Cruise recalls all self-driving cars after grisly accident and California ban

This is just a perfect representation of the limitations of driverless cars. What happens if you crash? Well, it depends doesn't it. Sometimes you want to pull over and get out the way to limit the danger of anything else happening. Sometimes you've got to stop in place because you'll cause more damage/danger by moving. How do you know? You make a judgement call, you might even get out of your vehicle to check it before moving.

What did Cruise do? Well they just said screw it, detect a crash? Pull over. Great, you've just dragged a pedestrian down the road. Now they're putting out a press release saying the new plan is to just stop and not move. Ok, how long before a cruise car detects a crash in the middle of a highway and stops in the middle of highway speed traffic. There isn't a right answer of what to do here, it's a judgement call and I think we probably need better answers than just "I'll just swap out the if statement here".

Pedestrians and cars ,self driving and human driven, often have conflicts. This is why driving in the city is so stressful compared to driving on the highway.

Maybe it would be better for Cruise , Waymo etc. to focus on highway-only self driving cars. I would like to board a self-driving car near a highway on-ramp and I would like it to drive me to my friends and family in another city; I would exit the car near an highway exit. For everything else, I could use cabs or Uber etc or public transport.

Self-driving cars are the single biggest farce in modern times. It is an effectively intractable problem with our current technology and infrastructure. And in addition, it is a solution to a question or problem that doesn't exist. Driverless cars don't solve any problem and only create problems. Yet, taxpayers have been swindled out of money and their lives in pursuit of this.

> In a statement on Wednesday, the GM unit said that it did the recall even though it determined that a similar crash with a risk of serious injury could happen again every 10m to 100m miles without the update.

This kind of misses the point though (probably intentionally). Sure the odds of this exact same type of crash happening again are quite low. But the question is how many of these "one in 10 million mile" crashes are there? Fixing just this type of crash doesn't solve the broader problem.