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