> The latest Cruise incident occurred Thursday night when a Cruise robotaxi and an emergency vehicle crashed and left a passenger injured. Cruise said in a social media post that one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene.
Noticing and responding to emergency sounds/signals in the road, distant but approaching, is yet another subtly complex aspect of human driving I hadn’t thought of but which seems obvious in retrospect. Seems solvable in theory but also involves a lot of uncertainty and contingencies. Then I suppose the cone-blocking hackers will start playing siren recordings to confuse the robotaxis…
In BobbyBroccoli's "The man who tried to fake an element", the title sequence music has a police siren play at one point. Every time I watch the video, I think there's an real-life siren outside.
Honestly, looking at recent news reports in the Chronicle, I don't think cone-blocking hackers need to do anything more right now. I mean, why cause trouble for someone if they're already slipping up in this way?
Quite a while ago, I learned the best way to follow the ball or puck at a sporting match. You don't try to look for the little object itself, you just observe what all the relevant players are doing, where they're looking, where they're running. You figure it out really quick with them helping!
Likewise, if I am waiting for a bus or something, I am really alert and on guard if I'm alone at the stop, because that bus will blow right by. Once there are a few other passengers around, I kick back and just watch them, because unless they're all impatient and pacing, their attitude and behavior will indicate when the bus is visibly arriving.
SDCs that coldly and analytically examine the traffic around them will probably never get the human nuances that we can pick up from second-and-third-order clues. For example, if I'm paranoid about whether a car's going to turn into me in an intersection, I don't watch their turn signal or lateral motion, I watch their front tire, because that's the first indicator of a turn. Is that sort of thing baked into AI? If several people are stopped at an intersection, eye contact and gestures are often essential in negotiating a solution. AI? Same with pedestrians. Make eye contact, signal, work something out. I'll often stop on a corner and wave cars through rather than insist on my right-of-way. Of course the motorist also has to decide if that's safe to do, and sometimes you can fool a motorist into making an unsafe move just by signaling your permission...
There are many instances in dense cities where the streets are too tight between buildings or busy with buses and cars to see down the other road at an intersection.
Japan gets around this by having ambulances at least slow down and look both ways for each red light they are driving through. Doesn’t seem like a huge ask.
Emergency vehicles here do the same thing, but there’s a human element that may be hard to implement- the drivers assume that a vehicle has “seen” them if it stops. But an automatic car (and some drivered cars, too) will then start up again and drive into the side of the truck.
But the biggest reason they slow down is that if two emergency vehicles are responding from different roads - they can hit each other - so much so there are multiple examples of it on YouTube.
That’s why they switch sound approaching an intersection and slow down. It actually helps them if there are cars stopped at the cross streets, running interference.
Speaking as someone who drives emergency vehicles with flashing lights and sirens - it's amazing how many people presumably with average hearing and average vision cannot see a fire truck until it's been tailing them for a while.
As a frequent lights and sirens passenger I'm convinced that they cause such a huge adrenaline spike that surrounding drivers act completely irrationally. Drivers will see us and then slam on the gas to dart in front or sometimes just stop in front of us. So many close calls where our engine almost gets hit by a human driver who seems completely committed to hitting us. Or we'll be turning onto a street (sometimes we have to swing wide to take a tight corner) and there will be a driver trying to squeeze by and making the same turn as us.
Emergency vehicles in many areas have a strobe light that sends out a particular pattern of flashes, allowing them to turn traffic lights red as they approach. Seems like a fairly obvious step would be to mandate that self-driving cars recognize those strobes.
If the light is already turning red that might be the more obvious indicator? Also those infrared LEDs are kinda angled upwards towards the traffic lights and might not be as visible from the road
Cruise released a statement which said the car did hear the siren when it was louder than background noise. No indication how close the siren was for that to happen, but it sounds pretty definitive that audio sensors are already part of the kit.
A small nit (sorry): it’s probably not a matter of sensor quality (decent quality microphones are not very expensive), but rather the neural networks that process the audio signal.
It’s almost a harder problem - I can regularly hear sirens in my town the moment they leave the fire station until they arrive at their destination - more than a mile away in each case.
Understanding a system well enough to manipulate it in ways that the owner doesn't want seems at least in the same category of phone phreaker behavior.
Which was also criminal behavior, but the point is that I don't think it automatically disqualifies it from the category.
Is putting a cone on a vehicle to cause traffic jams really so complex? Perhaps the first person to do it was a bit clever, but anyone imitating it really isn't.
I think it depends. To compare it back to the phone phreaker example, putting up a single cone that blocks something is roughly the equivalent of cutting a phone line. That is to say, probably not hacking.
But what about when you add a level of complexity and creativity? Say, putting up a series of cones that trap the car in an endless circle?
I don't really think the semantics matter too much. Sure, call the circle of cones a hack. The point is, it's criminal & likely causes a degree of chaos well beyond a simple prank.
Then I completely misread the post. In my defense I went back and re-read it, and it still looks that way. But, y'know, tone and text and all that. I could always be wrong.
The point was that it's a stupid and harmful crime. Calling it a hack makes it sound like a clever harmless prank. The point is about the characterization of it, not about what hacks can and cannot be.
Good question & to be honest I'm not 100% sure, though I bet there are many laws vague enough to capture it.
If it causes extreme traffic jams, perhaps there's some kind of public nuisance law that will cover it? Is interference with public infrastructure a crime?
Do you actually think this type of behavior will simply be tolerated?
They don't put the cone on the bonnet for no reason. They do it because they know what the likely outcome will be.
In a similar way, if you booby trap a vehicle such that it might surprise a human driver in some way whilst they are driving, causing them to potentially have an accident, the crime you are committing is not simply that you're surprising someone by tampering with their property, but you might be doing it with a specific intent to cause an accident.
> the crime you are committing is not simply that you're surprising someone by tampering with their property, but you might be doing it with a specific intent to cause an accident.
this is nice rhetoric and all but doesn't apply at all in this situation
nothing has been tampered with: the cone can be removed and having done so the vehicle will be indistinguishable from before it was placed (no property damage)
the "attack" keeps the vehicle in its safest possible state (that in which it can't move) so there is no intent to cause an accident
and you still have yet to point out which law is being broken (I suspect because there isn't one), so it is a crime?
however the company may be able to go after you in a civil court for lost revenue/reputation
You'd be doing it so the vehicle won't move, and if the vehicle doesn't move it will cause traffic. If your argument is even slightly correct (that there would be any problem prosecuting such behavior) then it at least won't be in the future. Obviously trying to trick a car into causing traffic chaos is not going to be an accepted behavior.
Maybe we should try other signaling methods (radio?) for emergency vehicles that’s easier to process for computers. That may be end up being useful for human drivers too ultimately.
Because nowadays cars are computers on wheels with lots of sensors, so we don’t need to only rely on human ears and brains like we had to in 1950s.
I think modernizing traffic signals will end up making transportation more efficient and safer. (Just imagine knowing the timing of the next 5 traffic lights on your path.)
This would make roads undrivable by human drivers (unless augmented by modern tech). Probably exactly what you had in mind, but I don't want this future (at least not now)
I am a little confused at how the reduction request is coming from the CA DMV…
> The California Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that regulates the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles in the state, requested the reduction in operations.
… while it was the CPUC that allowed an expansion of their fleet:
> The CPUC, the agency that regulates ride-hailing operations including those involving robotaxis, approved Cruise and Waymo on August 10 for final permits that allow the companies to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, expand their fleets and charge for rides throughout the city.
I guess Cruise is still officially allowed to run the expanded fleet, but the DMV has the ability to say "Stop everything" and so their request has the weight of an order?
Unbelievable these things are on the street and more have been deployed!
A bunch of Cruise cars lose internet connection and become disabled blocking a street. All because the 5G network is being slammed by a music festival 6 miles away. Laughable! Has Verizon, ATT, etc solved that issue of too many connections at a Taylor Swift concert for example?
Then a passenger is hurt because AI can't hear or detect emergencies vehicles rushing to save lives, but in the end the EMT vehicle is blocked from saving lives and hurts another life. All in the name of rich tech moguls trying to win the AI robot car market. Progress will be deadly killer ... Uber's car already killed a pedesterian.
I have a bit more faith in Waymo as Google has been at it since 2005 or 2007. Cruise seems like another Uber ... do whatever it takes to win the AI robot car race... knowing all along they are not ready for prime time and are learning as they go. What's next a Cruise car gets hacked and then is used as a weapon.
> What's next a Cruise car gets hacked and then is used as a weapon.
Nobody would burn that hack on just a single vehicle. It'll be fleet-wide once inside, then we'll see some Daniel Suarez level chaos in the streets with mobs of robotaxis converging on targets at 100% throttle.
Everywhere I've lived, it's the responsibility of the emergency vehicle to avoid a wreck when they are crossing an intersection against the signal, whether they're lit up and blasting the siren or not. If the Cruise vehicle really did have a green and the emergency vehicle struck them, then this doesn't actually seem like their fault.
Unless it was already in the intersection and blocked... or the fire truck turned a corner quickly. Or a hundred other things.
There's a reason the emergency drivers don't plow straight through intersections. Let's just see the footage when it comes out rather than making stuff up.
Safety is the first rule, yielding the right-of-way is second. This was not an emergency vehicle behind the Cruise car, it was an emergency vehicle entering an intersection against the signal (running the red). They are supposed to stop and proceed only once they verify the intersection is clear.
Another example is when you are at a red light and an emergency vehicle comes up behind you with their lights & siren activated. What do you do? Wait where you are for them to go around, or the light to turn green. Firefighters everywhere urge you not to run a red light just to make way for them, because it makes everyone less safe, including them.
Why u giving this guinea pig robot car a pass ... how many other accidents need to happen for cruise to learn and perfect its algorithm... some of their lessons they learn will be at the hands of severely hurting someone or many ppl directly or indirectly.
Cruise hasn't been at this as long as Waymo nor are we seeing Waymo have such accidents .. seems they are just trying to kill it like Uber did and we see what happened there.
Overall I'm against tech bros trying to kill it and doing anything and all cost to win a market to the point it actually kills ppl. I think most ppl who have morals and aren't greedy )have skin in this robot car game) share this sentiment.
I've said it before when a self-driving Uber killed a woman, and I'll say it again:
I don't understand why authorities allow self-driving cars to beta test out in public. I thought Waymo was the best with something like millions of hours on the road but when they started accepting passengers, it failed to proceed past a traffic cone:
I wouldn't trust any of the others like Tesla and Uber that think self-driving is as easy putting it out on the road. And Tesla with their cost-saving no LIDAR nonsense.
These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from testing out in public.
So? No need to increase that number by allowing half-developed machine to kill even more people. Having those kids on the road is a necessary evil. Having those dumb machines on the road is not. AI should be trained safely off the roads or not at all. If those companies don't know how then that's their problem, not ours.
Why is it necessary to train kids on the road in real driving conditions but not necessary to train AI on the road in real driving conditions? These AIs have probably hundreds of thousands of hours of incident-free driving in simulation. Kids aren't even required to do a single hour in a simulator before they're allowed on the roads.
> No need to increase that number by allowing half-developed machine to kill even more people
1. To my knowledge there has been only one death by a robot car. It was Uber’s and that program has been shut down for many reasons.
2. Given robot cars already have a higher bar for safety (ie fewer deaths, injuries, etc) than 15 year olds, wouldn’t the more prudent use of time/energy be to invest more into robot cars while changing policy so driving becomes (at minimum) 18+?
In Europe they can't drive normal cars before 18. They will be able to to so after 17 if accompanied by an adult and will be subject to a probation period of 2 years after taking the test. Also speed "limitiers" will be required in all new vehicles after 2024. Most of these would probably be audible nags, like the one that beeps if one drives without the seatbelt.
You have untrained people using multi-ton motorized equipment on streets where people cross. And you don't even ask them if they'd be okay with this experiment. At least a bit unethical.
Exactly, the point I’ve been trying to emphasize is:
The bar to become a driver in California is really LOW. We should push for the robots to be even better, but given the low bar for humans, I don’t see a good reason to stop them from training on public roads.
> I've said it before when a self-driving Uber killed a woman, and I'll say it again:
But that car had a safety driver, who turned out to be negligent. What's the difference between a company testing a self-driving car with a safety diver killing someone because the safety driver was negligent, and a company doing deliveries with a human driver, and killing someone because the driver was negligent?
The car hit her because Uber purposefully disabled the Volvo SUV's built-in autobraking systems, and because the self-driving system detected and classified her with plenty of time to react...and simply did nothing to avoid hitting her. A complete and total failure of the self-driving control logic.
It's also arguable that she was killed as a direct result of Nevada happily allowing Uber to conduct their self-driving testing after Uber was banned from testing in California for ignoring regulators and their cars routinely being caught violating traffic laws by dashcams, traffic cameras, and cyclist helmet cams.
Even if the safety driver had not been playing with their phone - it's well demonstrated that the whole concept of a 'safety driver' is bullshit; in studies, the drivers are terrible at taking over when they haven't been in control of the vehicle.
Safety drivers were lipstick on a pig, designed to make self-driving cars more palatable to the public.
> The car hit her because Uber purposefully disabled the Volvo SUV's built-in autobraking systems
Are autobraking systems mandatory? If amazon is doing deliveries using vans without autobraking systems, should they also get flak?
>and because the self-driving system detected and classified her with plenty of time to react...and simply did nothing to avoid hitting her. A complete and total failure of the self-driving control logic.
But that's why the human driver is there, right? To catch the system when it fails?
>Even if the safety driver had not been playing with their phone - it's well demonstrated that the whole concept of a 'safety driver' is bullshit; in studies, the drivers are terrible at taking over when they haven't been in control of the vehicle.
No, she was terrible at taking over because she was streaming hulu.
> why authorities allow self-driving cars to beta test out in public
because that's the definition of a beta test?
they have gone through a number of test stages over the years, and if the goal is that they drive in public, the penultimate step is test driving in public.
if your criticism is that they didn't do enough prior testing, could be, but you need to make that case.
> “Over one hundred people lose their lives every day on American roadways, and countless others are badly injured, Cruise said in a statement sent via email.
I’m so tired of this angle being accepted at face value. Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing into an emergency vehicle that has its sirens and lights blazing.
Nobody should trust their evidence-free assurances that they will also be better at the less routine, more complex situations that human drivers (who almost universally have better sensors and better cognition) currently fail at.
Just because they have weird failure cases does not mean they fail more often than human drivers.
FWIW as a biker in SF i feel much more comfortable around driverless than actual drivers, especially in areas like the Mission where people don’t check their right before turning onto streets like Guerrero or Valencia. The self driving ones always do
Right, but the OP seems to be skipping that part entirely. The only metric we should care about is overall accident rates (controlling for reasonable variables of course), not "safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with".
Given that driverless cars are slim minority on our roads, if they exist at all, failure modes actually do matter a lot. Human drivwr failure modes are what everybody is used to, and trained by everyday life to cope with. The radom, unpredictable stuff driverless cars do is in itsrlf dangerous from that perspective.
This isn’t the kind of thing you need to theorize about when there’s real world data to look at. American drivers have 13.5 deaths per billion vehicle miles, you can try and adjust that for conditions etc but people still fuck up driving good cars in nearly perfect conditions.
The fully autonomous cars without safety drivers haven’t yet crossed the threshold to compare fatalities, but you can compare vs the 5 million car accidents in the U.S. each year 43% of which resulted in injuries. So there’s enough data to know they aren’t wildly dangerous.
I think the jury is still out since these cars are deployed in very specific, limited environments. In my opinion you need to compare only the areas they are driving in vs the accidents in only those areas. If they don't use freeways or specific streets, or drive in the rain, than those needed to be excluded in the data.
There are other factors like if they make unintended stops, cause traffic, etc. that don't get marked as accidents.
I would love it if they all worked and saved lives but I'm not yet sold on this.
I don't think that IS a fair metric. Be it for Tesla or for robotaxi and let me explain why.
Tesla vehicles should be compared to similar vehicles driven by people that can afford a Tesla. (Not to a national average that includes lots of small, cheap or old cars).
Robotaxis incident rates should be compared to taxi incident rates in the specific areas.
There should be some way of factoring in the overly-cautious driving causing other drivers to do stupid shit because they got annoyed by the cars in question. (Not sure how exactly though)
>Tesla vehicles should be compared to similar vehicles driven by people that can afford a Tesla. (Not to a national average that includes lots of small, cheap or old cars).
>Robotaxis incident rates should be compared to taxi incident rates in the specific areas.
That's what I said in the original comment?
>overall accident rates (controlling for reasonable variables of course)
An unlicensed driver in the Mission plowed into me on my motorcycle because he panicked and slammed on the gas.
Cruise cars, conversely, generally result in close calls due to aborted lane changes, cutting me off, or absurd double parking, but I can safely assume that a Cruise car will sit at a stop sign for minutes on end of other drivers don't give it a turn.
Cruise vehicles operate like over-cautious student drivers, dangerously lacking assertiveness and commitment.
Basically, if the Mission is your bar for quality, we may as well let elementary school kids drive. Nonetheless, Cruise vehicles for into that tapestry quite nicely. Unless I'm going to the Mission, it's best to avoid it altogether.
Assertiveness is a bad thing in drivers. Sure you wait longer for others to do the right thing, but you also don't force crashes because of your bad driving.
I find CA drivers to be very assertive, meaning they will accelerate to pass you while joining the freeway; in the Midwest people will slow down when merging to be polite, which causes many more issues.
You also have the situation where an assumed perfect car that drives exactly as you expect, but once in a million goes just kills you - is likely to be much less annoying (unless you’re dead) than a car that every single time you interact with it does weird things, even though it never kills you at all
Every day you're probably taking one-in-a-million risks where a drunk driver in an Escalade could randomly kill you. Either you get T-boned when it runs a red light at >60 mph or it drives off the road and snaps off one of those breakaway light poles and flattens you as a pedestrian.
>>>> Current driverless cars are not even capable of ...
If Brand A has single-digit massive fuckups per ten million miles driven, while Brand B has quintuple-digit massive fuckups per ten million miles driven, it's weird to argue that all brands are massively fucking up so much worse than humans.
Evaluating safety of self driving cars is not just a matter of comparing number of failures of number of accidents, or any one scalar number.
Just to illustrate my point, imagine a case where self driving cars have same number of fatal deaths (normalised by whatever you need to convince yourself), but self driving cars disproportionately fail on dark skinned children. Then it is obvious that self driving cars are worse.
Weird failure cases, cases where a bad human driver would do better, are bad for self driving cars.
Your point is that we shouldn't have self-driving vehicles because... we can't prove they're not racist? I'm not following.
I mean, yes, you're correct that there are edge cases in any moral analysis and it's not just about comparing two numbers (though in safety arguments, yeah, it's almost always about simple numbers).
But you don't get to wave that fact as a get-out-of-jail-free card in an argument! You need to show us the edge case. And the best you can do is "the cars might be racist"?
Do terrible drivers drive as much as Cruise does? Terrible drivers at least eventually get better through practice. Having 100 poorer than average driving autonomous cars in the streets driving around 24x7 is a net worsening. Autonomous cars improve more slowly than humans do.
The myth about good vs bad drivers has long been out to bed.
All drivers are better than average drivers.
The problem for all humans is alcohol, sleep deprivation, stress, phones, coffee, makeup, shaving, food, etc.
Everyone, including you, has read at least one text while driving. Sleep deprived actors by definition cannot correctly judge their ability to be sleep deprived. None of us are immune to these realities.
The only way safely (with data) testing self-driving robots is “net worsening” for humanity is if you aren’t taking a long term view.
Sleep deprivation causes a reduction in ability to reason. Similar to being drunk. A drunk person can also feel drunk, but “how drunk is too drunk?” Similarly “how sleep deprived is too deprived?”
The answer is, at a minimum, that a second “sober” party make that judgement.
"If you can feel it, you're too drunk" is the answer these days, so I don't think even that one is true anymore. And as far as I'm aware it's a good bit easier to tell how sleep deprived you are than how drunk, am I wrong on that?
I think I understand your original post better now, but I disagree with how high of a bar you're setting for "correctly". "Am I sleep deprived?" is not a question that needs precise measurement.
Nope. Believe it or not, some of us put our phones away when we drive. Mine is either in my hip pocket or center console. I couldn’t read a text while driving even if I wanted to.
Driving is one of two things I regularly do in which a moment’s inattention could cost someone’s life (belaying climbers is the other). I take both very seriously. I’ve seen brains spilled out on the roadway by someone who didn’t, and I’ll never forget that.
I have not and will not touch my phone while driving, and I obnoxiously ridicule those close to me that choose to do so near me.
It sounds like YOU'RE in denial and trying to convince yourself that it's absolutely unquestionably ubiquitous -- it's not, and it's a danger to yourself and even to those others on the road that made better choices.
You are in denial. Plenty of people understand the weight of sitting behind the wheel and have the self control to devote the attention that driving deserves. If you don't have the self control, you should admit it and try to better yourself. But don't try to pretend that no human has surpassed you at the task of driving without glancing at a phone. Many have.
Your point about terrible drivers getting better through practice doesn’t make much sense to me:
- autonomous cars are also getting better with practice
- we’re alway producing new batches of terrible drivers. This is unlike autonomous cars, where all cars within a particular fleet (Waymo, Cruise) are monotonically becoming better drivers
Why would they get monotonically better? Is that your experience with modern best practice software development? Where companies push user hostile features and bugs automatically without user interaction.
All Waymo cars could simultaneously degrade due to an update (or hack). Imagine if all them did full left at the same time.
Your objections make little sense.
Waymo is not working on a mobile phone widget but on advanced process control software. And yes, this class of software is getting increasingly better.
Of course software bugs will be introduced, and later rectified. We live in an imperfect world.
The statistics "per mile" have been out for a long time. At least for Waymo they are extremely good. What difference does it make that any specific car drives around 24x7?
Quick look up of current numbers - without double checking whether it's over the life of the program, or just the latest year, or what:
Waymo one crash per 1.26 million miles
American humans overall one per 484,000 miles or 552,983 miles depending on the yr or something.
Younger drivers, something like 3 times the average.
And that's when Waymo reports automatically while many human collisions don't need reporting.
> Autonomous cars improve more slowly than humans do
They can get buggy software updates and maps but otherwise I'll bet on the software.
Yes and the driver probably was impaired and fined/charged and possibly lost their license.
So with that in mind Cruise's hive mind controls all it's cars and they need to lose their license immediately before it does what Uber's not ready for prime time car did and killed a pedesterian!
They're engaged in a standard PR / argument technique of whataboutism. When facing negative PR, you blather about something else positive. One reason is that you're pushing the positive info into people's brains even if they know what you're doing, and the second: there are tons of morons who will happily eat the "this random positive thing offsets or excuses the negative thing."
"Your cars aren't stopping for police pulling them over for traffic violations, and even driving off from officers who have no idea what to do because regulators are firmly in the industry's pocket and not requiring firms offer solid ways for first responders to command these vehicle's control systems, or at least committing to having a human supervisor available to quickly take remote control of the vehicle and move it."
PR response: "but what about all those crashes human drivers get into that we don't?"
...which doesn't change the fact that we have vehicles running around that are almost completely free from policing.
How did we land in a spot where the “only serious contender” to solve this problem is VC funded companies using the roads and people’s lives as beta testing grounds?
I get where you’re coming from but SF is full of busses, it has trams, light rail, (even some cable cars!) and a subway. A couple of years ago it was stuffed full of electric scooters. Bikeable areas are constrained by the hills or practically impossible due to the road layout (bus lanes, tram tracks, crazy Victorian street plan) pedestrians who go literally anywhere they want at any time, questionable grid system that inhibits walkability with endless crosswalks. Changing anything significant costs billions of dollars. We don’t have any credible solutions to these. It’s like a massive technical debt where you can’t rebuild and every fix breaks something else.
Some of these things are basically solved (e-bikes chew through hills, physically separated bike lanes solve the "no space for bikes" issue, etc) but SF is still super car friendly. It has to be because of road and zoning regulations, so roads have to be maintained at a certain level and must be a certain width, and there must be a certain amount of parking, etc. If we gave walkability and biking the same amount of deference and funding our cities would be cyclist/pedestrian paradises.
Coming from a major metro area in the Midwest, on my recent visit to San Fran you could get to MANY more useful things in a 15 min walk. Because of its density, I don’t think San Fran has a real transportation problem to speak of (for those who live in the city proper). For those who live outside of it, sure. But that’s just par for the course rush hour issues at any major metro.
We’ve had those technologies for decades. Why are fatalities not dropping to zero?
Because the personal automobile is so desirable.
A majority of fatalities do not happen in urban environments. But the solution has to cover the last mile, or else it will not be an attractive alternative to other modes.
Alabama, Mississippi et al have highest fatality rates. A car is far more convenient than a bus or a bike.
I’m referring to the technology generally here. I’m indifferent to how it comes about (“VC funded” etc). We need to innovate to solve hard problems.
Nah, walkable cities, physically separated bike lanes, public transit, and trains. Also cheaper, leads to better health outcomes (more walking and biking), and more sustainable. And as a bonus, you avoid having thousands of cameras trolling around at all times.
Is this not a logical fallacy? “Technology fails at something simple therefore it will fail at something complex.” Humans might fail in that manner but this technology was trained and operates in an entirely different manner.
I think you may also be rather too generous to human drivers. My grandmother crashed into a parked car at 10mph, flipping her car upside down in the process. My wife’s grandmother phoned up her son mid-journey to ask which pedal was the accelerator and which was the break - when unsure she would just press both!
The evidence is always nuanced and we should be wary of motivated reasoning from those who stand to profit / lose from decisions made from such evidence. /throatclearing
BUT the thing that most people ignore is that self-driving cars share a learning network, where the entire network benefits from hitting and learning from edge cases. Humans tend to have to re-learn their mistakes on a per-human basis. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the common failure conditions of humans — stressed, exhausted, distracted, frustrated, greedy, emotionally unstable, unpredictable, imprecise, etc.
So long as the cost of the damage is borne by the car manufacturer/owner and there was minimal harm done to life, I’m perfectly willing to allow self-driving car experiments to continue.
… Not that I had any significant power to stop it in the first place.
> Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing into an emergency vehicle that has its sirens and lights blazing.
Those are both very common accidents for human drivers. It's fine if you want to argue with numbers about whether or not Cruise/Waymo/Tesla are more or less likely to get into these accidents. But please don't spin and claim that people don't do this too. That is simply incorrect and you know it.
What boils my blood each time I hear self driving company talk about metrics, is total ignorance to decades of safety engineering and processes developed there.
They act like reasoning about safety of automated systems is brand new area that they need to develop and disrupt.
Sure, heavy reliance on AI makes some traditional forms of validation more tricky, but BS metrics and test in prod is so reckless, that will end up only hurting the industry. When there will be a big tragedy, because of reckless approach, government will be forced to drop heavy hammer of regulations and make it much harder to develop self driving tech.
When you put it that way, it strongly mirrors what is seen in computer programming and I am inclined to wonder how much of it is simply the computer programming culture leaking into the automotive world.
There are reckless people in software development, and there are reckless people in the automotive world. Any industry is going to have people who cut corners to be early to a new market.
I’m a software developer, and being asked to test in prod is a massive red flag. It’s almost always prompted by someone with fairly little technical background.
>It’s almost always prompted by someone with fairly little technical background.
Or it's a sales team that knows a big $$$ contract is out there and this thing needs to be in PROD now and not in the normal cycle of DEV -> QA/Staging -> PROD.
There are many reasons for doing things in prod, none of them are valid reasons, but there are many of them that people use. "The specific data we need to test against isn't in DEV" is one of my pet peeves.
In fairness, cruise is smart enough to not even attempt to unleash their cars on areas challenging enough to cause the death of a 4yo. If they did, who knows what would happen.
> I’m so tired of this angle being accepted at face value. Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing into an emergency vehicle that has its sirens and lights blazing.
The incident was reported as the Cruise robotaxi being struck by an emergency vehicle. It sounds less like the car drove into the big vehicle with the flashing red lights and more like the vehicle wasn't visible and the robotaxi drive into the intersection and was struck. This is a common failure mode of below average human drivers as well.
I agree that its a failure mode that needs to be eliminated and looks pretty bad on Cruise for not anticipating and testing this, but that is a situation that below-average human drivers absolutely do struggle with.
Yeah it sounds like the corner was blind and the Cruise was in the right lane and the Firetruck had crossed into the oncoming traffic lane and struck the cruise on the right side:
The title may sound a little bit inflammatory but emergency vehicles are usually found at fault when they enter a red light, even when they're running lights and sirens and have a collision. They don't get tickets for breaking the law, but they are often found civilly at fault for collisions that happen when they do. They're expected to slow and visually clear the intersection, and if they were using the oncoming lane and couldn't see cross traffic they should have been more cautious.
This happens all the time with humans. One of the many reasons why 2 or more vehicles are usually dispatched (although there's a few videos you can find on youtube of firetrucks from different engine companies responding to the same incident T-boning each other as well).
Waymo at least claims to do things much more correctly and like a human in this case:
> Waymo representatives believe their vehicle would have handled this situation. According to Waymo, “Waymo has developed various technologies to detect active emergency vehicles even if they are not in direct view. Like humans, our vehicles can hear sirens and reason about the direction, location, and motion of the active emergency vehicle, importantly including whether it is approaching or receding. When we hear sirens, our vehicle will slow and then depending on how the situation develops, we will either pull over or stop ahead of intersections where there might be crossing emergency vehicles, even if we have a green light. The system is designed to remain cautious and not enter an intersection if it is still reasoning whether the emergency vehicle is approaching the intersection based on what it is sensing.” However, it is fair to say that Cruise has said similar things about their own vehicles ability to detect emergency vehicles, and Waymo has not tested in this exact situation.
Cruise should still get punished over this, and I don't know if 50% reduction in vehicles is enough of a punishment or what it should be. Going "move fast, break things" on public streets to try to catch up to your competitor should definitely result in you losing more ground that you think you're gaining when you're busted for it, or else it isn't a deterrent.
> The latest Cruise incident occurred Thursday night when a Cruise robotaxi and an emergency vehicle crashed and left a passenger injured. Cruise said in a social media post that one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene.
It sounds serious. But more importantly, it’s a self driving car and a public emergency vehicle. I expect both to have a high def video of the accident and it should be released soon for the public benefit. The US is one of the most driving countries and it’s one of those rear cases when it’s about a public safety and everyone is an expert.
It would be interesting to see, but emergency vehicles responding to a call (and with lights and sirens going) clearly have right of way. That said, every emergency driver I know and have seen slows to a near stop at intersections to make sure it's clear before proceeding.
But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.
An emergency vehicle with sirens on obviously has the right of way. And they absolutely slow down for traffic in California. Right of way does not absolve emergency vehicle drivers from responsibility to avoid accidents. It’s easy to get confused especially in busy traffic when an emergency vehicle approaches. But if we have videos, everyone can judge for themselves if self-driving vehicle failed the expectations. Here is interesting stats: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/emergen...
No, the driver with the green light has right of way.
Emergency vehicles are not allowed to break traffic laws in any state; they're just afforded some privileges other vehicles aren't, and other operators are required to get out of the way.
If an ambulance hits a car that had a green light, the ambulance driver is cited.
In all states I'm familiar with, the driver with the green light is still supposed to yield the right of way to the emergency vehicle once they see it. The ambulance driver has a responsibility to make sure that the driver with the green light is doing so. If a car is e.g. going 55 through a green light, they might not even hear the sirens until it is too late to stop.
The US, in general, doesn't have strict "right of way" rules for it's always X driver's fault. All parties involved have a duty to avoid an accident. If you see someone doing something totally stupid and against the rules of the road and just plow into them, it's technically your fault (of course they would have to prove that you deliberately failed to avoid the collision, so if you keep your mouth shut, you might get away with it[1]).
They may have right of way, but does that mean they can blast through an intersection at any speed or is there a reasonable speed they should be proceeding at?
On what's currently made public, this really feels like it could go either way with regard to which party was more at fault.
> But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.
Definitely is. I was on the jury for a case that involved an officer calling for help on the radio. We watched the dash-cam footage of the first officer coming to assist. He got up to 80 between the intersections, but slowed down to near the speed-limit for green lights and almost stopped at red lights, despite the urgency and it being 3 in the morning when the odds of another car being there were low.
You and others here are conflating right of way with responsibility at red lights. Those are two separate things. While emergency vehicles have right of way, that only means you must pull over to let them pass you. But emergency vehicles also have intersection responsibilities. For example, here's the law excerpt in Texas:
> In operating an authorized emergency vehicle the operator may: ... (2) proceed past a red or stop signal or stop sign, after slowing as necessary for safe operation; ...
And in California the relevant law is in vehicle code section 20156 [1], which clearly states that emergency vehicle drivers cannot do whatever they want without regard to the safety of other drivers just because their sirens are on:
> Section 21055 does not relieve the driver of a vehicle from the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of all persons using the highway, nor protect him from the consequences of an arbitrary exercise of the privileges granted in that section.
It's quite likely that the emergency vehicle driver is at fault in this interaction, not the Cruise vehicle.
They might have right of way in the “law”. But if emergency responders rip through a red light at high speed without looking, they’ll quickly learn that there are another set of laws, called the laws of physics.
Lots of top level comments here are making sweeping generalizations about self driving cars from this event, but the truth is that we won't know which vehicle is at fault here until some video comes out of the incident.
“Cruise said one of its self-driving Chevy Bolt EVs entered an intersection on a green traffic light at Polk and Turk streets when it was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene.”
Hard to imagine a scenario in which an emergency vehicle with its lights and sirens on is at fault here. Normal traffic is required to STOP in this situation, even if the traffic light is green.
Absurd: Are we going to call for a 50% reduction in human operators next time there is a crash caused by something with a pulse?
We can't have progress if we don't get over this inane sentimentality(?) over how accidents, deaths, and dismemberments are just 'how things are' so long as they are caused by people and 'Safety of the traveling public is the California DMV’s top priority[0]' when a robot does it.
[0]Editorial comment: it sure as shit isn't the rest of the time.
After a human killed a four-year-old child in central San Francisco earlier this week (did not hit the front page of HN despite being as relevant to AVs as this story) unfortunately nobody called for an immediate reconsideration of the whole car thing.
> We can't have progress if we don't get over this inane sentimentality(?) over how accidents, deaths, and dismemberments are just 'how things are' so long as they are caused by people and 'Safety of the traveling public is the California DMV’s top priority[0]' when a robot does it.
That sure does sound like the way to have progress.
Blockchain and self-driving seem to be the only digital domains where adherents argue for lowering our standards for the technology being offered-- typically in pursuit of some unspecified improvement at an unspecified future date.
It's actually difficult to come up with an analogy in any other domain. Perhaps if VR hardware had some inane limitation that required users to always walk the entire physically analogous distance to move around in the virtual world. And when a user complains about not being able to teleport to different areas, VR adherents push back that the VR world is no worse than the physical world in this sense.
Lowering from what baseline? I almost always see people advocate for similar accident rates as humans or better. That's not lowering.
> It's actually difficult to come up with an analogy in any other domain. Perhaps if VR hardware had some inane limitation that required users to always walk the entire physically analogous distance to move around in the virtual world. And when a user complains about not being able to teleport to different areas, VR adherents push back that the VR world is no worse than the physical world in this sense.
In this analogy, is walking the only option in the physical world too? Or can VR have vehicles too?
If yes to either of those, I don't see what's so ridiculous about this scenario. Am I the dumb one?
For the analogy to fit, there must have been enormous amounts of money spent on trying to invent VR teleportation, but it hadn't happened yet.
And in that case... yes the complaint is valid, but it doesn't make VR a failure.
You wouldn't be lowering your standards because of the lack of teleportation.
Good idea. Let's extend that to all gasoline vehicles. They can only be driven (or robo-ride) every other day. Cuts congestion and gas consumption. Makes parking easier.
Every driver can still get to all of things they have to. They just have to learn to schedule things better. Car pool, transit, whatever. Most cars aren't driven many hours a day anyways.
I assume most people aren't wealthy enough to do that, so the measure still reduces the number of cars on the road and the amount of petrol consumed. And the net effect is to transfer wealth from rich people to all the people involved in making cars. Sounds like a win to me.
Er, no, not in the least. Where do you get that from?
Maybe something along the following lines: 1. Everyone hates either rich people or poor people. 2. I didn't get outraged at one particular thing some rich people are alleged to have done, therefore I don't hate rich people. 3. Therefore I hate poor people. The only thing wrong with this argument is every part of it, so I hope you mean something more reasonable. But what?
You admit that most people won't have the money to retain their cars, thus they will lose the greatest tool for individual travel ever. So you want to force poor people to be stuck in their current location regardless of how safe it is, and how much opportunity it has.
Pretty common in Italy and Costa Rica. My family car license plate was allowed on Mondays and Thursdays in downtown San Jose. Of course there's a great bus network and tons of taxis for the other days.
> According to a CPUC press release, Cruise could charge for service between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. without a safety drive, while Waymo could charge for passenger service at any time but only with a safety driver in the car. Waymo was also able to operate its cars completely autonomously but was unable to charge passengers for those services.
Once again, why the fuck was and is GM/Cruise getting special privileges up and over Waymo when Waymo doesn't have this level of critical failures on the road?
There's some point where we need to start leaning in and actually fining AV companies for this horseshit and taking actual action. Limiting the fleet is one thing, but actually stripping them of special privileges would be a better idea. It sounds like Cruise needs to go back to safety drivers in every vehicle.
On top of this, GM's allowed to market and sell Super Cruise (their Autopilot-esque clone) on public highways. Why isn't the NHTSA looking a lot closer at GM and scrutinizing their products?
Pedestrian safety is to self- driving cars what child porn is to encryption. It is the excuse used by government to conceal its true motives. How many millions of dollars of traffic fine revenue will government be deprived of when self- driving cars follow every law governing it?
The amount of mental gymnastics in the comments here to justify the Cruise vehicle's actions baffles me. Emergency vehicles have right of way, always, in the USA. This is non-negotiable, especially if sirens are blaring. It does not matter if other vehicles have a green light.
This is like cracking down on all e-cigarettes because some people got sick from for some crappy e-liquid, while regular cigarettes kill nearly half a million people a year without anyone batting an eye. Classic misdirection while ignoring the real problems.
“The Cruise AV did identify the risk of a collision and initiated a braking maneuver, reducing its speed, but was ultimately unable to avoid the collision.”
Yea, but why? The article doesn’t actually explain the critical issue.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadNoticing and responding to emergency sounds/signals in the road, distant but approaching, is yet another subtly complex aspect of human driving I hadn’t thought of but which seems obvious in retrospect. Seems solvable in theory but also involves a lot of uncertainty and contingencies. Then I suppose the cone-blocking hackers will start playing siren recordings to confuse the robotaxis…
Ummm, that would even confuse normal drivers, and I hope that it would wind you up in jail.
Those siren sounds get played on the radio sometimes, and I really wish that it was illegal to do so.
You have to know when to stop and let the cards fall where they may.
How do deaf drivers respond to sirens from emergency vehicles?
Likewise, if I am waiting for a bus or something, I am really alert and on guard if I'm alone at the stop, because that bus will blow right by. Once there are a few other passengers around, I kick back and just watch them, because unless they're all impatient and pacing, their attitude and behavior will indicate when the bus is visibly arriving.
SDCs that coldly and analytically examine the traffic around them will probably never get the human nuances that we can pick up from second-and-third-order clues. For example, if I'm paranoid about whether a car's going to turn into me in an intersection, I don't watch their turn signal or lateral motion, I watch their front tire, because that's the first indicator of a turn. Is that sort of thing baked into AI? If several people are stopped at an intersection, eye contact and gestures are often essential in negotiating a solution. AI? Same with pedestrians. Make eye contact, signal, work something out. I'll often stop on a corner and wave cars through rather than insist on my right-of-way. Of course the motorist also has to decide if that's safe to do, and sometimes you can fool a motorist into making an unsafe move just by signaling your permission...
Japan gets around this by having ambulances at least slow down and look both ways for each red light they are driving through. Doesn’t seem like a huge ask.
But the biggest reason they slow down is that if two emergency vehicles are responding from different roads - they can hit each other - so much so there are multiple examples of it on YouTube.
That’s why they switch sound approaching an intersection and slow down. It actually helps them if there are cars stopped at the cross streets, running interference.
If all drivers were completely deaf it would indeed be a problem.
(I get the impression these are just a tad quieter in Europe)
We have complex flexible shapes to channel audio. Alongside an extremely complex set of hairs for hearing.
Which was also criminal behavior, but the point is that I don't think it automatically disqualifies it from the category.
Others are so complex or use the software against itself that they clearly are hacking; even if they remain criminal.
But what about when you add a level of complexity and creativity? Say, putting up a series of cones that trap the car in an endless circle?
Specifically, it seemed to imply that anything that was criminal could not be hacking.
The legal status of something, seems completely orthogonal to hacking to me.
What was the point then?
If it causes extreme traffic jams, perhaps there's some kind of public nuisance law that will cover it? Is interference with public infrastructure a crime?
Do you actually think this type of behavior will simply be tolerated?
quite why this is different because an unfit for purpose driverless vehicle is involved, I don't know
the company operating the vehicle should be the one fined for blocking the highway
In a similar way, if you booby trap a vehicle such that it might surprise a human driver in some way whilst they are driving, causing them to potentially have an accident, the crime you are committing is not simply that you're surprising someone by tampering with their property, but you might be doing it with a specific intent to cause an accident.
this is nice rhetoric and all but doesn't apply at all in this situation
nothing has been tampered with: the cone can be removed and having done so the vehicle will be indistinguishable from before it was placed (no property damage)
the "attack" keeps the vehicle in its safest possible state (that in which it can't move) so there is no intent to cause an accident
and you still have yet to point out which law is being broken (I suspect because there isn't one), so it is a crime?
however the company may be able to go after you in a civil court for lost revenue/reputation
I think modernizing traffic signals will end up making transportation more efficient and safer. (Just imagine knowing the timing of the next 5 traffic lights on your path.)
> The California Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that regulates the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles in the state, requested the reduction in operations.
… while it was the CPUC that allowed an expansion of their fleet:
> The CPUC, the agency that regulates ride-hailing operations including those involving robotaxis, approved Cruise and Waymo on August 10 for final permits that allow the companies to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, expand their fleets and charge for rides throughout the city.
I guess Cruise is still officially allowed to run the expanded fleet, but the DMV has the ability to say "Stop everything" and so their request has the weight of an order?
DMV regulates other aspects, including the overall self-driving program.
A bunch of Cruise cars lose internet connection and become disabled blocking a street. All because the 5G network is being slammed by a music festival 6 miles away. Laughable! Has Verizon, ATT, etc solved that issue of too many connections at a Taylor Swift concert for example?
Then a passenger is hurt because AI can't hear or detect emergencies vehicles rushing to save lives, but in the end the EMT vehicle is blocked from saving lives and hurts another life. All in the name of rich tech moguls trying to win the AI robot car market. Progress will be deadly killer ... Uber's car already killed a pedesterian.
I have a bit more faith in Waymo as Google has been at it since 2005 or 2007. Cruise seems like another Uber ... do whatever it takes to win the AI robot car race... knowing all along they are not ready for prime time and are learning as they go. What's next a Cruise car gets hacked and then is used as a weapon.
Nobody would burn that hack on just a single vehicle. It'll be fleet-wide once inside, then we'll see some Daniel Suarez level chaos in the streets with mobs of robotaxis converging on targets at 100% throttle.
Sounds like your giving the robot guinea pig AI car a pass when clearly it did not and will not act like a human does.
There's a reason the emergency drivers don't plow straight through intersections. Let's just see the footage when it comes out rather than making stuff up.
Another example is when you are at a red light and an emergency vehicle comes up behind you with their lights & siren activated. What do you do? Wait where you are for them to go around, or the light to turn green. Firefighters everywhere urge you not to run a red light just to make way for them, because it makes everyone less safe, including them.
Cruise hasn't been at this as long as Waymo nor are we seeing Waymo have such accidents .. seems they are just trying to kill it like Uber did and we see what happened there.
Overall I'm against tech bros trying to kill it and doing anything and all cost to win a market to the point it actually kills ppl. I think most ppl who have morals and aren't greedy )have skin in this robot car game) share this sentiment.
I don't understand why authorities allow self-driving cars to beta test out in public. I thought Waymo was the best with something like millions of hours on the road but when they started accepting passengers, it failed to proceed past a traffic cone:
https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742
I wouldn't trust any of the others like Tesla and Uber that think self-driving is as easy putting it out on the road. And Tesla with their cost-saving no LIDAR nonsense.
These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from testing out in public.
Who is paying whom to clear these hurdles?
By your logic we should also stop allowing 15-20 year olds to learn how to drive in public.
So far the robots have done less damage.
[0] https://www.inlandempirelawyers.com/blog/young-driver-accide...
1. To my knowledge there has been only one death by a robot car. It was Uber’s and that program has been shut down for many reasons.
2. Given robot cars already have a higher bar for safety (ie fewer deaths, injuries, etc) than 15 year olds, wouldn’t the more prudent use of time/energy be to invest more into robot cars while changing policy so driving becomes (at minimum) 18+?
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/european-com...
Seems like a low bar to me - for both robots and humans. We should instead raise the standards even higher for both!
Exactly, the point I’ve been trying to emphasize is:
The bar to become a driver in California is really LOW. We should push for the robots to be even better, but given the low bar for humans, I don’t see a good reason to stop them from training on public roads.
But that car had a safety driver, who turned out to be negligent. What's the difference between a company testing a self-driving car with a safety diver killing someone because the safety driver was negligent, and a company doing deliveries with a human driver, and killing someone because the driver was negligent?
It's also arguable that she was killed as a direct result of Nevada happily allowing Uber to conduct their self-driving testing after Uber was banned from testing in California for ignoring regulators and their cars routinely being caught violating traffic laws by dashcams, traffic cameras, and cyclist helmet cams.
Even if the safety driver had not been playing with their phone - it's well demonstrated that the whole concept of a 'safety driver' is bullshit; in studies, the drivers are terrible at taking over when they haven't been in control of the vehicle.
Safety drivers were lipstick on a pig, designed to make self-driving cars more palatable to the public.
I go the other way with that information.
Safety drivers being used that way are bullshit.
If they didn't have the safety driver then there's no way in hell the braking systems would have been disabled and need manual intervention.
Therefore it was bad management and the entire idea of using safety drivers that way that was the problem, not the underlying self-driving system.
Are autobraking systems mandatory? If amazon is doing deliveries using vans without autobraking systems, should they also get flak?
>and because the self-driving system detected and classified her with plenty of time to react...and simply did nothing to avoid hitting her. A complete and total failure of the self-driving control logic.
But that's why the human driver is there, right? To catch the system when it fails?
>Even if the safety driver had not been playing with their phone - it's well demonstrated that the whole concept of a 'safety driver' is bullshit; in studies, the drivers are terrible at taking over when they haven't been in control of the vehicle.
No, she was terrible at taking over because she was streaming hulu.
Part of Total Information Awareness involves rolling as many cameras around in public as people will tolerate. San Francisco have made their priorities clear: https://reason.com/2022/09/26/san-francisco-police-can-now-h...
because that's the definition of a beta test?
they have gone through a number of test stages over the years, and if the goal is that they drive in public, the penultimate step is test driving in public.
if your criticism is that they didn't do enough prior testing, could be, but you need to make that case.
Because self driving cars will save lives in the long run and are potentially the largest QOL improvement of my lifetime.
I’m so tired of this angle being accepted at face value. Current driverless cars are not even capable of safely navigating situations that below-average human drivers rarely struggle with, like avoiding driving into clearly marked wet concrete, or not crashing into an emergency vehicle that has its sirens and lights blazing.
Nobody should trust their evidence-free assurances that they will also be better at the less routine, more complex situations that human drivers (who almost universally have better sensors and better cognition) currently fail at.
FWIW as a biker in SF i feel much more comfortable around driverless than actual drivers, especially in areas like the Mission where people don’t check their right before turning onto streets like Guerrero or Valencia. The self driving ones always do
The fully autonomous cars without safety drivers haven’t yet crossed the threshold to compare fatalities, but you can compare vs the 5 million car accidents in the U.S. each year 43% of which resulted in injuries. So there’s enough data to know they aren’t wildly dangerous.
There are other factors like if they make unintended stops, cause traffic, etc. that don't get marked as accidents.
I would love it if they all worked and saved lives but I'm not yet sold on this.
Tesla vehicles should be compared to similar vehicles driven by people that can afford a Tesla. (Not to a national average that includes lots of small, cheap or old cars).
Robotaxis incident rates should be compared to taxi incident rates in the specific areas.
There should be some way of factoring in the overly-cautious driving causing other drivers to do stupid shit because they got annoyed by the cars in question. (Not sure how exactly though)
>Robotaxis incident rates should be compared to taxi incident rates in the specific areas.
That's what I said in the original comment?
>overall accident rates (controlling for reasonable variables of course)
Cruise cars, conversely, generally result in close calls due to aborted lane changes, cutting me off, or absurd double parking, but I can safely assume that a Cruise car will sit at a stop sign for minutes on end of other drivers don't give it a turn.
Cruise vehicles operate like over-cautious student drivers, dangerously lacking assertiveness and commitment.
Basically, if the Mission is your bar for quality, we may as well let elementary school kids drive. Nonetheless, Cruise vehicles for into that tapestry quite nicely. Unless I'm going to the Mission, it's best to avoid it altogether.
I find CA drivers to be very assertive, meaning they will accelerate to pass you while joining the freeway; in the Midwest people will slow down when merging to be polite, which causes many more issues.
If Brand A has single-digit massive fuckups per ten million miles driven, while Brand B has quintuple-digit massive fuckups per ten million miles driven, it's weird to argue that all brands are massively fucking up so much worse than humans.
Just to illustrate my point, imagine a case where self driving cars have same number of fatal deaths (normalised by whatever you need to convince yourself), but self driving cars disproportionately fail on dark skinned children. Then it is obvious that self driving cars are worse.
Weird failure cases, cases where a bad human driver would do better, are bad for self driving cars.
I mean, yes, you're correct that there are edge cases in any moral analysis and it's not just about comparing two numbers (though in safety arguments, yeah, it's almost always about simple numbers).
But you don't get to wave that fact as a get-out-of-jail-free card in an argument! You need to show us the edge case. And the best you can do is "the cars might be racist"?
I'm sure its not that uncommon just not publicized, people are terrible drivers.
All drivers are better than average drivers.
The problem for all humans is alcohol, sleep deprivation, stress, phones, coffee, makeup, shaving, food, etc.
Everyone, including you, has read at least one text while driving. Sleep deprived actors by definition cannot correctly judge their ability to be sleep deprived. None of us are immune to these realities.
The only way safely (with data) testing self-driving robots is “net worsening” for humanity is if you aren’t taking a long term view.
What is that supposed to mean?
Especially 'by definition'??
Your body gives you plenty of feedback for sleep deprivation.
The answer is, at a minimum, that a second “sober” party make that judgement.
I think I understand your original post better now, but I disagree with how high of a bar you're setting for "correctly". "Am I sleep deprived?" is not a question that needs precise measurement.
No.
Driving is one of two things I regularly do in which a moment’s inattention could cost someone’s life (belaying climbers is the other). I take both very seriously. I’ve seen brains spilled out on the roadway by someone who didn’t, and I’ll never forget that.
I have not and will not touch my phone while driving, and I obnoxiously ridicule those close to me that choose to do so near me.
It sounds like YOU'RE in denial and trying to convince yourself that it's absolutely unquestionably ubiquitous -- it's not, and it's a danger to yourself and even to those others on the road that made better choices.
I know that’s not-done around here, but I must admit it makes the eventual slip up just slightly more delicious.
All Waymo cars could simultaneously degrade due to an update (or hack). Imagine if all them did full left at the same time.
Of course software bugs will be introduced, and later rectified. We live in an imperfect world.
Yeah by the second or third time people generally learn to keep the throttle up so the wheels don't sink down into the wet concrete.
Quick look up of current numbers - without double checking whether it's over the life of the program, or just the latest year, or what:
Waymo one crash per 1.26 million miles
American humans overall one per 484,000 miles or 552,983 miles depending on the yr or something.
Younger drivers, something like 3 times the average.
And that's when Waymo reports automatically while many human collisions don't need reporting.
> Autonomous cars improve more slowly than humans do
They can get buggy software updates and maps but otherwise I'll bet on the software.
So with that in mind Cruise's hive mind controls all it's cars and they need to lose their license immediately before it does what Uber's not ready for prime time car did and killed a pedesterian!
"Your cars aren't stopping for police pulling them over for traffic violations, and even driving off from officers who have no idea what to do because regulators are firmly in the industry's pocket and not requiring firms offer solid ways for first responders to command these vehicle's control systems, or at least committing to having a human supervisor available to quickly take remote control of the vehicle and move it."
PR response: "but what about all those crashes human drivers get into that we don't?"
...which doesn't change the fact that we have vehicles running around that are almost completely free from policing.
Or just a simple left turn without a green arrow.
They may not be there yet. But AVs are the only serious contender to solve the traffic fatality problem.
How did we land in a spot where the “only serious contender” to solve this problem is VC funded companies using the roads and people’s lives as beta testing grounds?
Absolutely absurd.
Because the personal automobile is so desirable.
A majority of fatalities do not happen in urban environments. But the solution has to cover the last mile, or else it will not be an attractive alternative to other modes.
Alabama, Mississippi et al have highest fatality rates. A car is far more convenient than a bus or a bike.
I’m referring to the technology generally here. I’m indifferent to how it comes about (“VC funded” etc). We need to innovate to solve hard problems.
I think you may also be rather too generous to human drivers. My grandmother crashed into a parked car at 10mph, flipping her car upside down in the process. My wife’s grandmother phoned up her son mid-journey to ask which pedal was the accelerator and which was the break - when unsure she would just press both!
BUT the thing that most people ignore is that self-driving cars share a learning network, where the entire network benefits from hitting and learning from edge cases. Humans tend to have to re-learn their mistakes on a per-human basis. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the common failure conditions of humans — stressed, exhausted, distracted, frustrated, greedy, emotionally unstable, unpredictable, imprecise, etc.
So long as the cost of the damage is borne by the car manufacturer/owner and there was minimal harm done to life, I’m perfectly willing to allow self-driving car experiments to continue.
… Not that I had any significant power to stop it in the first place.
Guy ran a red light and put me in the ICU for a week. Wasn't even in the news.
But sensors? These cars scan the environment with dozens of sensors, much better than what a human can do.
Better perception? Yes, although the perception models have come a long way but they are still quite primitive compared to what a human can do.
Those are both very common accidents for human drivers. It's fine if you want to argue with numbers about whether or not Cruise/Waymo/Tesla are more or less likely to get into these accidents. But please don't spin and claim that people don't do this too. That is simply incorrect and you know it.
They act like reasoning about safety of automated systems is brand new area that they need to develop and disrupt.
Sure, heavy reliance on AI makes some traditional forms of validation more tricky, but BS metrics and test in prod is so reckless, that will end up only hurting the industry. When there will be a big tragedy, because of reckless approach, government will be forced to drop heavy hammer of regulations and make it much harder to develop self driving tech.
When you put it that way, it strongly mirrors what is seen in computer programming and I am inclined to wonder how much of it is simply the computer programming culture leaking into the automotive world.
I’m a software developer, and being asked to test in prod is a massive red flag. It’s almost always prompted by someone with fairly little technical background.
Or it's a sales team that knows a big $$$ contract is out there and this thing needs to be in PROD now and not in the normal cycle of DEV -> QA/Staging -> PROD.
There are many reasons for doing things in prod, none of them are valid reasons, but there are many of them that people use. "The specific data we need to test against isn't in DEV" is one of my pet peeves.
My point is that picking false equivalencies and anecdotal evidence doesn't work, in both directions.
https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-king-st-crash-driver-arre...
The incident was reported as the Cruise robotaxi being struck by an emergency vehicle. It sounds less like the car drove into the big vehicle with the flashing red lights and more like the vehicle wasn't visible and the robotaxi drive into the intersection and was struck. This is a common failure mode of below average human drivers as well.
I agree that its a failure mode that needs to be eliminated and looks pretty bad on Cruise for not anticipating and testing this, but that is a situation that below-average human drivers absolutely do struggle with.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/08/18/cruise...
The title may sound a little bit inflammatory but emergency vehicles are usually found at fault when they enter a red light, even when they're running lights and sirens and have a collision. They don't get tickets for breaking the law, but they are often found civilly at fault for collisions that happen when they do. They're expected to slow and visually clear the intersection, and if they were using the oncoming lane and couldn't see cross traffic they should have been more cautious.
This happens all the time with humans. One of the many reasons why 2 or more vehicles are usually dispatched (although there's a few videos you can find on youtube of firetrucks from different engine companies responding to the same incident T-boning each other as well).
Waymo at least claims to do things much more correctly and like a human in this case:
> Waymo representatives believe their vehicle would have handled this situation. According to Waymo, “Waymo has developed various technologies to detect active emergency vehicles even if they are not in direct view. Like humans, our vehicles can hear sirens and reason about the direction, location, and motion of the active emergency vehicle, importantly including whether it is approaching or receding. When we hear sirens, our vehicle will slow and then depending on how the situation develops, we will either pull over or stop ahead of intersections where there might be crossing emergency vehicles, even if we have a green light. The system is designed to remain cautious and not enter an intersection if it is still reasoning whether the emergency vehicle is approaching the intersection based on what it is sensing.” However, it is fair to say that Cruise has said similar things about their own vehicles ability to detect emergency vehicles, and Waymo has not tested in this exact situation.
Cruise should still get punished over this, and I don't know if 50% reduction in vehicles is enough of a punishment or what it should be. Going "move fast, break things" on public streets to try to catch up to your competitor should definitely result in you losing more ground that you think you're gaining when you're busted for it, or else it isn't a deterrent.
But perhaps that's not procedure in California, which would be madness.
Emergency vehicles are not allowed to break traffic laws in any state; they're just afforded some privileges other vehicles aren't, and other operators are required to get out of the way.
If an ambulance hits a car that had a green light, the ambulance driver is cited.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ambulance+driver+cited
The US, in general, doesn't have strict "right of way" rules for it's always X driver's fault. All parties involved have a duty to avoid an accident. If you see someone doing something totally stupid and against the rules of the road and just plow into them, it's technically your fault (of course they would have to prove that you deliberately failed to avoid the collision, so if you keep your mouth shut, you might get away with it[1]).
1: Not legal advice!
On what's currently made public, this really feels like it could go either way with regard to which party was more at fault.
Definitely is. I was on the jury for a case that involved an officer calling for help on the radio. We watched the dash-cam footage of the first officer coming to assist. He got up to 80 between the intersections, but slowed down to near the speed-limit for green lights and almost stopped at red lights, despite the urgency and it being 3 in the morning when the odds of another car being there were low.
> In operating an authorized emergency vehicle the operator may: ... (2) proceed past a red or stop signal or stop sign, after slowing as necessary for safe operation; ...
And in California the relevant law is in vehicle code section 20156 [1], which clearly states that emergency vehicle drivers cannot do whatever they want without regard to the safety of other drivers just because their sirens are on:
> Section 21055 does not relieve the driver of a vehicle from the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of all persons using the highway, nor protect him from the consequences of an arbitrary exercise of the privileges granted in that section.
It's quite likely that the emergency vehicle driver is at fault in this interaction, not the Cruise vehicle.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
I’d love to neither on roads personally. Delivery trucks, tradespeople, emergency vehicles , that’s it.
Hard to imagine a scenario in which an emergency vehicle with its lights and sirens on is at fault here. Normal traffic is required to STOP in this situation, even if the traffic light is green.
We can't have progress if we don't get over this inane sentimentality(?) over how accidents, deaths, and dismemberments are just 'how things are' so long as they are caused by people and 'Safety of the traveling public is the California DMV’s top priority[0]' when a robot does it.
[0]Editorial comment: it sure as shit isn't the rest of the time.
That sure does sound like the way to have progress.
Blockchain and self-driving seem to be the only digital domains where adherents argue for lowering our standards for the technology being offered-- typically in pursuit of some unspecified improvement at an unspecified future date.
It's actually difficult to come up with an analogy in any other domain. Perhaps if VR hardware had some inane limitation that required users to always walk the entire physically analogous distance to move around in the virtual world. And when a user complains about not being able to teleport to different areas, VR adherents push back that the VR world is no worse than the physical world in this sense.
Lowering from what baseline? I almost always see people advocate for similar accident rates as humans or better. That's not lowering.
> It's actually difficult to come up with an analogy in any other domain. Perhaps if VR hardware had some inane limitation that required users to always walk the entire physically analogous distance to move around in the virtual world. And when a user complains about not being able to teleport to different areas, VR adherents push back that the VR world is no worse than the physical world in this sense.
In this analogy, is walking the only option in the physical world too? Or can VR have vehicles too?
If yes to either of those, I don't see what's so ridiculous about this scenario. Am I the dumb one?
For the analogy to fit, there must have been enormous amounts of money spent on trying to invent VR teleportation, but it hadn't happened yet.
And in that case... yes the complaint is valid, but it doesn't make VR a failure.
You wouldn't be lowering your standards because of the lack of teleportation.
Every driver can still get to all of things they have to. They just have to learn to schedule things better. Car pool, transit, whatever. Most cars aren't driven many hours a day anyways.
Maybe something along the following lines: 1. Everyone hates either rich people or poor people. 2. I didn't get outraged at one particular thing some rich people are alleged to have done, therefore I don't hate rich people. 3. Therefore I hate poor people. The only thing wrong with this argument is every part of it, so I hope you mean something more reasonable. But what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd%E2%80%93even_rationing
> According to a CPUC press release, Cruise could charge for service between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. without a safety drive, while Waymo could charge for passenger service at any time but only with a safety driver in the car. Waymo was also able to operate its cars completely autonomously but was unable to charge passengers for those services.
Once again, why the fuck was and is GM/Cruise getting special privileges up and over Waymo when Waymo doesn't have this level of critical failures on the road?
There's some point where we need to start leaning in and actually fining AV companies for this horseshit and taking actual action. Limiting the fleet is one thing, but actually stripping them of special privileges would be a better idea. It sounds like Cruise needs to go back to safety drivers in every vehicle.
On top of this, GM's allowed to market and sell Super Cruise (their Autopilot-esque clone) on public highways. Why isn't the NHTSA looking a lot closer at GM and scrutinizing their products?
@kvogt has some explaining to do.
GM has better lobbyists?
This isn't about safety. It's about money.
Yea, but why? The article doesn’t actually explain the critical issue.