[HN Gopher] Cruise's Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco ___________________________________________________________________ Cruise's Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco Author : fortran77 Score : 34 points Date : 2022-07-08 20:53 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.wired.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com) | fudged71 wrote: | If a human driver is lost or in distress, the default behavior | would be to find the nearest safe spot to pull over and put on | your hazards. Shouldn't this be the default fallback behavior if | a remote driver isn't responding? | nerdbaggy wrote: | Yup they do that. Just happened to pull off to the side in a | crosswalk | | > Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo provided a written | statement that said the company's vehicles are programmed to | pull over and turn on their hazard lights when they encounter a | technical problem or meet road conditions they can't handle. | jdminhbg wrote: | > If a human driver is lost or in distress, the default | behavior would be to find the nearest safe spot to pull over | and put on your hazards. | | Well, it _should_ be... | 37ef_ced3 wrote: | From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a | hardware/software taxi driver is in any way better than a human | taxi driver, particularly with (human) driver assist preventing | collisions and all the other warnings provided by a modern car. | | In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a | human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) | you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth | driving. With a robotaxi you have something inferior. But maybe | it's a lot cheaper, right? | | The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only | advantage. If you own a car that drives itself, that's a | different story. Everybody can see the value proposition. | | But is the robotaxi actually cheaper at all? We would have to | look at the cost of the hardware (how often do lidars fail and | how much do they cost to replace?) and the cost of the software | development and the cost of the fallback human remote operators | (fleet monitoring and teleoperation) and the years of huge R&D | investment (billions of dollars) to evaluate whether a robotaxi | fleet is indeed cheaper. So how much cheaper is it, exactly? 5%? | 10%? 15%? | | As a customer, would you pay a little more to have the most | flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth (human brain + | driver assist) or would you want to save a few dollars and risk | having some dumb piece of software strand you in the middle of | the road somewhere? | | We all use Google Maps or Apple Maps when driving and most of us | have seen these systems do boneheaded things. Just imagine the | dumb things a robotaxi could do. It's hard for a normal person to | be excited about this. I don't know a single person who is | excited by robotaxis. | AlotOfReading wrote: | There's a couple misunderstandings here. | | > The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its | only advantage. | | That's one advantage. Another is that that it's a third option | to the traditional dichotomy of driving yourself or be driven | by a stranger. | | It's worth taking a step back and looking at the bigger | picture. Robotaxis aren't the end-all-be-all for anyone. It's | just a bounded problem domain with some promise of commercial | profitability on the road to "full autonomy". A baby step, in | other words. Yeah, the autonomous vehicles on the road today | aren't clearly and obviously better than the best human | drivers, but how are they going to get to that point without | going through all the intermediate steps to get there? | marcosdumay wrote: | Yes, the robotaxy will be much cheaper. Maybe not the first | generation, but once it matures any little bit, it will be | cheaper. | | They will also be available at 3AM at a medium sized city. | | And yeah, that's basically their benefit. That's enough to | displace all the human competition, anyway. | hansword wrote: | I think your 'only advantage' is a bit premature. | | 3 seconds thought: Robotaxis can't get covid (or warthog-flu or | whatever new pandemic the next years will bring), which might | be an advantage to some customers. | | Having said that, I don't drive nor use taxis, so I don't care | much. | jjulius wrote: | I can't wait for that point many moons in the future, where FSD | is fully/widely-adopted, and where every Honda (or pick any | mfg'er, really) on the planet stops right where it is because | some key piece of their critical infrastructure went down. | recursivedoubts wrote: | if you want a vision of the future, imagine an ambulance stuck | behind an automated vehicle trying to update its firmware when | AWS is down, forever | sonofhans wrote: | Nice. | | "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping | on a human face-- forever." -- George Orwell, 1984 | salmonfamine wrote: | Self-driving cars are a solution for a problem that has already | been solved. Build trains. But of course, this doesn't benefit | automakers, requires a move towards high-density housing that | NIMBY's and certain classes of investors oppose, so instead we'll | create an entirely new class of problems by allowing these | companies to unleash their insufficient technology on public | roads. | DoneWithAllThat wrote: | Explain how trains solve the last mile problem? The thing that | roads already solve? | salmonfamine wrote: | Walk. | | EDIT: or just drive, as you do now. | rnk wrote: | so we build giant parking lots at our metro train stations? | We need different transportation. The us is terrible at | building needed train infra. But just like in Europe, you | need different solutions at diff levels. | SECProto wrote: | > so we build giant parking lots at our metro train | stations | | No. The comment you're replying to specifically said | "walk", while the comment at top of thread specifically | mentioned that building trains "requires a move towards | high-density housing". High density housing, trains, and | walking is a solved transportation solution for cities | with much higher/denser populations than we have in North | America. | | Getting there from here is not such a solved solution, | but the general process many places are working on goes: | | build train (with park and ride at outskirts for current | ridership) --> build high density mixed use near stations | (which now doesn't need parking for each unit) --> rinse | and repeat until city is more sustainable without blowing | $$$,$$$,$$$ on road capital projects every year to deal | with ever-increasing traffic | eric-hu wrote: | What cities or countries did this successfully? Were they | as dependent on cars as American cities tend to be? | tmcw wrote: | Sure, so I'm from a tiny town in New Jersey. I was used to | having to drive 30 minutes to the train station as a kid, and | there are no buses there, so car ownership is mandatory. | | Took a long time to realize that next to one of the buildings | in town was a train station. And twenty years ago there were | buses, too. | | Anyway, solve the last mile by funding transit and rebuilding | trains. We had them before, we should have them again. | aetherson wrote: | I am willing to bet that if self-driving cars come along, they | will see strong sales/rental/deployment, however they end up | working in Europe, or Japan, or wherever else you have in mind | as some place that has "already solved this problem." | salmonfamine wrote: | That only raises more questions. People will buy them, of | course. People buy cigarettes, heroin, and NFT's. Will they | actually meet high enough safety standards in these places? | Will they reduce commute times? | | In other words, are they actually going to deliver the long- | haul, end-all-be-all transit solution that many of its | proponents imagine they will? Or is it just a nice-to-have | feature that will make driving a little safer and a little | easier for some people? And if so, is that value really worth | the incredible amount of effort that's gone into making it a | reality? | AlotOfReading wrote: | How do you plan to get permission/funding to build trams, | metros, and trains in every city in America? The minuscule | commercial deployments we've already seen in cities like | Phoenix and SF cover vastly more area than the last 50 years of | passenger rail construction in those same cities. | salmonfamine wrote: | Well, that's the problem. Self-driving cars does not solve | that problem. | CamperBob2 wrote: | Ah, yes, fixed rail. Great for locking assumptions about | population and labor distribution over the next 50-100 years | into multi-billion dollar financial commitments that have to be | made today. And unmatched when it comes to moving people from | one place where they don't want to be to another place where | they don't want to be. | salmonfamine wrote: | As opposed to highways, which magically have none of these | problems. | ROTMetro wrote: | It does seem sort of iffy from this article (though I have | not researched if the article is just FUD yet) | https://eurasiantimes.com/a-whopping-900b-debt-chinas- | once-p... | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-08 23:00 UTC)