Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

https://www.wired.com/story/cruises-robot-car-outages/

by fortran77 • 4 years ago

82 85 4 years ago

37ef_ced3• 4 years ago

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.

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

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.

AlotOfReading2• 4 years ago

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?

ars• 4 years ago

People seem to completely forget how valuable having a secure place to store your things is.

If you travel to the White House using public transportation with a baby carriage - well, you can't. There is no place to leave it, and they won't let it in. (Same for your purse, or a backpack, or even a water bottle.)

If you take a car you can leave all that in your car. Of course it's not easy finding a place to put your car near the White House. What I did is drive almost all the way, to a parking lot, then take a train for the last couple miles.

hansword• 4 years ago

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.

ROTMetro2• 4 years ago

Don't forget hygiene. Robot taxis are going to be much grosser because you won't have a human watching to make sure the person in the back seat isn't spilling coffee/having sex (with self or others)/throwing up/hawking luggies (sorry I'm from the 80s, what's the right term?). Though I am sure we will all also at some point grab one whose previous occupant didn't quite make it to the hospital in time for the childbirth :)

forgotloginonp4• 4 years ago

Do they not have passenger monitoring aicctv?

SheinhardtWigCo2• 4 years ago

Have you been in an AV? In my experience (around 50 rides) overall it's a more relaxed and smooth ride; strikingly so, even at this early stage in the game. There are occasional uncomfortable and/or confusing moments, but they're already becoming much less frequent. Lyft/Uber already feels less comfortable, and even less safe. It's horse vs car; elevator operator vs buttons; Blackberry vs iPhone all over again.

recursivedoubts• 4 years ago

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

babl-yc• 4 years ago

If that's the future, then engineers of the future are making poor choices. It'd be best to save OTA for a vehicle that is parked and charging.

I'm surprised Cruise cars aren't configured to pull over with the server being down (maybe max X seconds of offline driving). Seems better than parking in the middle of a crosswalk/intersection and something that can be done safely offline.

fudged71• 4 years ago

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?

jdminhbg• 4 years ago

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…

nerdbaggy• 4 years ago

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.

salmonfamine8• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

Explain how trains solve the last mile problem? The thing that roads already solve?

salmonfamine8• 4 years ago

Walk.

EDIT: or just drive, as you do now.

tmcw4• 4 years ago

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.

simne3• 4 years ago

It is possible, and it could be extremely effective, but not straight way.

1. exists concept of linear city, and exists few implementations, most known:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd

2. In linear city, possible to create just one line of train, and station every mile, and all other transport muscular, or something like pneumatic-mail and open conveyors.

In some cases, could be effective to make rectangular network of train lines.

Sure, for old cities with lot of legacy, only train transport in many cases impractical, because usually their logistic network is not linear and even not rectangular. And train largest problem, is large radius of turn.

Currently in most large cities exists underground train or light city train, in different countries named tube, metro, underground.

simne3• 4 years ago

BTW in western Europe railway network is very dense, and in some countries train is more popular than taxi.

But I think this is mostly because there high density of population, so they long time ago faced problem of transport large number of people, before appear large city buses.

anonuser123456• 4 years ago

You get off the train onto your segway.

AlotOfReading2• 4 years ago

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.

salmonfamine8• 4 years ago

Well, that's the problem. Self-driving cars does not solve that problem.

aetherson3• 4 years ago

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."

salmonfamine8• 4 years ago

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?

CamperBob23• 4 years ago

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.

salmonfamine8• 4 years ago

As opposed to highways, which magically have none of these problems.

ROTMetro2• 4 years ago

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...

opportune2• 4 years ago

This also describes a road

Tade0• 4 years ago

Not going to happen as long as energy is cheap in the US.

The rest of the developed world didn't shift back to public transport because they enjoy the company of strangers so much, but out of necessity.

Without domestic production of fuel a transport system is vulnerable to fuel price/availability swings.

syntheweave• 4 years ago

I hate seeing this premise. It is railfan navelgazing. I like rails and ride them frequently. Rails are not the future for passenger commuting, outside of the middle-long distances that heavy rails serve.

What AV addresses is primarily a last-mile problem. Last mile is all about the personal transport solution, and cars are just the largest of those. The physics and geometry of cars means that they are more expensive because they are literally more mass being moved around. Bikes and scooters have become much better personal transport recently because they now have electric assist options, and so are more accessible for more situations and capable of pulling heavy loads. So the problems of cars are already being addressed from one end; bike-friendly infrastructure is lagging behind in much of the world, but it's also one of the cheapest changes you can make to a road, and far cheaper than adding a new metro stop.

Once AV is adopted, the physical economics remain the same, but the economics of rental change; you don't have to go where the fleet is, it shows up at the door. But that doesn't result in everyone riding a personal limo. Smaller is cheaper for personal transport in the last mile, and that does not change just because you replaced the driver. Cost reduction will take place in shared rental fleets. Cost reduction means cars get smaller, so car infrastructure can get smaller, so last-mile alternatives gain space, so transit gains space and ridership. AV is not in conflict with transit, rather, it redefines the bottlenecks of transit modalities. If you need a sit-down vehicle with a cabin for your trip, you still don't need additional empty seats - unless you pay a premium, you will be crammed into the lightest, smallest thing that is roadworthy. Only an enthusiast will bother with lugging a huge vehicle around town if you can rent that size on demand. That goes for the car and it goes for the train. You still want to have transit to cover longer distances along major corridors, but the effective coverage of all stops is bolstered if you can pick up a bike or scooter share at either end of the trip.

salmonfamine8• 4 years ago

There is no reason that self-driving will create a transit modality that is more conducive to smaller vehicles. That is an energy cost “problem.”

maccam942• 4 years ago

The last mile is only a problem because people live in single-family housing zones, where there is not enough density for mass transit. We created this type of land use for several mostly not good reasons. Trains are far more efficient than car infrastructure. Why do commuters need a self driving car if there are trains that run by your block every 5 minutes, and get you to your office block in 10-20?

mrshadowgoose2• 4 years ago

Build trains...on every single road in existence?

Neither my house or workplace is adequately serviced by public transport, and even if they both were, I wouldn't use it unless legally or financially forced to. I enjoy proceeding directly from point A to B in the comfort of a private space, and so do very many other people.

The waste of personally-owned automobiles is admittedly abhorrent. Electrification and self-driving systems (and the resulting fleets of cheap automated taxis) will go a long way towards reducing the waste inherent to automobiles.

wizofaus• 4 years ago

Can you give an example of a large metropolis anywhere in the world where it's realistic for a significant percentage of the population to all be able to enjoy "proceeding directly from point A to B in the comfort of a private space" without any significant externalities? Or are you suggesting we need to massively decentralise?

opportune2• 4 years ago

You could probably put a streetcar on every other street in many dense locales. In fact historically that’s how they were set up

The problem is after the 50’s, in much of the country, development consists of large residential-only suburban developments feeding into highways. So streetcars won’t work for that

wffurr• 4 years ago

> Build trains...on every single road in existence?

Yes. That's effectively what cities had at the turn of the last century. And then they ripped up all the tracks or paved them over.

They recently did a full depth reconstruction on a street in my neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts which entailed digging up the old streetcar rails, ties, and brick substrate from under the pavement.

dangus• 4 years ago

This video might be relevant to your described scenario:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ

Notice how in The Netherlands, despite making bikes, transit, and pedestrians welcome in this suburban business park near the airport, you can still drive there if you want.

Yes, if you lived in The Netherlands, you could drive to this business park shown in the video in your personal vehicle. There's a parking garage right there, and even though the infrastructure is pedestrian and bicycle focused and prioritized, the cars don't have to wait long at the traffic signal or endure crazy traffic.

Why is that? Because there are fewer cars.

Why are there fewer cars? Because there are viable alternatives.

Essentially, having better public transit, pedestrian, and cycling infrastructure actually makes life better for drivers, too!

The thing is, in North America, in most places you don't actually have any sort of choice on whether you want to drive or not. If you don't drive, your entire environment is hostile to your very existence, and public transit is just for the poor and desperate. You must buy a car whether you want to or not. That's not really choice or freedom.

You're saying that you would choose a personal vehicle, but does that choice have the potential to change if the surrounding circumstances change?

So, it's perfectly fine that you'd prefer to own an automobile. You're free to pay the close to $10,000 a year it costs for the average person to own a new car according to AAA.

I personally wouldn't make that choice if I had a better one available, but if I live in suburban America the choice has been made for me.

Electrification and self-driving systems (and the resulting fleets of cheap automated taxis) will go a long way towards reducing the waste inherent to automobiles.

This is what's so frustrating about talking about the future of the transportation with people who can't imagine a world that lessens the emphasis on car-scale infrastructure. The waste problem with automobiles has already been solved. It has been solved by not using them as much.

This isn't a hypothetical. We have living, working examples of how to use cars less often in small towns, medium sized suburbs, and big cities.

Making cars self-driving is putting lipstick on a pig. It's like taking high blood pressure drugs instead of losing weight.

2muchcoffeeman• 4 years ago

Electrification and self-driving systems (and the resulting fleets of cheap automated taxis) will go a long way towards reducing the waste inherent to automobiles.

Why would electric vehicles reduce waste? Cleaner, sure. But we’d be just as capitalist. City people didn’t ditch their cars and buy their pristine 4WD Ford Trucks that they use to transport their kids because this was the cheaper and saner option.

Electric vehicles will just mean these people will ditch their current vehicles and buy a new Cyber Truck every few years.

Lock downs during the pandemic showed us what needs to be done: Get rid of as many vehicles as possible. Remember all the wildlife that came back and the cleaner air?

ratg13• 4 years ago

We are not discussing every single road in existence.

We are discussing high-density cities where the problem in the article is occurring.

There is more entitlement in your argument than I care to address, but it serves as a strong reminder of why American cities are so travel-hostile compared to European cities.

onionisafruit2• 4 years ago

I’m not sure what real problem self driving cars are supposed to solve aside from some people aren’t able to drive. Some might say that self driving cars would be safer than human driven cars, but that fails to account for the fact that any safety improvements from self driving cars can be built into active safety features in regular cars.

oneoff786• 4 years ago

I don’t want to drive but I still want to go somewhere

whimsicalism• 4 years ago

I’m not sure what real problem self driving cars are supposed to solve aside from some people aren’t able to drive

there could presumably be large improvements in the ratio of cars to people.

SheinhardtWigCo2• 4 years ago

Fast forward ten years.

They are trains, sans every major problem with trains: almost no fixed infrastructure, no last mile problem, no expensive human driver/conductor, yet similar vehicle construction cost per seat.

Eventually they'll block off a lane of every major freeway and you'll be able to go anywhere in the country at an average of 160 mph, with no need for bulldozers, eminent domain, new viaducts, years of environmental review, etc.

sschueller• 4 years ago

I would argue that asphalt has a much shorter life span than rail infrastructure.

concordDance• 4 years ago

Trains are incredibly expensive. Both making the lines and using them.

Judging by HS2 it costs around £200 million per km of track.

And it also costs around £0.5 per mile to use and door to door travel times are generally 2-3x higher on public transport.

Trains are NOT a solution.

rdsubhas• 4 years ago

Oh yes. Delete everything and build a new city from scratch.Easily solved.

jjulius• 4 years ago

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.

renewiltord• 4 years ago

Ha, how unlucky for them. Hope they're still able to operate.

alistairSH• 4 years ago

Why are these robo-taxis dependent on some sort of OTA communication to operate? I understand periodic OTA updates, but shouldn’t they be able to operate autonomously for long enough to avoid jamming up traffic? Maybe long enough to find a legal parking place instead of the middle of a turn lane/crosswalk?

93po• 4 years ago

Where are the elon haters that constantly love to say that tesla FSD is "far behind" the competition now?

PraetorianGourd• 4 years ago

Humans are abstractly selfless but functionally selfish. In the abstract, trains and bikes and walking are wonderful forms of transportation. And creating cities where cars are not needed is a wonderful goal.

Except, cars exist. We can go from here to there in absolute comfort, listening to the music we want, stopping exactly where we want. Any solution needs to be faster, cheaper, or easier. Probably all three.

It is insanely easy to say that some abstract “they” should just change their lifestyle for the good of humanity. But the trouble is turning the abstract “they” into the specific “me”. Even if we had the pipe-dream of one mile cities, what if my mile has great sushi, but I want pho? Get on a bus to that mile and then walk? Or just drive to it?

Lastly, we have self-driving cars. They are called taxis. And for most people, the price of a car payment + gas + maintenance + insurance is less than one would spend on a taxi per month. But we still prefer cars. Because they are faster, more comfortable etc.

You either need to force people into your worldview or make the alternative better. The former is a losing strategy, so do the latter.

Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

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