete dividers and a little paint along a street maybe every four or five intersections, enough to make it impractical to use for longer-distance car commuting.
Some other things that are usually relatively cheap to add to existing streets:
* Automated speed cameras
* Roundabouts
* Chicanes
* Protected bike lanes, using basic dividers
* Dedicated bus lanes
* Better bus stops that at least have some kind of roof and bench
* Zoning rule changes that play well with density, like allowing light retail in currently residential-only zones, or allowing 'missing middle' housing
These are off the top of my head, but I know there are more.
Besides, suburbs exist, and someone living in Sherwood who works in Portland, at this time, requires a car. And public transit would need to be either faster, cheaper, or more convenient (wifi, coffee etc) than driving for (most) people to adopt it over a car.
And Hawthorne is _super confusing_ now. Turning right from Hawthorne to 10th is a nightmare, you have a bus lane, a bike lane and a sidewalk to the right of you, all of which could contain someone. It is hard to accurately see all three "lanes" that you need to cross. Another example is the Hawthorne bridge onto 99E, the angle is below 90 degrees so you end up with a massive blind spot. I start looking for bikes/peds way before the off-ramp because I am used to it.. someone from out of town or who rarely drives in Portland is going to kill or injure someone.
That's what protected bike lanes are for. Basic ones aren't that expensive, really, the issue is more the road space. Cars dominate the existing space, and many, perhaps most drivers will scream bloody murder at losing any. They don't want equality and choice, they want dominance and everyone forced to drive.
> Besides, suburbs exist, and someone living in Sherwood who works in Portland, at this time, requires a car.
"Besides" nothing, you're talking about an almost entirely separate issue now. Obviously bikes aren't great for really long distance commutes for most people, they're more for short to medium distance trips. And yes, that's where public transit comes into play -- with people able to walk or bike to the stations.
> And public transit would need to be either faster, cheaper, or more convenient (wifi, coffee etc) than driving for (most) people to adopt it over a car.
Yup, that's where you throw in bus lanes everywhere. Places like London have heavy adoption of bus lanes that lets taking the bus often be faster than driving by yourself.
> And Hawthorne is _super confusing_ now. Turning right from Hawthorne to 10th is a nightmare, you have a bus lane, a bike lane and a sidewalk to the right of you, all of which could contain someone.
I admit that I'm not that familiar with Portland, but protected intersections are a solved problem. Takes more money than the other things I've mentioned so far for sure, but it's still quite doable.
I’m an environmentalist and the solution is electric vehicles powered by renewable electricity. It’s not cooping people in tiny apartments and foisting dense living on people that don’t like it.
That might be the first time I've seen privacy as a main objection. Not sure how serious that should be taken considering how much privacy has willingly been given up in the last couple decades in the name of convenience. And also how few cases where it would matter. Like does it matter if a rando can see one sit on a bus? It's not going to make a difference with companies and governments since they have so much electronic location data available, not to mention license plate scanners for private cars which also have electronic location data.
I don’t mean privacy as in personal data, I mean not having to be in close quarters with other humans.
Perhaps. It's also possible that current roads could carry vastly more traffic driven by autonomous drivers instead of people. As a regular cyclist, I would be ecstatic if even if every human driven car on the road were replaced by 2 autonomous ones. Buses are some of the worst vehicles to be around on city streets (huge, poor visibility, frequent stops, filthy diesel emissions).
Suburbs tend to be sterile and devoid of character, but I do agree that they promote living in a bubble away from other humans.
Why that is desired or a widespread model for living needs more explanation. Sure some people like to be hermits, but as a social species it seems odd and also a highly inefficient way to accommodate a larger population. Also peculiar if one likes true "wilderness", because more suburban sprawl means less of that.
And suburbs have got to be one of the key factors in the reported loneliness epidemic. With the reports of increasing prevalence of loneliness, seems odd to want the default way of life to be one that we both agree means living spread out and not close to one another.
And yeah some people do like suburbs. On the other hand, Irvine ca despite being such an upscale and model suburb, is like living in the set of the truman show: artificial feeling and boring. People often describe it as sterile or like living in an office park. The landscaping of suburbs, such as irvine, also tend to be environmental disasters on top of being utterly bland. It's lose lose.
Not to mention, car transport being the paramount design concern makes for truly miserable pedestrian life and running trails. Running next to 6 lanes roads with 55 mph speed limits is just a terrible experience - irvine is crisscrossed with them.
Not sure how one can have a better road system than irvine - but it doesn't end up saving the residents time - things are just more spread out and they have to driver further between them and then fight for parking.
We've tried a car oriented transportation plan for decades - it gets one LA traffic. Parts of the 405 have 12 lanes. If you build it, congestion comes. We've tried it for decades, it's horrible. What is it they say about trying the same thing over and over and expecting another outcome? Oops actually the i5 - 405 merge near irvine has 26!!! lanes amongst all the ramps and truck bypasses. Needs more, right?
Bikes? If you mean e-bikes and motorcycles then maybe. Buses and trains? No it's not and it will never be. This is a position only a green extremist would take.
A fucking horse is better than any of those methods of transportation. There are two crucial elements a car and a horse have in common:
The first element: You own it (or rent it) and you tell it when and where to go. The when and where part is crucial.
The second element: It has the capability of carrying not only you, but also an another person and cargo.
The only transportation devices that can do both of these things are a) cars, b) horses, c) bikes (kind of... two people and cargo on a bike would be pretty tough to do, let alone with any level of comfort).
The fundamental, unfixable problem with trains and buses is that you don't tell them when and where.
The future is in EVs or global warming. Personally I've had it up to * here * with all the green hypocrites so I say bring on the warming, let's fuck this place up if you don't want electric cars.
A proper public transit network already goes to where you wan to go. You don't have to tell them.
The vast majority of car rides are taken by a single person without significant cargo. Nobody is saying we should eviscerate all cars, but _most_ of the time, _most_ people that use cars in cities don't actually _need_ to use cars.
That said, I don't have access to the data and I don't really know if Cruise has been acting inappropriately. I'm glad that Waymo seems to be generating far fewer negative press reports, which seems to be a good proxy for whether regulators are going to clamp down. So I hope Waymo continues to operate successfully (and expands their service to me in particular) and I hope that Cruise improves their system and gets back online.
Cruise was pushing too hard and fast for where their stack is at and they seem to have some severe safety related bugs.
Ex [1]: The car randomly starts swerving rapidly across traffic lanes towards an occupied sidewalk.
Ex [2] (@1:31): The car doesn't stop for someone already in the crosswalk and nearly hits them.
[1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12640657/self-drivi...
[2]: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/video/driving-taxis-hittin...
For some reason, I can't imagine literally any human driving quite like that?
That's a common response from people who would prefer NOT to know the facts.
https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-th...
so pulling over after a collision, which resulted in dragging the human 20 feet is an interpretation of this regulation.
sounds like California and Federal AVs regulations are equally not safe for the public's operations
which is a good enough reason to revoke permits too, until they fix this together with the private industry
until they figure that out, this is a not-intolerable course of action. it doesn't need to be interpreted as punitive.
AVs seem to all have different "mental models" of the external world, so it seems like we've got a lot of work before we can pipe data collected from this Cruise incident into a simulator and test Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc.
“The Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV. The AV biased rightward before braking aggressively, but still made contact with the pedestrian. The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. The driver of the Nissan Sentra fled the scene after the collision.”
I welcome our robot overlords.
Really wish there was a way for tech (especially new AI tech) to wholesale abandon the city. Even just move south to the actual Silicon Valley. The city picking winners and losers like this is untenable
How else are they supposed to screw up?
If the city needs more information from the cars, they should sue for it not indefinitely suspend operations.
The city is looking to regulate all this like it regulates new housing (ie out of existence), there has to be consequences for it.
So yea, this is the city working to regulate driving, like it regulates housing and small business i.e. to the death while favoring incumbents that are far worse.
Cruise operates fine in Austin and Phoenix. They could just move their operations to South San Francisco or further south and be better off. The city simply does not deserve the presence of tech, and for tech companies their presence in the city seems counter-effective
"The DMV has provided Cruise with the steps needed to apply to reinstate its suspended permits, which the DMV will not approve until the company has fulfilled the requirements to the department’s satisfaction."
[1]: https://sfist.com/2023/08/17/sf-city-attorney-files-motion-t...
Some other factors are in play
I'd say the initial hit probably did a chunk of damage to the pedestrian, but quite likely not fatal unless their head hit the ground. But then being driven over and dragged 20 feet is going to be pretty scary and in all likelihood cause more serious injuries than the initial impact.
1 - https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autono...
I like how you're parroting Cruise's spin on this: the pedestrian was "pushed along", not "run over and then dragged."
That is an optimistic view of the likely behavior of your hypothetical driver. Hit and runs are commonplace. Dragging struck pedestrians around isn't all that uncommon either. Panicked motorists frequently make very bad decisions.
Probably because you're reading their press release. Their previous press release was even more convincing - they somehow forgot to mention the part about draggin the pedestrian at the time.
Here they somehow forget to mention the car has already accellerated to 18mph while a pedestrian was still crossing the road.
I'm not trying to detract from the horrible outcome of this case, but the problem wasn't the car pulling away at a green light when there were no obstacles in front of it, but the way the car decided to move itself to a "safer place" immediately after an accident when it clearly didn't have enough sensors or the AI wasn't trained sufficiently on this kind of situation to be 100% sure that it was safe for it to make the maneuver.
So there was this woman crossing a crosswalk in front of these two cars when she shouldn't have. I guess I don't understand why neither car stopped in front of the crosswalk when they saw this woman in the middle of the crosswalk (illegally).
IMO it was a bit aggressive for Cruise to have seen this woman jaywalking and still crossed the crosswalk after detecting that the woman had just passed the car but still in the middle of the crosswalk.
It doesn't sound like the Cruise car stopped because it basically saw that the woman had just barely crossed to its left out of its path of travel.
A more cautious driver would have slowed down at the very least or stopped completely.
Ba dum tss
In those situations I would 100% stop completely in front of them and/or drive very slowly around them. The difference between a regular jaywalker and someone who is mentally disturbed is the mentally disturbed jaywalker is unpredictable and you have no idea what they'll do next.
The right decision in this case was for both cars to at least slow down if not stop in front of the crosswalk. The Cruise car driving normally just because the walker happened to just pass to its left without slowing down doesn't seem like the best decision.
And it's not a given that doing so would make the situation safer, as other drivers would eventually drive around your car.
Anyone who doesn’t slow down in situations like that is a waiting to be like the Nissan driver: a person a-okay with committing manslaughter.
And two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because some human drivers are negligent and horrible doesn’t mean we have to accept robots varieties that are also bad.
Jaywalking laws never cease to trigger culture shock for me
Crossing on a red signal (when safe) is even polite in my country, to not unnecessarily impede traffic
(Of course, we're talking about crossing "when safe", not when you'd be walking into the path of a vehicle with the right of way.)
Wat? (Most) pedestrians aren't squirrels that hang out in the road running back and forth. You've put forth an unreasonable standard that basically nobody uses. Except for maybe those "special" types of drivers that will slam on their brakes and wave at you when your intended path was clearly behind their car after it had passed, as if you're supposed to be thankful for their putting themselves in your way to indulge in a simulation of altruism.
A good human driver may have slowed down from perceiving the emerging exceptional situation of the oncoming car not reacting to the pedestrian, but I'd say that's a much different framing than what you asserted.
"The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet."
First of all, I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large. I'm sure the Cruise car recorded the plate and they passed this to the police.
Second, the corporate speak on the Cruise release is very good. Notice how it says "pulling the individual forward", in other words, the car dragged the person while it attempted to get out of the way. I guess nobody thought about that edge case. And they released a completely irrelevant simulation showing that if the other car had been an AV this wouldn't have happened. Yet, the real issue with the Cruise AV is that after a collision it just blindly tried to pull over and it dragged the person. The same thing would have happened if the person had simply collided with the car on their own.
Ironic but completely expected. We have normalized and accepted the awfulness of human drivers to a degree that people just don't comprehend. Human would be terrible drivers even if you ignored the fact that many of them are chemically impaired, even if you ignored the fact that they are prone to rage and aggression.
As we consider the safety of self-driving vehicles, there is going to be a disorienting amount of cognitive dissonance as we are forced to confront the awfulness of what we already accepted and have been living with for a century. There were over 42,000 deaths due to motor vehicle accidents in 2022. That means if we created self-driving cars that were twice as safe as humans, they might save 21,000 lives per year and also kill 21,000 people per year. That sounds insane, but it would be a sane way of improving an insane situation.
Kibitzing about these individual incidents is a normal and inevitable human way to try to deal with the problem, but we need some way of measuring how deadly self-driving cars are in comparison to how deadly human drivers are. I never see that, so I wonder how we're going to know when we should loosen the reins on them? Are regulators actually doing their jobs, or are they just going to move inexorably forward while occasionally throwing bones to public outrage?
The stakes here are huge, tens of thousands of deaths and horrific injuries per year, and we will unnecessarily kill lots of people if we deploy self-driving technology too fast or too slowly.
The way this will probably work out in practice is regulators choosing the path of least resistance between uninformed public outrage and greed-driven industry pressure. What we should be asking for is a data-driven approach.
If a human being had done that they would have absolutely had the book thrown at them. There was a case where a woman was drunk driving and hit a man, he came up over the hood and into her windshield. He was alive but bleeding. She drove home and parked her car in the garage. He bled out through the night. NO ONE was sympathetic towards that woman.
But if an automated vehicle does it, it just becomes a line item that someone somewhere has to pay. You watch, someone will start offering insurance for that liability.
What we should be doing is making it an existential crisis for these companies. That will never happen and thus self driving vehicles will become good enough and that's it.
You can punish the manufacturer of any item that creates an excessive danger to the public.
Lawn darts aren't intended to be thrown near people, and don't exist anymore because people used them negligently. Human-driven cars are used negligently and kill 40,000 Americans a year.
Lawn darts don't exist because the FDA banned them. Without that happening, they'd still be sold today.
> Kids can hurt themselves with bicycles and archery and rifles, too. Why aren’t they included? I’d rather be hit by a lawn dart than by a horseshoe
-- R. B. Jarts, inventor of lawn darts.
Consider, the Dalkon shield which had a hospitalization rate of 5 in 1000 and a death toll easily in the 1000s (maybe 10s of thousands). [1] The company went bankrupt but not defunct. It is now a part of Pfizer. Nobody experienced any sort of jail time in association with the deaths (and, after it was banned, they started selling the dalkon shield in poorer regions).
A serial killer killing 10 people gets the death penalty, yet there exist mining companies that have easily killed 1000s of employees with silicosis (and are still operating today, looking at you Dow [2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkon_Shield
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster
But that's the idealist side of me talking, the realist understands that will never happen.
It should really be the opposite in an ideal world. A company that has documented "this is what we did to make sure everything was safe" should less culpable than the company that moves fast and breaks things/people/the planet.
If a company killed someone, I'd want their defense to be a list of everything they did to prevent that person from dying, not a "well shucks, accidents happened, and this was a tragedy that couldn't be avoided!". That's the response that should end a company's existence.
Really? If they had been in a car accident caused by another driver, and took a few seconds to pull over because they were unaware they were dragging a person initially hit by the other driver, they would have been charged?
It's very hard to hold people responsible, and it's telling that you had to cite such a grisly and outrageous example. Unless you're drunk or it's a hit-and-run, you're unlikely to face any charges beyond a traffic violation.
> You watch, someone will start offering insurance for that liability.
Of course? Exactly like we've mandated for human drivers since the 1970s?
All this hand-wringing about things that we've accepted our whole lives with human drivers.
I'll say it again: we need data-driven approach to figuring out when autonomous vehicles reach the threshold of becoming less deadly than human drivers. If we jump the gun and allow widespread adoption too soon, people will die unnecessarily. If we drag our feet and allow widespread adoption too late, people will die unnecessarily.
unless you believe this person stayed completely silent during this, the answer is yes. The measuring stick that the law tends to use for liability like this is the reasonable person test and no reasonable person drives 20 feet with someone screaming in pain after having HIT their car.
Are there circumstances in which someone would NOT be charged? sure, there have been cases of toddlers running out in front of cars and it was determined the driver couldn't possible have seen them due to their height.
Since you apparently misunderstood, the point about the insurance is that maybe we shouldn't allow companies to insure themselves against killing people. We as a society absolutely went after Ford for choosing not to do recalls because the estimated cost of the recall exceeded the estimated payout for the deaths and injuries. Under no circumstances should we allow companies to make decisions like this.
This sort of nonsense where you take a serious statement and tell me the cutesy "name" of the autonomous vehicle really detracts from the seriousness of the issue. Also, the last paragraph where they try to talk about how their vehicle wouldn't have made the same mistake as the human driver, glosses over the actual issues the cruise car had which a human driver would have known not to do.
I wouldn't expect this offhanded fact in long-form, slower journalism. But I expect this from Reuters.
So basically nothing you said is relevant.
Why is anyone paying attention to it?
In their original press release they didn't even mention dragging the pedestrian. Here they've only mentioned it because they were caught red handed by the DMV.
Jesus Christ! Good riddance, I'm glad their permits are revoked. Can you imagine witnessing this and watching an autonomous vehicle slowly crushing and dragging someone underneath? That 20 ft must have felt like forever to witness. Let alone experience.
That’s a pretty enormous screw up and not one I’d heard about when this was initially reported. Interesting the statement from the DMV implies they were lying…
Having ridden in Cruise cars a couple of times, I am glad I was able to ride one while I had the chance. The novelty factor was very high, and while being hard to hail + very slow, it was a great thing to show to visitors to the city. Hopefully these safety issues can be resolved. As a biker, I feel much safer around a cruise than your average prius.
At least the autonomous vehicles actually follow the rules: they are patient and always watching the bike lane and crosswalks. I've never had one try to cut me off, make an illegal turn, or aggressively turn into me while in the crosswalk. These things are daily occurrences for me with human drivers due to the sheer lack of traffic enforcement.
Waymo has been very cautious. This turned out to be much harder than expected. Waymo's stats get better each year, and it looks like this is going to work.
Later, the car in front of me was going down the hill and my cruise car kept accelerating and then braked very hard once its sensors were able to see that something was in front of it.
It was an okay experience, but I’ll be honest, I don’t think I would be willing to take myself in it again or my family anytime soon. And honestly, I can’t believe that moped driver didn’t get hit/I didn’t get whiplash.
Before this, I was really impressed by Cruise and actually bought shares in General Motors because I was so blown away. But yeah those cars aren't perfect. However, maybe a human was controlling the car when it blew threw that cross walk? I would not be surprised if a person were to do something like that because people drive horrible all the time, but I would expect better from a computer.
Maybe that's part of the problem? We have bad drivers who are ultimately writing the software that controls the cars.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. If someone from Cruise happens to read this, try and add some code to prevent these cars from blowing through cross walks with people in them. (I'm not sure what the law says about this, but my interpretation is that if the cross walk sign is lit up, and there's a pedestrian in the cross walk, you should stop. Maybe it's okay to go if they haven't made it to your side of the street yet, but you should never get so close to a pedestrian that they can strike the vehicle out of anger with an object.)
At all.
They are classification systems. They have no understanding whatsoever of anything around them. Which means it is likely that the AV which is the subject of this accident didn't understand that it hit a person, what a person is, how a person could be stuck under the car, how a person could be dragged by a car, how a person could be hurt by a car, how a person is more fragile than a car, why it might be better to not move in any of the above contexts, how a human driver would more likely get out of the car and make sure it was safe to move (and render first aid), etc.
We are calling this crap "Artificial Intelligence". It isn't. It is not at all. It's a parlor trick devoid of anything that resembles understanding. A dog understands the world far better than the most advanced self-driving-car.
This lack of understanding issue carries with it layers of significance. For example, a human driver understands consequences to his/her actions. Yes, of course, there are a-holes in every crown...yet, the vast majority of people are good. If that were not the case society would not function as it does. Lacking the concept and understanding of consequences, just assigning scores to things and path planning accordingly, removes important decision-making layers and drives suboptimal AV decisions.
You can add responsibility, fear, financial consequences, emotion, care, consideration and a whole host of human condition realities to the list of important factors completely lacking from AV's today.
Driving is fine when reality is reduced to easy-to-classify monotonically varying experiences. Not so easy when reality becomes, well, real.
I don't understand why authorities allow self-driving cars to beta test out in public. I thought Waymo was the best of the lot with something like millions of hours on the road and no incidents, but when they started accepting passengers, it failed to proceed past a traffic cone on a sunny day:
https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742
The government should initiate a comprehensive test on a self-driving car's capabilities. In their current form, I wouldn't trust any of the others like Tesla and Uber that think self-driving is as easy putting it out on the road. And that too with Tesla and their cost-saving no-LIDAR nonsense.
These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from beta testing out in public.
I worked in the AV space for years - not at Cruise - but during one of my first driverless rides in a Cruise car, we ran into a few blocks of SF where the power was out. About 3 street lights in a row weren't functioning. At each one the Cruise stopped completely for about 45 seconds before crossing - even if there was no traffic coming from it's left or right. That delay was so that a remote operator could clear it to proceed after it detected that there wasn't a functioning street light where it expected there to be one. After the first street light we were getting honked at and swerved around by cars behind us while it paused and waited for clarification.
Comparisons between the safety of robotaxis and human drivers are strange to make when 'robotaxis' still depend on remote operators for fundamental parts of the driving task
I strongly agree that the safety comparisons aren't anywhere near the same ballpark. They are just too apples to oranges.
All that said, I don't think that means we can't evaluate whether they're safe in the limited contexts they're being deployed in. We just have to be aware those statistics are only as good as their context (weather, geography, terrain, traffic patterns/devices/laws, social norms, etc).
I'm initially most hopeful for constrained environments (city, low speeds, parking) and Waymo in particular, because of the house amount of investment and very thoughtful and cautious strategy in terms of deployment.
It does feel like a lot of these weird/longtail situations should be more quickly resolved with some better combination of letting a human override in person (like when a AV car blocks a firetruck) and/or quickly getting a human to remotely take over, but yet we keep seeing these reports of where the car does something dumb for a long period of time. Is it as simple as they don't have enough employees on-hand to intervene?
I've been writing my distaste for Cruise for the past few month or so here, because of this. Of course getting downvoted by those with skin in the game but c'mon you can't act like how Travis Kalanick did...you are pushing technology onto the streets that can kill people! As well Waymo (Google who im no fan of) has been working on their robot car tech since 2007 ... Cruise no way for that long.
There were reports they are pushing their tech onto many city streets. Sorry to say and hopefully other cities/states follow CA's lead!
Fixing all Cruise vehicles so that this doesn't happen might be hard, but it isn't impossible.
Sounds like a good argument to ban almost all human drivers.
I realize assuming this is the California DMV's line of reasoning is speculation, but this sentence from Cruise's own public statement on the event really does it for me (emphasis mine):
> The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet.
The tricky thing about these vehicles' control software is that it has absolutely no judgment or common sense. That's really on display here, where the vehicle immediately goes into a canned program instead of following a course of action that takes into account all the details of the situation in which it found itself, not just the ones that its creators had anticipated.
That doesn't necessarily mean that testing self-driving cars on the roads is inherently irresponsible, but it does mean that the ground rules for how we manage such programs need to be tailored to the situation. What we have here is a situation where a rather nasty software defect has been discovered. We can assume that this defect is present in all of the vehicles Cruise is operating on public roadways. It is therefore reasonable and prudent to temporarily suspend autonomous testing operations on public roadways pending analysis and remediation.
Because, let me emphasize again, TESTING. Pausing to analyze and iterate when you find problems is an essential part of testing. It's arguably the main thing that distinguishes testing from just YOLOing shit into production.
Accidents...manageable.
Hitting a pedestrian...still manageable.
Deliberately withholding evidence....burn them at the stake and regulate them to an inch of their corporate lives.
Tesla is going to smoke these companies. Theirs is the only software trained on high quality actual driver behavior (which they can pull from their fleet because they have telemetry in the form of a real-time safety score for every driver).
It's like every other company is trying to write an algorithm to construct strings, and Tesla has GPT-4.
They don't have the hardware to compete with Waymo and Cruise.
But sure, it is a good narrative for the stock to go to the moon.
Otherwise... not so much.
Which would make the driver responsible not the the company for incidents especially ones which explicitly circumvented controls.
The scenario with cruize is different because the company is responsible for everything
The FSD Beta uses the in-cabin camera's to do eye tracking and all the other attention stuff.
It may have been true at the time, but now Tesla uses the interior camera to make sure you are paying attention to the road.
If you don’t want to use the FSD beta, you don’t have to activate the camera, or you can put tape over it. With either of these actions the user can opt out but will not have the ability to use the beta.
Two points:
Try using Cruise outside its tiny comfort zones.
There is no such thing as the “self driving Tesla” you mention. There is a beta which requires human supervision at all times.
We, I mean humanity, need an example that L4 self driving is possible.
When SpaceX showed that private company can access space and build a product in the area world changed.
Startup founders, investors, government changed their opinion and many space companies were created and trying to do things that they would not even consider before SpaceX: Astra, Rocket Labs, Planet Labs, Firefly, etc
(Great book on the topic "When Heavens went on sale": https://amzn.to/46NRx9l)
If we get one example of self driving as a product on the roads, it may have the same effect. We are going toward self driving winter and unless Cruise, Waymo or similar companies will do the impossible new iteration will happen in 10+ years.
It is mentioned in the text that in Q3 GM spent 700M on Cruise.
Not that many companies in the world: 1. have similar level of talent as engineers at Cruise 2. can spent similar amount of money 3. are willing to spend them
And we need all three.
There are so many corner cases that without large scale as close to the real life deployment as possible...
I feel very sad.
P.S. Worked for 3 years in a self driving company, till our division was sold :(
This was at night with zero traffic. I have no idea why it took so long.
When the CPUC was set to vote on expanding Cruise’s operations several months ago, SF first responders and other residents spoke out against expanding operations. CPUC ignored all the feedback and concerns and voted to expand. I believe the press pointed out the CPUC people that voted to expand Cruise operations would benefit off the expansion (can’t recall if they were former employees or tied to the driverless industry). But despite emergency responders giving numerous examples of how dangerous the cars were in emergency situations, they were ignored.
As far as I can tell, they were open in 4 metro areas (SF, Austin, Houston, Phoenix). So this is their original testing zone, and 1 out of 4 of contemporary zones down.
Will this impede their ability to retain and expand existing zones?
What I found so far is this:
- Waymo and Cruise have driven about 8 million miles driverless (mostly in San Francisco) and reported about 100 crashes (mostly minor like scraping shopping cart, etc) and many that were fault of another car. (as of September 2023)
- Apparently a human drives am average 100 million miles between fatal accidents. In that case we do not have enough data, yet.
I'm not sure what to think. Is the rate of accidents a cause of concern? Or is this blown out of proportion and driverless cars are actually safer? Or (most likely) we simply do not know, yet?
My drive to work is 20 miles and a really good stretch of that is just 1 lane where I’m stuck behind a car or the road is empty. In those cases I have no problem letting FSD handle everything, the road is extremely hilly, bendy, lane lines vanish every once in a while and it’s fine so I do find it useful at times, though not worth 200$ a month by a long stretch. I’ll probably cancel the subscription soon.
Its problems appear very clearly whenever it needs to accurately predict what other cars on the road will do to make its decision. It is honestly horrible at that and while a few times I tried to not intervene, I realized I was just creating a nuisance and now stopped allowing FSD to deal with those situations. It is also bad if there are wrong lane lines (happens at one final stretch of my daily drive)
Finally, as someone working in AI, I’m actually very optimistic about their next approach of just learning an end to end model to drive the car. I think this is the only scaleable way to reach human level driving. Any set of rules based + optimization based planner will have those edge cases that ruin the cars capability, in fact it turns out the long tail is really long. When a human is not drunk and focused he is a remarkably good driver. On the other hand, if you just need to capture the edge cases data and add it to your training set to solve it, you can capture all the possible driving conditions that come up on road. This reminds of how there were hundreds of failure modes and jailbreaks for ChatGPT early on while now there are close to None, presumably because they just added them to the training set. If a good human level self driving car appears, I’m convinced it will be an end to end approach, whether the Tesla team are capable of this, who knows.
Also for those who think, OpenAI’s scale based approach only works for language, I have access to ChatGPT Vision and its capabilities astound me. Scale for sure works
Tesla doesn’t have an end-to-end model. They call it “end-to-end AI”, which just means they’re applying AI to all subsystems, exactly like everyone else. All the big players already use heavy ML-based planning systems that are not “rules or optimization based” and which are way more sophisticated than anything Tesla has put out or is planning to.
[1] https://wayve.ai
Why aren't they investing in core engineering, instead of moonshots?
> In a statement, Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow disputed that Cruise failed to provide the full video during the first meeting with the DMV. “I can confirm that Cruise showed the full video to the DMV on October 3rd, and played it multiple times,” Lindow told Motherboard in a statement.
Filling out forms with made-up bullshit just to get an approval works great when you are putting together a SaaS sales presentation, not so much when it's the state Department of Transport on the other end and you are working on matters of public safety.
Is there something specific that caused this halt on Cruise's testing permits?
10000% we need safer designs for streets and roads, better education, automated enforcement of speed limits, dis-incentives for larger/heavier/more dangerous vehicles, ...
All of these things need to be done, and can be done with existing technology today. We don't need self-driving cars to address our problems; they're essentially a distraction and an excuse to postpone improvements.
If that car gets found doing something obviously illegal (speeding, running a red light, some kind of "reckless driving" camera review, etc) the registered owner is automatically assigned blame. They can potentially file paperwork to the court to prove someone else was driving (a lease arrangement, some valet ticket along with some proof from the restaurant or whatever at the time, a sworn statement from another individual confessing to it, etc). But ultimately by default the owner of the car is responsible for the safe handling of the vehicle. If you're worried someone is going to break the law with your car, don't give them your keys. If you don't like this, find another form of transportation.
Tag enforcement needs to be stronger. If an automated system sees a tag that doesn't make sense, it should be immediately flagged and enforcement dispatched. Lots of cops already have ALPRs, those should immediately trigger. I see so many cars out there with sketchy paper tags, this whole thing needs to be shut down.
Driving a car on public streets shouldn't be nearly as easy as it is in the US. Far too many people don't treat driving with the respect it needs.
Why would you let, by definition, more dangerous cars on the road in order to perfect their software, when perfectly good solutions exist?
Perhaps in the end Waymo will be forced to license the base technology somehow.
Understandably it is expensive. But the profits will similarly be great.
They ought to build their own mini cities to test on as part of their own Manhattan Project.
First, the California DMV, with result seen here.
The incident that triggered this event happened when a human driver, who is still at large, hit a pedestrian who flew into the path of the Cruise vehicle.
The car executed a maneuver to pull over for a safety stop, but failed to recognize the woman who was dragged some distance.
Second, they reached to the Federal agencies via Nancy Pelosi’s office, with primary focus being the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The request was to gather data, which given the friendly posture of the NHTSA at this time will likely result in the opening of an investigation.
Both of these moves have some bite. The California DMV can suspend licensure as happened here.
But they’re fairly straight-shooter civil service types in the end, and they’ll eventually clear the vehicles for use. You can see this in part because of the action against Cruise only, rather than Waymo.
Some may attribute this to Waymo’s greater political sway in California. But my experience of the products themselves is that Waymo has a higher quality self-driving system.
The NHTSA is a bit trickier to predict.
The NHTSA’s powers are broad in theory and as granted by statute. They could theoretically issue an order to remove a type of vehicle from the road for imminent threat to public safety.
However, their typical modus operandi is to issue recalls and work with the auto companies. They won’t want to test these powers under the current court, so my opinion is that they won’t take much action.
After leaving the state, I'm glad to not have to drive on the same road as these.
Yet, trying to create near-peer artificial human driving intelligence—just so cities can continue to be designed around horseless carriages, minivans, and truck nuts—well, that may not have been the best solution to the problem.
Ideally, autonomous driving would be for “the edge” of a transportation network. Like a house on a dirt road, or a camping site, or the home of a misguided friend who moved to south Gilbert, AZ ;)
You shouldn’t need to be watching for basketballs and red lights on interstate highways. Everyone is going the same direction for long distances between transfers. Cars are often individualism, which I’m certainly not against.
The arrogance of “driving driverless should be easy” probably comes from a lot of people seeing driving as a part of their basic humanity. The car is nearly a cyborg extension of their mobility and physical power.
Me? I just wanna get to the concert. Take the humans out of the equation where it makes sense. I’d rather go with light rail; not my friend who offered to drive, then road rages over a merge, then follows some minivan psychopathically for a few minutes (true stories).
We shot ourselves in the foot because mass transportation in America has failed to impress us as much as a Jaguar XK or Jeep KJ, or whatever your Soul Car is.
As much as I'd like to agree with this, the fundamental problem is that most people in the US do not work at a single point in the city anymore.
That's the real problem. You don't get to connect existing enclaves. You have to build your mass transit, fund it at a loss for decades, make sure it doesn't get overrun with crime, and maybe after 10-20 years there will be enough housing and office space along the line in order to make it viable. Maybe.
Or you can throw down a couple more roads and let people figure out where to live, themselves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
But like. We can certainly innovate more flexible routing systems of transport that don’t require specific neural training and licensing to use foot pedals to stop it crashing.
(Maybe I could have reserved some of those neurons to be better at drumming!)
What stops us from using modular mass transit systems? Lots of things. But when mountains stopped trains, we exploded the mountains. Built huge bridges over ravines.
Because of the period between 1850 and 1970, I don’t buy the excuses. Unless it’s just “we’re still not there yet.”
[0]I can see myself not agreeing with the conclusions, but to not even see the question broached in these terms is maddening.
No advanced robotics necessary.
[1]And getting there slower has the opportunity cost of surplus deaths at the current rate minus the terminal rate - a year delay to that future costs 39,960 lives. (A year delay to ubiquitous public transport does as well ofc.)
Note for example today's suit against Meta for alleged harms against children. No such suit against TV aimed at children or e.g. fashion magazines that are well-known to have deleterious effects on children. Autonomous vehicles are new tech, so the bar will be higher.
But every new model or software update will invalidate what we've observed and know about automated driving.
We're in an era of extreme obfuscation and enshittification by tech companies, even where safety is involved. I'd be more likely to trust self driving tech if I trusted the current form of the tech industry, and trusted that regulatory bodies had the power and ability to oversee them as effectively as when they were first regulating cars.
Of course even that wasn't perfect, but my trust that we can even do that well is nonexistent.
Public transport is a safer alternative but not as profitable
is it accepted as a standard by any professionals? Why or why not?
One simple and obvious reason for this standard is that it optimizes for human safety.
“A highly-skilled and attentive human driver” is a reasonable standard. So-called autonomous vehicles are nowhere near that.
I think AVs need to be better than p95 or so to be socially accepted.
If we can achieve that, the best in 100 or best in 1000 may not be far off.
Those that do are making a costly mistake. Any robot-assisted car still requires a human driver to be paying attention to the road, but by definition, because the robot does most of the driving, the human failsafe is going lulled into a false sense of security, or bored by effectively driving without actually driving. They will slack, and when the critical moment of awareness from the human is needed, he will be caught off guard, as opposed to the actual human driver who was aware the entire time, because he always had to be.
More to the point, even if I had a 100% guarantee of safety, I would never want to have the joys of driving taken away from me in the first place! Driving is liberating. It's power. It's the freedom to go anywhere and do anything. It's, dare I say, cathartic.
And for those that are unable to drive, Uber & Lyft exist to fill in the gap. They are themselves a relatively new technology, just under a decade old, and you can always find a quick, affordable ride on demand to just about anywhere.
What gap in the market would a self-driving car even fulfill?
This is yet another example of the arrogance of big tech, pushing out unsafe and socially deleterious products in the hopes of a get rich quick scheme. It's no different to what social media did a decade ago or what "generative a.i." is doing now.