Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations.
The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode.
In terms of staffing, we are intentionally over staffed given our small fleet size in order to handle localized bursts of RA demand. With a larger fleet we expect to handle bursts with a smaller ratio of RA operators to AVs. Lastly, I believe the staffing numbers quoted by nyt include several other functions involved in operating fleets of AVs beyond remote assistance (people who clean, charge, maintain, etc.) which are also something that improve significantly with scale and over time.
> Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles
The NYT is definitely implying 1.5 workers per vehicle intervene to assist driving at first read. Only after reading the above comment do I notice that they shoved the statements together using different meanings for “workers” as they didn’t have the actual statistic on hand.
Where are these remote assistant human drivers located (country), and how have they been screened for temporarily “driving” vehicles in those cities (do these humans have American licenses? ). How is all this regulated?
Basically, I am curious if these remote assistant drivers are located in foreign nations without American licenses. And if so, how did you get them cleared to be able to “drive” cars on Americas roads?
Thanks
Ps: I took a cruise once in Austin and it needed remote assistance.
"The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help."
Hoo boy, sure wish the NYT had clarified that. That changes things significantly.
It's telling that you declined a request for an interview, yet still feel the need to clarify on HN. You'd be doing a lot better with transparency and public trust by just taking the interview.
Is there something that's covered by an interview that a list of questions or email exchange wouldn't? Interviews take up a valuable chunk of the CEOs time, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to them declining it.
Reporters take email interviews and interviews with corporate officers besides CEOs all the time. Any CEO can get a media relations person to write up an email response and then check it over quickly -- or have, for example, the CTO do it instead.
Hi Kyle (hello again), thanks for being so transparent with this.
I suspect this is a moment where news are looking for a scapegoat / villain from the AV sector, and your team is an easy target given what has happened recently.
I believe that transparency is the right way to address issues and concerns. Please keep doing that.
>> Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations.
Funny, since I thought full autonomy was the goal of the company. 2 percent human intervention isn't scalable.
For example - does the vehicle have to come to a full stop, as it can't safely proceed without an operator intervention? At busy periods, do they also have to wait for an operator to become available?
A busy junction could easily have 100 cars through it per minute. If two cars every minute stopped unexpectedly, that would hardly be scalable.
That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.
They could spend $75/hr on employees and the cost per car-hour would be just $1.50. That's nothing.
3.5M people work as truck drivers in the US, enough, in principle, to drive ~175M cars at the same time assuming 2% of cars need help at any given moment, ie ~60% of all the cars and trucks in the entire country being driven simultaneously.
Presumably though they'd be able to shave that down a few fold between where they are and dominating transportation nationwide (should they ever do so). So, it's pretty scalable in practical terms.
This is true, but the numbers inflated even. There's no way they'll pay these people more than $15 or $20 an hour once it scales, which probably further helps your point.
If you sell a ton of these cars, having employees controlling 2% of the time means your costs become enormous rather quickly. You would have to have a subscription business model for this to make any sense where the person buys the car and then has to keep paying monthly for self driving.
Cruise is aiming for a robotaxi market, not for consumer vehicles. In their business plan, they own and operate fleets. In that kind of model, it’s possible that they can get away with 4% human control. Another way to put that is that they would have one operator on duty for every 25 cars.
No-one credible is talking about selling self-driving cars to consumers for a long time. Taxi services make much more economic sense and are all-around more comfortable from a liability perspective as well.
2-4% is very high. It essentially means none of your trips can be completed without remote intervention.
This puts your cars and the safety of the whole city at the mercy of reliability of mobile networks. This is a fundamental architectural change in the design of the city. Do the telecom operators take liability if they can't meet their designed SLOs for availability? What are the worse case scenarios that you have considered?
I'm not really sure what you mean there, but I do know that companies are happy to make unsubstantiated claims. One way news organizations deal with this reality is by interviewing the company and questioning them when things are not clear. Personally I find it likelier that Cruise has things to hide if they don't want to answer interview questions, but I guess that's just me.
I would consider this realistic service design, just as Meta’s Cicero (plays blitz Diplomacy) is smart design. It might work as a service.
What the answer glances over is that even with just 3% of the time requiring human assistance (2 minutes out of every hour) the term ‘autonomous vehicle’ is not really applicable anymore in the sense everybody is using/understanding that term. The idea behind that term assumed ‘full’ autonomy. Self driving cars. And there is no reason to assume that this is still in sight. The answer puts that ‘self-driving car’ on the shelf.
PS. Human assistent seems to me a difficult job, given the constant speed and concentration requirements.
By this logic Tesla does not have "autonomous vehicles" either. They just do adjustments after the car crashes and kills someone instead of doing it online.
Your plan is to make someone in india remote control my car? What if the signal goes down? What if it lags and they accidentally give the wrong instructions?
Hello Cruise CEO, there's a huge market for durable and profitable "dumb" cars. Why don't you get on that market? In a time when electronics represents over 30% of car costs and ~50% of car failures, people like me would be happy to buy a car that doesn't suck (low-tech) and can be maintained for decades for a reasonable price. In the meantime, i'll keep buying old Renault/Peugeot cars from the fifties/sixties i guess :(
I actually concur, my DPF is a nagging beast and I hate it.
But I am betting that quite a lot of the electronic components of cars these days are tied to things, my DPF is a great example, that come from safety and environmental regulation. If you pull the ECU out and tricked the motor into running anyway, I am betting your emissions profile will suck massively. Ditto transmission. The rest of my car seems to involve safety features, sensors and cameras mostly.
By the time you reinvent the car to exclude all these things, then make it roadworthy again I reckon you would end up with almost exactly the standard modern car again. Car makers arent putting computers in for funsies.
> Car makers arent putting computers in for funsies.
There's a bit of everything. Some parts are due to regulations. Some parts are due to providing fancy options (LCD screens, seat heaters..), some parts are useful for diagnostics.
Still, some designs are overly complex because during production it's easier to use a hundred MCUs assigned to a specific task. But for durability purposes, it would be better to have clear circuitry with only a handful of MCUs running open source software.
I'm guessing there's an interesting middle ground to explore between "raw motor + wheels" and "FSD car".
The things you say are just factually wrong on many levels.
> durable and profitable "dumb" cars
Both of these are pretty much wrong.
First of all, just based on regulation and safety, the car is gone have a huge amount of electronics. Second, regulation about emissions also require a huge amount of electronics. You can't get away from that no matter how dumb you want to make a car. Maybe you don't like it, but society prefers less people to die even if it is not inconvenient for you.
Granted, in many way an old inefficient smaller car is still saver and better for the environment then a modern huge car. But that i a failure of the regulation.
Next the idea is that such cars would be profitable. This is simply inaccurate. Car companies can barley make money on cars as it is, in fact, without parts supply they don't really make money on those cars.
Additionally most consumers simply prefer to buy cars with lots of multimedia options and things like that. Having the ability to warm up your car before you get in is useful for example. Having phone conversations in your car is useful. Having GPS in your car is useful. People like having heated seats. People like having good sound in the car.
People simply aren't buying the cars you seem to be demanding and doing such cars simply wouldn't be profitable. In fact, generally if you look at China you will see an increase in the types of features you don't like.
To suggest an autonomous car company gets into that business makes no sense at all.
And I say this as somebody that doesn't own a car and generally thinks cars should be replaced as much as possible and band in many places.
There are many ways repeatability could be improved without going back to 1960s cars. Many of those should be embraced but you will simply not get around some inherent complexity of the modern world.
They do? Nobody is forcing you to buy a decked out Cadillac. If you want to buy a base model Malibu for $25k, I'm sure you can find a dealer that will gladly sell it to you.
If you want a brand new car for $10k you’re going to need a time machine, or move to a country without modern safety standards.
That's not wrong, but still some parts wear out and it's harder to find them nowadays. Although to be fair there's still some production for the most popular cars (eg. 2CH, 4L).
But it would be interesting if we took that old "built forever" approach (remember washing machines that last a lifetime?) and used it to build modern low-tech cars with the newer higher safety standards and efficiency gains. It's a shame how everything that comes out of factories nowadays has a 10 year lifespan.
remote operation of vehicles often makes a lot of sense economically, since you can effectively decouple drivers from vehicles/riders. As you pointed out, this means you can shift to deal with peak loads and all of that - great.
Given everything you know now, was it wise to push for expansion over improvements to safety and reliability of the vehicles? On one hand, there is certainly value in expanding a bit to uncover edge-cases sooner. On the other hand, I'm not convinced it was worth expanding before getting the business sorted out.
My guess is that given the relatively large fixed costs involve in operating an AV fleet, that it makes some sense to expand at least up to that sort of 'break even' point. Do we know what that point is? Put differently, is there some natural "stopping point" of expansion where Cruise could hit break-even on its fixed costs and then shift focus towards reliability?
The first thing that came to my mind after reading, “… makes a lot sense” was the latency overhead that’s incurred when RA is activated and associating it with drunk driving due to the increased response time.
Maybe the article answers the following, but don’t know since I haven’t read it yet.
- median, p95, p99 latencies for remote assistance
I think a lot of the confusion here is over what's meant by "RA". This isn't a remote driving situation. It's like Waymo, where the human can make suggestions that give the robot additional information about the environment.
So when low wage mechanical turk costs turn out cheaper than engineering to improve driverless vehs… this will just be another exploitative gig job for folks in remote locations?
I don’t trust proper attention will be given to improvements in tech once profit and roi is considered compared to human labor costs especially in lower wage nations.
Well, low wage mechanical turk costs have not yet turned out to be cheaper and there's no reason to expect that to happen, so this is one channel for exploitation that I'm not going to worry about.
Huge cojones on the CEO to risk public statements given the enormous legal and regulatory pressure being applied. I certainly wouldn’t recommend this tactic!
Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win.
In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensing lands in these vehicles and our service area will be large enough that you forget there is even a geofence. If OEMs have still not managed to get the necessary performance gains to go fully driverless, we'll know what move was the right one.
It's good to hear a CEO say "we don't know the answer, but we're making a bet" rather than the typical Elizabeth Holmes style "We are absolutely correct and first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you get convicted of three counts of wire fraud and go to prison".
"This is a solved problem.", "We're light-years ahead of the competition", or "We expect everyone with existing hardware to be able to monetize their cars as robo-taxis by the end of next year" are other great examples.
to be fair, this is because Elizabeth Holmes is probably a sociopath, so you'd expect to hear something overly confident like that from such. Not that we knew it at the time.
I've met quite a few people like her and I really don't believe they are sociopaths - they say things that sound real and even convince themselves of it but as soon as you start peeling back details they don't exist. It's like you are talking to a Turing machine and it's you failing the test. People on these forums never really speak to these people because we are already largely scientists and love empirical evidence and work with and hang around similar people. There's a whole class of people who have learned to pattern match talking like us without anything to back it up. See the industry "Comms" for many many examples.
>There's a whole class of people who have learned to pattern match talking like us without anything to back it up. See the industry "Comms" for many many examples.
Have noticed this through my career as well. There is a whole class of people who go through life never actually doing anything. They just talk about people doing things. And get paid to talk about people doing things. And by the time people realize that they are just full of shit, they move on to the next place where they get paid to talk about people doing things. And they never actually did anything in the first place, so it's not like you can even say they were a bad worker.
Roughly 1 in 20 folks on average out there is a sociopath (some quote from Jordan Peterson). It doesn't have to be full 110% on scheming world domination, but detectable (and obvious in daily life). I am not an expert on her or whole saga, but from my perspective many famous people show this trait. In business its almost mandatory to get/stay on top, it certainly gives one advantages compared to nice fair honest people.
Sociopaths are not uncommon as people think. They think sociopaths are “mad killers” but they’re just people who don’t feel remorse when ie lying and have little to no empathy. I’ve met mild sociopaths who were just bankers who would never even think about second order and third order effects of what they were doing. It’s not some kind of rare condition.
I heard the figure was 1 in 30 but 1 in 20 is close enough.
True. I actually replied to the entirely wrong comment, should have been one up... I have a great deal more confidence in truly revolutionary things that have been factually delivered by SpaceX (such as 100+ re-uses of a rocket first stage now), and I question how much of that is really due to Musk at all. Maybe Musk as a figurehead. I wonder if all of the Elon fanboys know that much of what's been accomplished at SpaceX is thanks to Gwynne Shotwell, or even know who she is.
Things like promising "full self driving" for 6+ years now and charging people $12500 for it leave a really bad taste in my mouth and I find it difficult to square with my overall very positive impression of spacex.
I'll bite. Say I'm a Musk fanboy... I can assure you that all Elon fanboys I know are fully aware who Gwynne Shotwell is. Now, your turn: please explain how the following SpaceX accomplishments are thanks to Gwynne Shotwell (other that the hand-wavy "well if she didn't get the contracts none of this would be possible"):
- Merlin engine
- Vertical landing
- Raptor engine
... or, what exactly is the "much of what's been accomplished" that you talk about? Look, I'm not trying to minimize her role, she was clearly a great COO for SpaceX, but it seems weird to me that you try to minimize Musk's importance while at the same time picking one other singular person to highlight. I could understand the argument that "it's a team effort, no one person did this alone"; but if we're picking only one person to assign credits, then surely, _surely_ Musk is that one person, right? I understand the skepticism that he really does engineering & design, so here is supporting evidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
The anonymous “Interviewer” in the last part of that Reddit post was Sam Altman, excerpted from a 20-minute conversation with Elon Musk in 2016 [1] that I found to be interesting even as a non-fanboy.
I think we'll see major players leaving this industry soon. Self-driving will be a war of attrition and thus cannot be won by US companies with their insane burnrate. Europe has just as competent engineers making a tenth of their US counterparts. If I was a VC I would be head over heels investing in EU self-driving tech. They are the 'cockroaches' of this tech who will survive.
I can't imagine e.g. Waymo bankrolling tens of millions of dollars in payroll for years to come.
You might not give him credit even if he did. We're in a thread where people are wondering whether he's not just a figurehead for SpaceX, so... what exactly are we taking about?
AFAIK Musk's involvement in Tesla was specifically to address climate change/ help move the industry towards electric cars. To the extent that this, plus improved battery tech, ends up reducing our oil dependency and eventually contributes to "solving climate change" - would you credit any of that back to him? Or just say that he didn't single-handedly solve climate change, so it doesn't count?
What mystical gift does this one person have that 7 billion other people don't, that permits him and only him to run the company? This is a really unpopular opinion on a web site that exalts founders, but I don't think it really takes much special skill to run a company. Most (but admittedly not all) CEOs are in their position not because of their know-how, but because 1. They founded the company, and happened to be the one that flipped a coin heads 20 times in a row; or 2. They were born into that Ivy League class that closely gatekeeps CxO and SVP positions for themselves; or 3. Were descendants of one of the above.
Assuming a successful CEO is uniquely skilled is like assuming a lottery winner is uniquely skilled at winning the lottery.
I think many people, if given Elon’s financial war chest and basic knowledge of and an interest in rocketry, could have made SpaceX.
Musk didn't have that much money in the early 2000s. Compared to Bezos, he was small fish back then and SpaceX almost went bankrupt developing Falcon 1. If it really did, I don't doubt someone would explain persuasively why it could not have avoided that grim fate with a jackass founder like Musk; but they would have been forgotten already by now.
Attrition rate among space startups is insane. A lot of exciting projects like Armadillo Aerospace (by John Carmack of DOOM fame) crashed and burned. The graveyard of defunct space companies is huge.
I'm sure there are lots of other people out there who could run today's SpaceX as a space cargo trucking company. But Elon deserves the credit for creating two wildly successful companies that revolutionized their respective industries, both in the face of hugely entrenched competitors in highly regulated markets that hadn't seen successful new players in decades, and both as a side effect of his actual goal of getting humans to Mars.
The only people who were even competing were eccentric billionaires so let's be clear that he only beat a handful of other people who even had access to attempt the business. It's not that huge of an accomplishment because private space was theorized for a long time but NASA sucked up all the air in the room for the longest time but Elon's timing was just right. He out of the handful of billionaires working on this would get a chance to succeed at scale.
Honestly it’s hard to read your comment without an envious tone. You even admitted his timing was right, that alone takes skill. The point others are making is that there are lots of examples of failed companies, yet his have been successful. If anyone could have done what he’s done, why haven’t they?
Well, he was clearly competing with the faceless environment that allowed only eccentric billionaires to appear to be his only competition. If it was an open niche it would have been filled with others. Reading other threads here I learn that there have indeed been multiple failed attempts at space companies.
Maybe it's just a selection effect, but maybe they played their cards wisely and maybe some of the key choices can be attributed to the founder of the company that set the vision and picked the team carefully.
I'm personally not a fan of personality cults, but I don't think it's fair to swing too much on the other side. It doesn't strike me as plausible to think that Musk is just sitting on his ass and reaping the benefits of hard work of other people, and did that successfully with at least two companies.
He wasn't a billionaire for years after SpaceX had its first major successes and the "millionaires bad" narrative got retired since Bernie Sanders became one, so that's not going to work either.
>the credit for creating two wildly successful companies
From reading comments in other similar threads I seen the argument that Elon did not created Tesla, so maybe would be more honest to rephrase your "created" wording, I am wondering how many people know that Elon did not created Tesla so he is assigned the role just because of his big social media presence.
Apparently Tesla was: founded (as Tesla Motors) on July 1, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos, California.
It gets a bit more complicated however: Ian Wright was the third employee, joining a few months later. The three went looking for venture capital funding in January 2004 and connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million round of investment in February 2004 and became chairman of the board of directors. Musk then appointed Eberhard as the CEO. J.B. Straubel joined in May 2004 as the fifth employee. A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.
So I guess it depends on your definition of "created".
Then Elon is a god , depends on who defines what god means,
When Bob created his company X and later got some money from his dead uncle your "created" definition will assign the dead uncle the creator of X, I really want to see this definition, but don't segfault if you can't manage it.
1 if you know Elon did not created Tesla then why would you use the word "created" and not be precise, even if you don't like the truth about Tesla creation you can avoid spreading falsehood and having people correcting you and the others you misinform
2 if you were wrong and thought Tesla was created by Elon, then who is at fault, Elon, Elon fanboys, the Illuminati
> Why doesn't Trump or any of the Kardashians achieve similar feats?
they probably don't care about cars and space, one dude in your list managed to accomplish a big thing, he got elected by a large number of people
There are people that accomplished big things and we don't know their names or faces because they are not media stars, think at people that saved lot of lives by inventing medical procedures, or the ones that promoted introduction of safety belts in cars, or the ones that proved some chemicals are dangerous and we stop using them.
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In comparison Elon bought got his hands on an existing car company and used public money and a lot of PR to increase it's value. The timing is not a coincidence, only at this moment the batteries and climate change allinged to make it possible and remember there were electic cars before Elon appeared on the scene.
Musk set an improbable goal and he's heading to it. The other people from the Ivy League could do the same but didn't. He deserves some credit for that.
Another example Cook (coming from Compaq) is perfectly able to run Apple. A lot of people could have thought about iPhones and Macs but Jobs deserves some credit to actually start the company with Wozniak and actually pushing it to deliver those products.
Repeat with any successful FAANG or company in general.
> Jobs deserves some credit to actually start the company with Wozniak and actually pushing it to deliver those products.
...not to forget the period between 1985 and 1997 when he was ousted, founded NeXT and Pixar, and then re-hired to save Apple, which was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Indeed. It is very rare ( if not the only few I remember ) to see Silicon Valley or any VC funded Tech companies that is unsure of his / her tech or themselves. Their absolute optimistic nature ( If you could call it that ). People who are unsure of things, especially with leading edge tech, unproven tech and extreme difficulties tends to get my vote. I will now be keeping an eye on Cruise. Although I still think driverless cars in mainstream use is at least another 5 - 10 years away. There are just too many edge cases, but I hope people continue to work on it, as it will be part of the solution to solve housing and property market issues.
Game theory and personality dynamics strategy applies to C-levels too! For some industries, companies, etc you want to be a Holmes type of total confidence. It depends who your market is, and by that I mean the VC's you want to attract. If they go for the "arrogant boy/girl genius" schtick then that's what you do. If they want a humble intellectual, then that's what you do instead. Conversely, you may alternate between the two depending on your audience. Maybe you're humble in HN comments, but maybe a monster in VC meetings. Look at Elon's larger than life "boy genius" PR persona. It works really well. He may not be a total fraud like Holmes, but his shoddy car AI has killed at least a couple people in cases where if the car had a lidar-like system, that truck or whatever would have been identified instead of seen as part of the sky.
Also Cruise wants to license to automakers, not make their own car, so they have to act like trustworthy partners in their PR. Elon has his own car company and instead is antagonistic and belittling to automakers because he thinks there's a competitive advantage to it. Any positive sentiment towards his competitors is potentially lost sales for Tesla. Capitalism encourages zero-sum thinking and rewards zero-sum strategies.
CEOs are marketers and salespeople primarily and as such know how to play different roles for different situations. They code switch just like everyone else. The role isn't for everyone in tech because a lot of tech people don't have the people, political, and acting skills for it.
tldr; capitalism doesn't work well with honesty, in fact it works best with dishonesty. You don't have a personal relationship with a CEO or company, you're just absorbing marketing delivered via executive personalities. Personalities are perfectly valid marketing tools in capitalism. Take that as you will.
Theranos didn't use the normal set of VCs because they all thought it was a scam; they raised from some random rich people who weren't professional tech VCs instead. It's unfortunate the only thing she was convicted for was defrauding them, since being accredited investors they should be able to live with that.
As for Elon, he's currently doing a bad boy anti-government bit in an attempt to make Tesla "electric cars you can buy even if you're a Republican". Since we want those people buying EVs instead of coal rolling, that's a good thing.
>> It's unfortunate the only thing she was convicted for was defrauding them, since being accredited investors they should be able to live with that.
NO.
Investors are supposed to be able to live with all the usual risks of technology, execution, marketplace dynamics, etc.
They are NOT supposed to be OK with deliberate fraud.
If you invest at Early_Round when the tech looks promising, but then it fails to develop, CEO truthfully tells everyone what failed, the plan to overcome the failures, and you invest in Later_Round, or don't, and it ultimately fails and you lose your investment, fine.
BUT, if you invested in Early_Round and then the tech fails to develop, but the CEO straight-up lies to you and says they are "light years ahead of everyone else", shows phony endorsements from major industry players, and more so that you invest again in Later_Round, and then lose your shirt - that's fraud, and all involved in the fraud should be prosecuted, convicted, and jailed.
Anything less will create an environment where blatant lying for 100s-of-$millions is okay, and that is doomed to systemically fail.
But I think the point is that she wasn't convicted of endangering people's lives, which many would consider a far greater crime than just a con defrauding some gullible marks. People depended on those tests. They made choices (such as whether or not to have surgeries) based on the results.
I agree with your point, and I definitely wonder what was the failure in prosecution that produced those not-guilty verdicts. Not only was people's health involved with the fraudulent testing service, but the healthcare consumers did not in any way sign up for that.
The specific comment that I was responding to seemed to say it should be okay to defraud Accredited Investors should be "able to live with that".
If you're selling a pump and dump like crypto or Uber, you want the CEO to lie to you because it shows he's good at lying! Then you all go out and lie with him, then Softbank gives you a billion dollars for no reason.
How many other SV VCs joined Draper? FWIW, I heard that Ellison also put in some early money. If that was it, then will you agree that "mostly outside of the usual SV crowd." is accurate
How many rounds did Draper participate in? If Draper stopped after the first round or two, then it "got some early money from SV but everything else came from outsiders."
An extremely wise set of decisions. I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions; nor to accept that only passive sensing (cameras) can be used, when Active Sensing (probing, if you will) that Radar and LiDAR use is clearly giving the control computers more information about Reality (tm).
By using all (or almost all) available Active and Passive sensing technologies, fused with geofencing and operating at 'low-ish' speeds -- surely must be the fastest way to achieve 100% accident-proof self-driving vehicles that operate on ordinary city streets. Congratulations, Cruise. Keep up the Good Work.
One argument would be that once you have many vehicles operating with LIDAR, it's unclear which systems are sufficiently robust against being disrupted by interference from other systems. Same with RADAR - while this is not new technology, we've never really had a regime with potentially dozens of systems operating in close proximity.
For all Tesla's problems, the automation-via-cameras solution is the one I find myself having the least problems with: using a single, obvious input (to humans), you don't wind up in a situation where you can have multiple differently-capable systems disagreeing on what they're seeing.
Generally, you solve this problem by using different (randomized) wavelengths, modulation (e.g. pulsed in a pattern), or if interference is inevitable, do something like WiFi or BLE does. It's not a big problem in practice.
I can only suggest you think harder about the 'all cameras' approach. Imagine say a snowstorm. Hail. Rain. Ice sheets. Sun in your 'eyes'. Cameras, basically, suck. Elon's game is to use suck-tech and make it un-suck with computons. Bad Choice.
> I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions
The reason is simple: cost. The goal isn't to build a proof-of-concept safe AV, it's to build one that meets the safety bar _and_ is as cost-effective as possible, in a reasonable timeframe.
I happen to agree with the target-then-scale approach, but I also agree with Kyle that it's not a given that this is approach is definitely superior to the one that launches everywhere and tries to improve functionality.
Sure, but we already know that humans are not very good drivers (car accidents are #1 or #2 causes of death for age groups between 5 and 50). If you can do better than humans with more input, then that is compelling reason to use more input even if you can do just as good with a cheaper system.
I agree, but was narrowly addressing the claim " I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions". Cost is the a priori reason, albeit one that is potentially balanced by others.
What’s your view on whether self-driving cars should automatically be 100% liable for any accidents?
I ask this in the context of machines being governed by classical deterministic physics, so there is an argument that there is no such thing as an accident involving a self-driving car: only a design flaw.
This is a genuine question, as I can see that companies with self-driving systems that work, and who do serious fault analysis and rectification, might be in favour of 100% liability. 100% liability would stop cowboys from entering/surviving in the industry and sullying the reputation of self-driving. A company’s system would have to perform well enough that any residual risk of injury could be covered by an affordable insurance policy.
If you listen closely, you can hear Cruise's legal team shouting, "No you can't make a public comment on what level of liability you think we should accept" no matter where you are in the world!
Of course, knowing that self-driving cars are 100% liable would incentivize some people to attempt to be hit by one of these vehicles for a payout. A more realistic level of liability would be for 100% liability for accidents resulting from an "unforced error".
Well, a noise making device has already been mandated because the startup car company refused to voluntarily install one. It hadn't been formalized because every other brands basically had it forever.
The most common cause of motorcycle injuries that make it to the hospital (and statistics) is someone turning left in front of them in an intersection where they have right of way.
I couldn't find the clip of a motorcyclist patiently stopped at an intersection get taken out by an out of control left turner. Lots of fully legally stopped vehicles get hit.
In the general case it's impractical for electronic sensors to accurately measure the mechanical state of the vehicle. How do they tell us the suspension is rusted out and about to break? (In theory you can play some clever tricks with eddy currents or something but that's not going to be feasible for real world sensing.)
That is not much of a problem in practice. A 'rusted out' suspension doesn't happen overnight. There could be regulatory requirements for self-driving cars to be considered 'streetworthy'. Out of compliance, robotaxi disabled.
The tricks you mentioned are already used for some aircraft inspections.
What the software needs to worry about would be other types of failures. Software is much more likely to detect issues before the driver. Say, brake performance is outside the expected range, or appears to be degrading too quickly.
My fear is that car manufacturers will turn cars into a totally dealer serviceable only thing (even more than they are now), like the car version of the glued shut Microsoft surface that gets a 1/10 on the ifixit repairability score.
In the case of Cruise this wouldn't be a problem because you wouldn't own the vehicle. Its a robotaxi service. Your point is still valid, though I'd ask, how do you even solve certain classes of issues? Like lets say you had to replace a camera. You can't just plop one in and have it work. There is a ton of complex calibration work that needs to happen, both intrinsic & extrinsic.
Service intervals based on time and usage combined with certified repair. From a passengers perspective airlines are strictly liable but presumably airlines could then sue the relevant third parties in such a case. I suspect a similar model could work fine for self driving cars.
I wonder about that. The top maintenance issue that comes to my mind is sufficient tread on tires. Bald tires will still work great on dry streets but as soon as it starts raining, you start skidding. I honestly don’t know if software could intervene quickly and reliably enough there.
The software could require a trip to the dealer for a visual inspection of the tires at set intervals. Hopefully free of charge for something so simple. A quick hookup to the computer and the interval is reset.
Tesla vehicles can detect and notify the driver of tires with low tread remaining. It's detected by a delta in rotation speed between other tires and the tire needing replacement. Seems like a software implementation is straightforward.
Was editing my comment while you were commenting (removed service life, as software won’t detect dry rot or other defects undetectable from wheel speed measurements). Assuming tires wear evenly, you could still detect the change in rotation speed over time due to tread wear.
3mm is about a third of total tread depth, and 1% of the tire's radius. Why wouldn't this be detectable? ABS sensors tend to have 48-tooth tone rings and there's no reason why you couldn't vastly increase this number if you wanted.
Longitudinal tire slip is caused by thrust in excess of the tire's grip, which is a function of slip speed among many other things. Grip peaks with a mild amount of slip, but slip isn't the norm outside of racing. Mild acceleration produces zero slip.
I think you can. Remember you have a lot of time to work with. The car already knows when wheels are slipping to discard that data. You just pick a time when you are going straight on a nice somewhat flat dry surface going a consistent speed and measure then, cars do that all the time even on curvy mountain roads you will find plenty of such stretches and you only need to measure every few hours.
This is what service intervals are for - your car likely requires an service every 12 months or XXXX kilometers whichever comes first. The service doesn't just include actual work on the car it includes an inspection of the lights, tyres, etc and a report to the owner saying "tyres need replacing in the next couple of thousand Ks they're almost at the wear indicator".
I've given it some thought, and I think the SDC manufacturer must be liable for any accidents the SDC causes. Who else is there? The passengers certainly can't be responsible for any programming or manufacturing errors.
There are corner cases and exceptions, but that has to be the rule.
Which should mean that as and SDC owner, you don't have to pay car insurance.
We already have a system that relies on assigning fault among the multiple parties involved in an accident. This same approach applies just as well to SDC accidents. It would be even easier than the status quo, given the much richer data SDCs could be regulatorily mandated to provide.
When you say accidents you mean where the robo car erred? Asking because ofc it's possible to get into an accident where you are not at fault and I think this would also be true of robocar
My conclusion from years of self-driving, LIDAR, etc. research is that managing medium to heavy precipitation reliably might be impossible.
Visual algorithms run into the same problem as human brains, and the size of e.g. rain drops interferes with the frequencies employed by radio techniques.
Is anyone aware of any strategies that give us hope in solving this problem?
Though ... how good a job are humans actually doing in heavy precipitation?
I know that under normal circumstances our brains constantly do a bunch of work to create the illusion of a comprehensive high res visual field even though we really only have detail at the fovea. When it's raining heavily, and we think we can see "enough" to drive ... are we right? Or are we just lucky and pedestrians and cyclists are more likely to be off the road at those moments and so accidents increase but not to the point of disaster?
Agreed - I think the "but can it drive in a whiteout blizzard" question is best redirected to: "can a human?"
I suspect there are operating conditions the AVs won't solve acceptably - some of those conditions IMO are also conditions where we should not accept a human to solve acceptably. In general I feel we have a lackadaisical culture around driving that encourages/excuses unsafe behavior, and is overoptimistic about people's ability to drive well.
I grew up in a part of Ontario where total whiteouts can happen fairly frequently on both major highways leading in and out of my small town. It is in fact possible to drive dozens of km in near or total whiteout conditions simply by the hazard lights of the car ahead of you. You very frequently will see lines of cars km long, all going <20km/h, white knuckled and crawling home. Maybe one in every couple thousand goes in the ditch.
I don't think vision-based FSV will ever reliably handle winter conditions like this. The engineering and QA effort just isn't worth the cost-benefit when you factor in the very small amount of drivers who are consistently exposed to conditions like that. My father, who spent his career commuting to the city on that highway, was disappointed when I explained this to him.
I was once in the passenger seat in a downpour. My father was driving to the nav, and it seemed like we were traversing Mekong underwater. It was a complete instrument driving condition, except at most a feet of road markings were visible. The car was on local roads. He made cautious turns and drove slow, because it was obviously scary. Suddenly the nav said "Ding! you have reached your destination" in what seems to be middle of a road, and we immediately started making noises at the nav.
Then a person knocked on a window through the brown wall. It was someone we were to meet at the destination. He greeted us, and told us to come out. We tried to explain we can't just walk all perhaps a quarter mile to the place in this heavy rain, leaving the car left at a roadside. He insisted it'll be a short walk, and gave us no choice. Only when we stepped out, we realized that the car is right in the middle of the premise we were looking for, just couple feet from the main door.
This memory surfaces to my mind in the context of human drivers and inclement weathers; I'm still one piece, but maybe that has more to do with my luck, not necessarily due to myself playing every games extra safe.
The reason all that works is people drive to what they expect. In such conditions you might hit a human standing on the road, no human would be there in the first place, only other cars with flashing lights. As such so long as you stay in the correct lane for your direction of travel and go slow you don't need to see because there is no real danger most of the time. Most of the time...
The worst is when one goes into a ditch and the car following them follows into the ditch because their main indicator of where to go was the running lights and tire tracks of the car in front.
people are actually pretty good at driving in blizzards in locales where they happen often. snow tires (and possibly chains), good clearance, and great caution can get you a long way.
obviously you try to avoid driving in these conditions when possible, but sometimes a moderate storm is much more intense than forecast and you get caught out. pulling off to the side of a snowy mountain pass doesn't guarantee your survival either.
I know next to nothing about lidar engineering but 60GHz band radars can still function out to several hundred meters in rain. It is significantly attenuated as the rain rate (in mm/hour) increases, but it takes a lot of rain to make it completely useless.
In florida, I will say when it truly pours like that people do tend to drive extremely slowly and turn on their hazards. Also, sometimes these storms just appear out of nowhere. Over the summer I was driving from the Vero beach area to fort lauderdale and on the way to Vero beach, clear skies and on the way back there was an ENORMOUS storm that flooded streets and you couldn't see crap. It just happens
Unless it truly is "once-in-a-lifetime", or very brief, you cannot just stop and give up. To be a viable replacement, a vehicle must (as a human driver would) continue to make progress even in extremely adverse conditions. The progress might be much slower than usual, might be a re-routing (back up away from floodwater and go elsewhere), etc.
just because you can't write code to handle it doesn't mean a human can't. thousands and thousands of people drive in rain, sleet, snow and hail daily and do it just fine.
Taxis, available with e.g. a simple phone call, have existed since before telephones and cars really, and they still exist now even as ride-sharing has taken over. They will exist as Cruise rises.
In addition to going into highly dense cities and inserting autonomous cars into existing driver regulation; an interesting auxiliary strategy could be to partner with a master planned community that was designed from the ground up (physically and regulation wise) to be an autonomous first town where the majority of vehicles were autonomous and the majority of home owners were pro-autonomous cars.
The roads and pedestrian crossings could be much clearly marked with RF transceivers, etc. and the inclement weather could be pre-considered. HOA agreement could have a "I agree to co-exist with autonomous cars" TOS clause and perhaps a built in monthly subscription.
I think a ton of home builders (Lennar, etc.) and senior community developers (Ventas) would be interested if only as a PR concept. I also think a lot of remote Techies/senior citizens would be interested [1]. Sort of like this but replace golf carts with autonomous cars.[2]
Congrats on your incredible accomplishment! Thanks for doing this the responsible way. Tesla's approach does not inspire confidence. Starting at the high end, with expensive, reliable tech and slowly bringing the costs (and bulkiness of the equipment) down is the right approach!
In my experience, expensive doesn’t necessarily mean more reliable, it could just mean higher fidelity, higher resolution (and possibly less reliable due to the utilization of parts ‘less’ produced on the global supply chain), etc.
This improved resolution don’t necessarily help an AI grok the situation in real time with >20 Hz response time though.
I think the overall sentiment is more the "let's avoid premature optimisation" rather than "let's spend the most money".
If you have pre-sold a 'self driving' capability which you have guaranteed to be backwards compatible on cars you have already sold, then you are effectively cutting out Lidar as an option unless you are going to go back to all those cars and screw it on.
And considering that self-driving isn't solved yet, it seems like a bold move to define both your processing power and your sensing hardware in a way which makes it very difficult to (commercially) change.
Thank you for saying the honest, obvious answer. I am tired of people claiming to know what the implementation details of a technology that does not exist. As a nobody retail investor, I have long positions on autonomy (Tesla, Nvidia, GM/cruise, Google), not specific takes on it.
I'm fact, I think the radar/vision debate is not going to matter long term, as there can be multiple winners and the tech will likely converge.
The challenge I like to bring up is construction zones. How will cars cope when a road is unexpectedly under repair? Traffic is taking turns sharing the left shoulder with a flag man directing you?
Some people I've talked to insist that an up to date map is "all that's needed" and that all such projects will need to be put in the system. Haha, a water main broke and they think people are going to update a database for them?
A traffic light is out and the police are DC directing traffic at an intersection. This will happen inside any given geo-fence eventually.
The list goes on... forever. Tell me how self driving cars don't need full AGI.
A decent chunk of this list can be handled by the car coming to a safe stop and signalling that it is unable to proceed and you need to navigate the situation.
I suspect a lot of these could also be handled by that being a remote connection where a human is given the camera input and can indicate how the car should proceed (i.e. broken water main is a road obstruction that won't clear, and the obvious answer is a manual override to mark the road as unusable so the nav system reroutes).
...of course this brings up many other problems, like network connectivity and inter-city transport, which the companies have as far as I know not commented on. IMO the sensible solution is obviously to just require passengers be able to take over if given plenty of warning, but for whatever reason Cruise isn't doing this.
Been so impressed with the Cruise approach. No hype, no promises, just keeping quiet, working hard on a very hard problem until it’s ready to launch. Congrats to everybody who’s been a part of this.
Well to be fair they did get acquired and get access to a bunch of resources allowing them to fully execute. A lot of the hype machine is a result of the necessity of getting access to those resources. It’s just a difficult situation.
Tesla limited themselves to cameras because Musk said “humans can do it with two eyes”. He also didn’t like the look of LiDAR on cars. Such an idiotic decision. Good to see Cruise is not lead by a mega-maniacal CEO.
Currently Tesla is charging $12,000 for access to their self-driving package. Even if we assume that the price would increase to $19,500 if they included a lidar (I'm skeptical), it would be the difference between paying $12,000 for a feature that doesn't work versus $19,500 for a feature that might work. This is a luxury option no matter which way you swing it.
Definitely a luxury option for showing off at this point, as a status symbol, lots of people out there daily drive cars that don't have a bluebook value anywhere near $12k for the entire vehicle.
Problem isn't how much LIDAR used to cost or costs now. Problem is that customers paid for a product, and they still don't have it, many years later. And what is being showed nowadays is nowhere close to what was advertised.
A more accurate summary of Tesla's position is that they beleive that the incoming data from different systems (lidar, radar, visual, etc) must be merged and very often there is contradictory data.
Resolving that correctly takes time (in ms), adds complexity and will sometimes be incorrectly judged.
Since the visual data is the more accurate the vast majority of the time, it will anyways take precedence over the other input. As humans have proven that visual is technically enough, they decided it makes more sense to squeeze the most out of the visual, rather than collecting other data, crunching it, then (in most cases) discarding it.
I am not sure they are right, and am pretty sure that even if so - they need better cameras.
But misquoting them doesn't really help your argument.
You didn’t need to, but you decided to show up on HN to clearly articulate your strategy, so I applaud you for this.
> Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down.
There are broadly two ways to achieve your desired outcome of aggressively lower costs:
1. use money raised from VCs to subsidize the final cost of the product, or;
2. use money earned from customers as a natural consequence of growing demand for your product, in spite of strong competition from established OEMs, to fund your expansion.
Historically, the former has a lower likelihood of success relative to the latter and that’s because the former is really just a cash transfer from VCs to consumers. The latter is how Apple and Tesla have been able to grow into what they are today.
The reason the 2nd kind is so effective is that, when executed correctly, it often leads to a vicious cycle: your growth will lead to steadily increasing order volumes with your suppliers. This will in turn lead to sourcing for more suppliers to keep up with your growth. At a certain point, a supplier will feel confident that you are here for the long haul, causing them to take on more risk by pouring additional capital into their business to expand capacity. This will improve their ability to accommodate your current and future needs quickly, cheaply or both.
In other words, reality is multidimensional. It is rare for an individual company to aggressively drive down the costs of its product single-handedly, unless that company is ready to assume an enormous amount of risk currently being borne by its ecosystem of partners and suppliers.
I expect the media led zeitgeist to slime you on a few fronts:
1. AI/automation/tech bros undercutting the working class.
2. The mortal danger of self driving cars to pedestrians and the public- perhaps with an AI bias/racism zest.
3. The price, location-availability, or otherwise explicit exclusion of people that damage the cars or are otherwise unprofitable being harmful.
4. The proliferation of self driving cars reducing public transit use, thus reducing public transit investment, reducing transit access for poor, increasing pollution, and clogging roads.
5. Something something self driving taxis are subsidized by the government via public investment in roads.
All of these arguments are bullshit and I am not excited to hear people recite them to me in 5 years.
All-electric fleets of safe, non-honking AVs that are fine with whatever routes are required of them and go to designated areas to park and charge are going to make our downtown areas so much better.
The urbanist PoV is that anything car-shaped is bad for a city and it doesn't matter how smart it is. The proper answer is micromobility, aka ebikes and smaller vehicles that don't need to ever go highway speeds.
Full size EVs are still bad for air quality too because of tire dust.
Full sized EVs have their place in cities. However it isn't for mass transit, the train or bus is for getting people around. EVs are for getting goods and maintenance tools around. This is a small minority of traffic in most cities.
Just because you don't want to think about externalities doesn't mean they don't exist. There are a lot of strong ideological assumptions you have to make to handwave all these away as "bullshit".
From personal experiences I do not see how they are ready. They actively avoid the rules of the road and engage in dangerous driving actions because the car “sees” and obstacle or warning.for example when a car is double parked the self driving vehicles will swerve into the opposite lane, and in some cases almost hit another car, bike rider, or person.
When at stop signs they will sit back and wait even thought it is their turn. At times they will slam on brakes causing rear end accidents because the car saw a bird or reacted to steam from the ground.
Please talk with your legal team about embellishments made in insurance claims against other drivers.
Unless you have a conceptual AI with causal systems understanding reacting in real-time to a spacetime model of the world based on current and recent events, people are going to get injured and or killed by unusual real-world events riding in these autonomous cars. Although cats and dogs have great perception, we don't let them drive our cars for a reason.
> people are going to get injured and or killed by unusual real-world events riding in these autonomous cars
I don't think anyone inside or outside of the AV industry is expecting that there will be zero injuries or fatalities involving AVs. Why would that be the bar, when AV rides displace human drives that already injure and kill tens of thousands?
Sure, and they can't get drunk or fall asleep either. Even for taking for granted that AVs can't find an operating domain in which "non-pattern situations" are covered by failsafes, it's far from obvious that the net advantage goes to human drivers.
Does Cruise plan to try compete with Uber, Lift, etc.?
If feel like this tech could have a massive social impact if you sell it to local goverments so they could offer a highly efficient subsidized robotaxi service to their residents. It would democratize access to transportation and enable so many classes of underserved people to gain access to reliable transportation.
I'm no where near as experienced as you and your team, but that is what I was thinking as I read this. Tesla rather quickly went from the expensive sensors to the camera based setup they have now and it'll be interesting to watch how all this unfolds, safely from my 2006 vehicle with nearly no computers.
There's absolutely nothing stopping Tesla from adding back lidar/other sensors if the technology becomes cheaper or it turns out visual-only isn't accurate enough; Elon has other advantages that no other company is anywhere near competing with though too, and he clearly understands this, he understands his position well - and it's strong. He's also a very agile entrepreneur/engineer and not afraid to pull the trigger on whatever ideas come to his attention as being the best decision. He's also already succeeded in Tesla's mission - which was to get other vehicle manufacturers to transition to EV, so anything else after that is really just icing on the cake; Tesla stock holders however still believe strongly in him - and I'd argue rightfully so.
For now by using the cheapest technology he's arguably selling more EVs and/or making more profit per vehicle. If the market's competition requires a course change, then I don't see why he wouldn't take it - I don't think he'd fall pray to sunk cost fallacy; the reason for decisions may not be obvious to the public either, as we likely don't know details of his nuanced master plan.
A promise isn't a contract, so whether it's actually guaranteed in the language in whatever agreements may be signed, will be the determining factor.
And how the automative industry has functioned since its existence is risk-benefit-cost analysis, so if the cost of a future fallout is less than the short-term benefit then they tend to decide for the short-term benefit; most disgustingly in regards to known problems of vehicles, where only recalls happen if the potential harm/death rate and the cost of that is lower than the cost of replacing whatever needs to be replaced; I'd hope that practice has greatly improved, but who knows - most of our government agencies seem captured by industrial complexes.
No, courts look at the spirit of the language and the letter of the law. The letter takes precedent only when it is clear that the two parties are not intending to defraud each other and there is just a misunderstanding. If the court decides both parties had a different understanding of the contract than the letter, then what they understand is what is used. As a lawyer in court your jobs it to make the court believe what you understood the contract was about is what they use - if the letter supports you then you yell that, and since the letter is a easy to prove while a shared understanding that is different from the letter is impossible the letter normally wins.
Marketing is admissible in court as evidence of intended contract. Since marketing is generally easier to understand the legalese, if the court decides the marketing is misleading they will tend to punish you for that and accept the marketing as the shared understanding over whatever the letter of the contract is.
Note that I used a lot of wishey-washy words like tend... Each court case is different, and there is no real rule of what courts will do in any given situation. Consult a lawyer for legal advice about your specific situation.
thanks for pushing the frontier of self-driving cars and articulating this strategy.
historically, the pattern in tech is to succeed with strategy 2 -- that is, ride moore's law and achieve exceptional performance by combining commodities into super systems. google server farms are the canonical example.
obviously, this is only a pattern and not a law.
tesla's pathway represents strategy 1: start with super machines then drive costs down.
for non-SDC experts like me, could you share why it felt more compelling to start with super machines then drive costs down?
excited to see cruise help lead society into the future!
Sounds exciting! Are you hiring? I had a recruiter from Cruise drop out on me because I wanted to stay and work from Canada and wasnt in a position to relocate to the US.
Based on the reply to the question: What sets Cruise technology apart from others like Waymo, Tesla...In other words, how was this difficult technical problem, solved in a way others were unable to do so far... And whose reply you can hear here (video at the correct time):
Lol, what answer do you expect from a question like that? At a high level, Cruise is taking the same approach as Waymo, and a different one from Tesla: start with lots of hardware, HD maps, and a targeted operating domain, then try to scale. Answering in any more detail would be a) giving away trade secrets and b) rely on knowing trade secrets about Waymo's cars that they probably don't know.
No, the different strategies are that Tesla has a vehicle actually being used by hundreds of thousands of people and is slowly incrementally improving their self driving with massive amounts of feedback and data, while these demo companies are doing if statements around the block.
> vehicle actually being used by hundreds of thousands of people and is slowly incrementally improving their self driving with massive amounts of feedback and data
Throwing data at the problem isn't going to solve it. Only people without expertise in AI think that's how it works.
Well, you are ignoring the point. The whole differentiating strategy between Tesla and everyone else is the incrementally improvement of large amounts of vehicles versus the magic “hey, we came out of nowhere and now just drive ourselves”. This has been repeated though out tech history and the incrementally improving real life one always wins.
And Tesla will just ingest large amounts of data from their fleet and magically dump an L5 solution one day? That's believable?
Elon Musk has been promising imminent L5 self driving every year for the past 7 years; that requires more than incremental improvement. The ones actually doing incremental improvements are companies like Cruise and Waymo, making it work one geography at a time.
Is this because you specifically asked for a driverless permit? From the post,
> Cruise has had state authority to test autonomous vehicles on public roads with a safety driver since 2015 and authority to test autonomous vehicles without a driver since October 2020.
> Waymo has had state authority to test autonomous vehicles on public roads with a safety driver since 2014 and received a driverless testing permit in October 2018.
Yes. It's a very different permitting process. As you might expect, the bar is very high to jump from driverless testing to operating a driverless service available to the general public.
What happens when the car runs into a problem that it cannot address (Damage to car, blocked by obstacle in road) Does the passenger call you, or are you monitoring the car remotely for problems?
Congrats! Curious why Cruise got a permit to operate only between 10 PM and 6 AM? Is it a DMV decision because you applied for driverless operations or did Cruise specify operating conditions?
There's actually great synergy(sorry) between self-driving AI and would-be drunk drivers. The only downside may be the need for additional investment in cleaning services.
I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where robo drivers will report suspiciously shaped carryon items (e.g. "CA-SF-69420 reporting in. passenger spotted carrying human shaped object wrapped in a tarp. bleep bloop."
Hope we apply the same metric to human drivers as well and don't allow anyone on the roads till they prove they are attentive 100% of the time and can maneuver like F1 drivers at all times. Monitored cameras every 100 feet would be a good start to find who's driving badly, and also a required driver face camera that records to a blackbox like device that cops can get the video from, and which the driver has no control over.
>Fatalities from Crashes
>In 2016, over 33,000 traffic crashes resulting in fatalities, major injuries or minor injuries were reported on Bay Area roadways.
10% of the crashes resulted in more than minor injuries, so 3.3K serious crashes.
Your profile says you’re in the Netherlands, which is a completely different place.
You may know this already but here in the US, even though driving is technically a “privilege”, in reality it is a requirement in most locales due to lack of consistent and reliable alternatives. That’s part of why getting a drivers license is fairly easy.
It’s also why your “I’ll have my son shred my license after I turn 70” wouldn’t work unless you were living in a place like NYC or Chicago, or were totally okay with having little social life (dependent on your kids’ and friends’ ability and willingness to drive you to places).
Collectively you decide what kind of country you want to create and individually you have the choice to move. FWIW I spent years on the Canadian/USA border and have driven there quite a bit.
Pretty good. With well in excess of a million km driven, a valid driving license (something which no software product so far has been able to achieve), zero alcohol, zero drugs and no smartphone to distract me while driving. I see driving as a 'full time occupation'. My vehicle(s) (and that includes by bikes) are kept in tip-top condition, no expense spared, I'm fully aware that it isn't just my life that's on the line. I also have a standing order to my eldest that he is to shred my driving license when I turn 70 no matter how much I protest, and that's only 14 years away.
I'm all for self driving cars and I believe they are the future. I also believe they will be a decade or more in the coming and that we need at least one more level-up before AI sofware/hardware combos are solid enough that your typical self-driving solution will outperform an experienced driver.
Neither is 71, 72, 73, 74 and so on, and then one day you really were too old to drive. In a country where driving is a necessity there is no way around this so you get a lot of people driving who really shouldn't be. To play it safe I've set the limit at 70 for myself because I think that if I don't put a hard line down I will always think 'one more year'. This avoids the gray area entirely, exactly because 70 isn't too old to drive.
I know a 62 year old that shouldn't drive. And I know a 76 year old that is fine. It really depends upon the person, but our dmv isn't fit to detect this.
He's trying to be one of the pioneers of robot cars ... does he care how many people his robot cars are going to kill (drivers of them to the innocent drivers driving alongside them) in the name of progress? PUtting them on the road and learning and improving the AI is the progress needed to perfect them over Years, but its going to be deadly... unlike creating and fixing bugs on a videogame live streaming site.
Maybe he does care, but how much?
This is not to be flippant (i appreciated and used Justin.TV a ton back in the day..canceled Cable TV cause everything was there for one to watch ... 24/7 marathons of your favorite shows) but what I view of the harsh reality of putting these things on the road as Uber's self driving car already killed a pedestrian. Personally, I'm not sure I could in good conscious work for a robot car company (just was being recruited by such a company).
Two questions: 1. How do we see this detail about permits, such as for example that Cruise are permitted to have "nobody in the car" while Waymo are required to have "human safety driver behind the wheel at all times") ?
2. Where are Cruise's testimonials etc. for the presumably successful San Francisco non-commercial testing of this "fully driverless, nobody in the car" system you now have commercial deployment for?
Actually, answering “yes” to that question would have been extremely confusing given how the question is worded! Which makes the snarky request for a binary response even less reasonable.
I take your point but it might not have been snarky - for example, HN has a lot of non-native English speakers and different languages handle affirmation-of-negation very differently.
While I can appreciate that, let me rephrase my post:
There's a way of asking a question without being a total dick, and then there's your way.
Being direct doesn't mean being an asshat. I have plenty of experience of doing it the wrong way, and yes, I'm suggesting yours is not the right way.
Edit: "I'm sure it's in the budget."
Actually, I'm guessing this would be covered in the liability insurance. So it's probably a much smaller line item in the budget than you are so dramatically inferring it to be.
It's a useless question anyways, because the company gains nothing by "budgeting" for death, and loses everything by settling on a real number. It's like asking Boeing how many families they expect to send payouts to in any given quarter. The only answer is zero, and any answer above zero is itself negligent.
It's not exactly useless, as it is a serious business concern. However, asking it the way it has been phrased is useless, as you've stated, stating from the start that you are planning on paying out fees like this is just dumb. It is good business planning to be aware of the fact that it is a >0% chance of unintended bad things happening, so let's take out an insurance policy to cover for that contingency. There's a difference between planning for the fact that an accident is possible vs planning to cause an accident.
Exception events like are usually covered by Insurance.
However companies do provision for payouts in potential cases whether private/ class action or government regulatory ones , they are legally required to do so and disclose it in their filings.
You know back in CS class we had to go over the THERAC25 problem a lot. It wasn't so much about the specifics of the incorrect code, but more about the hubris that it "couldn't have been the code".
It seems like with self driving, it's like 45 companies just started making clones of the THERAC25 where they "are pretty sure it's fixed now, this is easy". It's the same damn ego.
Thanks for the clarification, but is there any public resource I can point people to in order to confirm the difference between Cruise and Waymo permits?
I believe you, but skeptics won't be persuaded by "the founder said so on HN".
> Cruise founder here. This is kind of confusing. Short version:
> - Cruise permit is for robo-taxi service, available to public (fully driverless, nobody in the car)
We need to have fewer executives talking about their awesome safe technology and more executives being forced to use their awesome safe technology.
It is extremely unfortunate that as the condition of the permit the DMV did not force dogfooding requiring that every executive of a company applying for driverless robo-taxi permit and executives' families, including their children, were mandated to give up their drivers licenses and all other modes of transportation ensuring that those executives and those executives families are the constant test subjects of the technology.
1) If you want very low latency, any network jitter or delays will cause pauses on the viewer side and "skips" when the feed catches up after a brief dropout. This is fine for video chat, where a little blip doesn't interrupt the experience. For live streams with 30k+ viewers, it's pretty annoying and very noticeable if the audio cuts out or skips. A 2-3 second window is typically large enough to paper over any jitter or retransmits due to packet loss between the broadcaster and Twitch servers.
2) Transcoding can be done with very low latency, but it's harder to scale horizontally and uses more bandwidth than if you give yourself a few hundred ms of buffer. Larger buffers enable better compression. Transcoding is needed if you want to stream to mobile, web, etc. in multiple formats, bitrates, or resolutions.
3) Chunked HTTP content is much easier to serve than RTMP or WebRTC-style content. You can use nginx or drop your content on a low-cost CDN. The caveat is that chunking generally introduces latency unless you do something fancy such as streaming chunks as they're being written to disk.
I really should thank you for the opportunity— not many people would let a new college hire spend months on a green-field rewrite of something so core to the company.
Building this was really fun, and I’m very proud of what kd5bjo, Emmett, and many others did to help turn Justin.tv/Twitch into what it is today. We found a way to make what was fundamentally an unprofitable business (if you relied on CDNs) work by relentlessly focusing on reducing cost to the absolute bare minimum through good technology choices and innovating when necessary. Justin.tv would have died otherwise.
Ok but one would think that some enterprising lawyer at GM or Ycombinator or on retainer to Sam Altman, investor, would think to do this, right?
Without looking at the incorporation documents on file, I'm sure they don't say that Jeremy gets 50% of the stock. If they did, there wouldn't be a lawsuit. It would be cut and dry.
I think what Jeremy is arguing is that he and Kyle had an agreement in the early days before paperwork, and that that agreement was not properly documented when the paperwork was written up. This is an extremely difficult thing to prove, and Kyle and his investors will no doubt lean heavily on the actual paperwork to sway the court.
This is wrong. Both the original suit and counter-complaint directly reference the fact that Kyle founded the company before meeting/engaging with Jeremy.
I dont think it has officers names on that $20 report.
>If you are requesting the $20 detailed information option, this application will not return actual images of the documents on record. This application will return a page listing the 5 most recent filings, franchise tax assessment, total authorized shares if applicable and tax due. Officer and Director names and addresses are maintained on the images of the annual reports and are not available through this application. If you wish to order a copy of an annual report please call 302-739-3073 for more information
The YC application isn't a legal document and Kyle (having gone through YC) knows this. Legally he'd have full ownership and in the application specify 50/50 meaning if/when they formalize the relationship that is what the equity split will be. YC doesn't really care what the actual current/legal split is at the time you write the application. What they care about is what the split will be by the time you start YC because that is what is relevant to them.
And (my guess) is that the real reason they care about the split is that they're looking for red flags. i.e. is the cap table already messy with lots of people on it? Is the split NOT 50/50 signalling the founders don't consider each other equals which is a bad sign, etc.
Well, I mean, presumably a lawyer associated with the case who was interested in proving it could depose Mr. Vogt and ask him under oath if he posted that comment.
That would seem to be the case. If Jeremy's claims were true there wouldn't be any lawsuit, as Jeremy would already have what he is currently suing for.
It amazes me from the other HN replies comments how much debate and confusion there is, about something so obvious.
We completely agree with your safety concerns (along with those of many others we've spoken to in the industry). That's one of the reasons we haven't released a product that works in the way currently advertised on our website.
While NHTSA has begun thinking about autonomous vehicle safety, there is still much to be done. We plan to release some of our thoughts about this in the next couple of months.
That seems to be exactly what Cruise is doing. Watch the video. "Seamlessly takes you wherever you want to go". "Just sit back and enjoy the ride". The website: "Just sit back and watch as the RP-1 guides your car down the road." Watch them drive on the Great Highway at SF's beach, which has traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, and bicyclists.
Suggested reading: Federal Trade Commission truth in advertising rules.[1]
To clarify, the California DMV carefully defines an "Autonomous vehicle" but has carve outs for collision avoidance systems [1]. While adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist are mentioned explicitly as collision avoidance systems, automatic lane changing is not. So we weren't comfortable adding that feature until the DMV published their regulations for the operation of Autonomous Vehicles (which still hasn't happened) and we met those requirements.
