GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise(ojoyoshidareport.com) |
GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise(ojoyoshidareport.com) |
Don't get me wrong, I'm on team ban cars and replace every stroad with a light rail corridor and bike paths, but I think self driving cars will be fine in some number of years once the haters calm down. Hard for me to believe we can't achieve better than the average shitty driver level of safety.
People often make arguments that "oh it will still be less accidents than human drivers", which is true, but, the problem is that human accuracy is a very poor benchmark for autonomous systems. Autonomous systems need to be held to a higher bar, and it's better if that accountability and expectation is held from the beginning.
Why? Won't this lead to a lot of needless deaths at the hands of human drivers while we wait for driverless cars to improve? Why not roll them out once they are safer than human drivers?
Never let a good solution get in the way of a good problem.
“But this medicine, while it can cure cancer, has a 1% chance of death!” “Ah shit good point, fuck it then. As long as we can still get pissy with that musk fellow.”
So even if self driving works most of the time, it takes a lot of work to address weird edge cases even the most inebriated human would not mess up, that other drivers/pedestrians would not anticipate.
Also it can't figure out lanes at all and is always trying to change lanes into the wrong lane. The navigate on Autopilot stack seemed better than the current FSD stack.
Ultimately, to design a transport system that benefits all of society, it needs to go from point A to point B. Light rail / public transport will always need a +somethingelse, in order to do that. Or we end up expanding the rail infra so much that we have just reinvented roads, but a little more constrained. Or we end up with car shares. Either way is fine.
I just don't see how to cater for lots of different disabilities and needs without 'cars' being a (maybe small) part of it. Regardless of what path we take, I just see the evolution converging back on a car-like vehicle for a substantial portion of the freight/transport industry (albeit 'trains' of them, but not physically connected), even if it's mostly final mile. But people and things don't want to hop between transport modes. They want to step outside their door into a vehicle, then out again at the destination.
Anyway... Self driving vehicles could be worse than some drivers currently, but it sure is better than SOME drivers I have seen. For an industry that has only had 15yrs direct investment, it's already better than bad drivers from my view - So it's almost time to start making driving licenses slightly harder to get and keep, IMO (it's so easy to get a license. It's hard to take them away, unless it's after an incident. There are so many very unsafe drivers).
That's a long way of saying that I concur with your comment.
Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.
I've taken 5 trips so far, and all have been great and better than the average uber driver.
I've had 3 sketchy Uber rides out of about 10 total in the last 3 months. One older woman was was peering over her steering wheel commenting that she really can't see that well at night, she'd kinda guess and head over to next lane, and had to abort once when she almost merged into another car. One plunged across 3 lanes of traffic without signaling while looking at the phone in her hand, twice! Another did a no look left turn while looking at the map and almost hit a pedestrian in the crosswalk. I said "stop!" and he did and looked up shocked. Slow enough that it would have only been a broken leg, but still...
Super cruise is a feature in GM cars.
If so I think it is unethical and false advertising to have a feature removed from something someone already owns.
Super Cruise - Hands free driving on highways Ultra Cruise - Hands free self driving cars almost anywhere
Ultra Cruise was never released.
"Ultra Cruise" is, or was going to be, a version of Super Cruise that worked anywhere.
I still believe divided highway trucking between major cities with last mile handoff to humans has legs, but I wonder how much the Tesla claims have poisoned the proverbial well of a more constrained system for the foreseeable future.
Who is liable?
That’s what largely killed prior attempts, especially those using custom built roads. If the car crashes who is liable - the manufacturer, the road builder, or the driver? I think it is telling that the pull back we’re seeing is correlated with early cases in this becoming more salient.
Why does this have to be a technical limitation/success (im not saying it is or isn’t) only?
Do what you do excellently. Learn. Don't follow.
Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity.
Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles. The legacy manufacturers will end up licensing one or the other, a la Android/iOS.
One can possibly compensate for an inferior “brain” by having more kinds of data to discern meaning from.
Maybe he'll be wrong in the future but for now even Tesla seems to have pulled the radar stuff from their cars.
Good luck finding non-press videos of it in action
2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.
Waymo isn’t profitable and has been a massive money loser over the past several years. See “Other Bets” in Alphabet’s earnings. Where does this claim come from?
The former sounds like a massive (understating it probably) infrastructure investment. Trains sound better (as other comment while I was typing notes).
The latter doesn't solve the issues noted in the recent article here: https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri...
Am curious to hear more thoughts/insights.
I never trusted the Cruise cars, they would drive like a teenager that was afraid of the road. But Waymo seems a step up even from the Uber drivers.
After that, vehicle production and operations cost will be the main factor in the race to $0
I don't think divided lanes are required either. The problems with self-driving trucking aren't about following the lane.
In an interview some years ago (I think it was lex friedman) he was asked about Tesla and their radars etc and he said he thinks the future of self driving cars is vision only.
I'm a driver, but I'm a safer than average driver. So why would I want a system that's better than "average" where average includes drunk people, speeders, new/bad drivers, driving in ice, etc.
I don't think it should be illegal to use a system that's actually better than average (which is 1 accident every 18 years), but many drivers might not want to.
Also when some company's financial success hinges on them reporting their safety being above a certain accident threshhold, I think any statistics provided by that company on safety should be doubted unless an indepedent third party can verify them.
And those people drive on the same roads as you, so you're still affected. Don't you want other drivers on the road to be less likely to t-bone you because they ran a red light?
In the UK, almost everyone learned (and learns) using a manual/stick shift vehicle, and if you learn and test in an automatic gearbox, your license is limited and you legally can’t drive manual. Hill starts and clutch control can be much fun! Lessons and the test involved difficult city situations ranging from extremely narrow streets, through 7-lane roundabouts, country roads both single-track and unrestricted (so 60mph speed limit, but not necessarily safe to drive that quickly - good judgement is required). You must pass a theory and hazard perception exercise, and the testing is government-administered.
In the US it seems almost everyone learns in an automatic vehicle, your license then lets you drive stick with no restriction. At least near cities, the roads you learn and test on are seemingly not 2” wider than your vehicle (measured at the mirrors), the situations are comparatively simple as well. There’s no hazard perception test. In my state, the test is administered by the instructor and not an impartial/neutral party.
I haven’t gone looking for large datasets to support this but it feels like the “I just passed my test” driver competence is going to be different.
I would be extremely happy to buy and trust a system like Ultra Cruise if it could navigate UK roads and city situations autonomously with less accidents/incidents than drivers at the 75th percentile in those environment, meaning with widespread adoption the system would raise the bar, and improve median safety properties of being a driver/participant on the roads. However, I would guess had they not cancelled it, being acceptably good for US driving conditions / better than the average US driver really just means you’ve built a system which can work in the US but absolutely won’t work in London, Paris, Berlin or anywhere else?
And I think that's a fine reason. Even if you don't think it's a fine reason, it's not going to change.
But Tesla or anyone else pulling radar stuff doesn’t really suggest he’s right. Until any of them succeed, it doesn’t mean much.
Even if it didn't work in snow (and it's unlikely to do worse than humans), all the west coast, desert west, and south have basically zero snow all year long.
I suspect large portions of North America will be easily serviceable by robotaxi.
And I do wonder what hail would do to it. Could cause a lot of... interesting input data. And subsequently a lot of interesting driving.
Amazon made no profit for many, many years, but that's because they were re-investing all their revenue. No one doubted that they could have turned a profit if they wanted. (Tbc, there is not yet a component of Waymo that is profitable because, as mentioned, they are just operating in a handful of cities.)
Where is the actual evidence of this, though? I'm not trying to be snide -- genuinely curious.
Waymo is expanding -- their service areas (and operating times) have expanded in SF and Phoenix. There's a waitlist in LA and Austin. Yet Waymo's financials are still buried in Alphabet's "Other Bets" line, which lost $1.2 billion in Q3 2023.
You think Google, which has been catching heat endlessly for falling behind in AI, has not only won the self-driving race from a technical standpoint (the claim by many in this thread), but has also found a way to make it both profitable and scalable to arbitrary locations, and they're hiding this reality in their earnings statements? Seems unlikely to me. Why bother with waitlists and slow rollouts in favorable climates? Why not blitzscale this thing to all markets and disclose the numbers to investors and send the stock to the moon?
(Also Google is bad at full commitment, and I don't know how much that extends to Alphabet, but they as a company seem pathologically incapable of putting even a majority of their weight behind anything, which is a significant source of failures for them)
> Where is the actual evidence of this, though? I'm not trying to be snide -- genuinely curious.
That claim was just based off how all businesses work. All the infrastructure, management, training, etc., that scale sublinearly with volume are diluted at large volume.
> Yet Waymo's financials are still buried in Alphabet's "Other Bets" line, which lost $1.2 billion in Q3 2023...
As I said, I definitely think Waymo is losing money overall right now, even in a particular regime.
> Why not blitzscale this thing to all markets and disclose the numbers to investors and send the stock to the moon?
They are in fact expanding rapidly. But this can't be scaled as fast as a software/internet company. They literally have to manufacture custom cars and, crucially, map the region in detail. Remember that Tesla's meteoric rise was ~70% growth per year. For years Waymo was only offering service to the general public in Phoenix. They opened in San Francisco in late 2022, and then in LA in mid 2023.
Also, Waymo (~$30B in 2020) is still an tiny part of Alphabet stock (>$1T), who owns a controlling interest. They have no reason to pump the stock because they have no shortage of capital.
> Don't we want these things to be better at driving than humans?
Sure we do. Your options are, a as-good-as-a-human-driver for 1 unit of cost, or a better-than-human-driver at 1000 units of cost. Realistically, which do you pick?
Other tech like Waymo is good. They drive well. But it's not scalable--expensive mapping and hundreds of thousands of lines of code written to address the nuances of whatever city they specialize the solution to. Not to mention that they only operate in cities with sunny weather all year round!
And Phoenix, and very soon LA, and very soon Austin. They're expanding, not staying in one spot for eternity.
> Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles.
What a coincidence, because L2 (what Tesla actually is) to L4 self driving are millions of miles away from each other.
The race is on, and if Tesla can fix a large number of small issue, they'll be able to do a massive global rollout fairly rapidly.
Maybe Tesla's approach isn't the way to go.
1. Waymo costs around $120,000 and the cost is rapidly dropping with new hardware generations and vehicle platforms. They’re in LA, soon in Austin, airport rides in Phoenix and imminent highway driving.
2. Tesla and Comma are only L2, not even L3.
Too many sources to cite but here is Wikipedia
It was very twitchy and jarring at stop signs, there are several uncontrolled T-intersections around my house that FSD just flew through (almost striking another car one time), and I didn't like how it always tried to get into the slowest lane on the highway during rush hour.
Maybe I'll try it again this summer to see how it's improved, but some of the close calls last time soured me on the experience. It felt more like I was babysitting a new driver and less like I was being chauffeured around.
And that’s a serious question, because the stress of trying to anticipate the next phantom brake event completely defeats the purpose in my mind. I’d much rather just drive myself.
Used to happen to me once every ~100 miles. This year, it only happened once the whole year, and the drop was maybe ~10mph.
Leveling means nothing, and are determined by the company. Actual operations and range of operational capability matter.
His suggested metric is cars/operator, which was ~20 IIRC.
For Tesla, for the near future, that number is 1.
That's what I thought too, but apparently it's not that clear cut. Their manual says that the driver must be ready to take over not only when prompted by the system but also "due to obvious circumstances". It's not clear what that means — cue the lawsuits. https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/no-mercedes-benz-w...
Tesla's approach will likely be the winner long-term and can be flipped on globally far faster than Waymo's could
The levels aren’t just slapped on by the companies for vanity. They indicate liability and therefore capability.
Waymo's approach is a Level 4 system from the start, but in a very limited operating environments, and slowly expanding.
Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather conditions, and yet still does a great job.
If Cruise had a fallback driver all the time, it would “operate everywhere” too. That’s not really saying much. The entire problem is about how to remove the driver, which Tesla is nowhere close to in any geographic area. A dead giveaway is how they’re reluctant to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel.