Cruise does distinguish itself by driving mostly on busy downtown SF streets, a challenging environment, and they've released impressive videos showing off their capabilities.
A few weeks ago Kyle Vogt claimed Cruise would surpass Waymo 'in a few months', whether they do or not remains to be seen, but they are making sustained progress and they have the full force of General Motors behind them.
Unlike Waymo, Tesla's Autopilot program, and Uber's autonomous driving program, Cruise's operation has been drama free, without any lawsuits, leadership blowouts, or departures of key people. This implies they've got a solid team under good leadership, and I think it matters a lot with complex software projects like this.
Most interesting is the Disengagements by location. (page 9) https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b...
Interstate 0
Freeway 0
Highway 12
Street 112
PS: Disengagements per 1,000 miles also dropped from 0.8 (2015) to 0.2 (2016) which suggests very good things.
PPS: Been getting a lot of up and down votes I wander what people agree / disagree with?
Also, while there may be fewer of some types of accidents, there will be lawsuits for a potentially very large set of other types that never used to get litigated. For example today when a driver causes their own accident, nobody gets sued.
Sure you can imagine some class action / criminal legal disaster but the auto industry has survived repeated scandals. Corporate criminal negligence is extremely rare.
In five or ten years this technology could be saving 100,000 lives every year. I hope we are not so risk adverse that these benefits are needlessly delayed.
http://www.insurance.com/auto-insurance/auto-insurance-basic...
Yes, anyone putting out such a system is going to get sued, but so does every car company that exists today. It's just the cost of doing business and ultimately just get's passed on to consumers.
More likely the bar for level 4 will just be significantly higher than parity with human error, if only for liability reasons.
So, at similar rate to human drivers that's ~24* million dollars per fatal crash in saved wages. Plus presumably higher truck utilization and lower management costs etc. Don't forget the driver is often not at fault and automated trucks should have plenty of footage of accidents to demonstrate who was at fault. So it's a fraction of both fatal and non fatal accidents, with non fatal accidents generally having lower associated costs. Also, most importantly it's only the truck involved in many accidents associated with bad weather and more generally the driver's medical bills etc do not need to be covered if there is no driver.
Further, technology is unlikely to degrade over time so they just need a profitable starting point. Also, if the self drive button cost ~25c / mile there are plenty of times I would hit it.
*Granted, there will be labor costs linked with automated trucks, but a 95% savings seems likely.
25c/mile just for the insurance surcharge, you mean? Sounds like we're in agreement that mere parity with human error would be expensive from a liability perspective.
Hell go to sleep and wake up in another city 500-1000 miles away without going to the airport or needing a rental is a major benefit even if your not saying money.
I've never seen them pulled over in the bike lane on Valencia like very other Uber/Lyft, which is a good thing, but picking up and dropping off is far from autonomous friendly in that neighborhood.
Of course sometime it's obvious a person is in control and presumably they're generating training data.
Does anyone know off-hand, how much testing have autonomous vehicles had at night (as in, full dark/need to use headlights).
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/car-startup-cruise-settles-le...
I don't doubt that it's a challenging environment, but there are many, many different kinds of challenges that are not even present in that city.
Not sure what you are imagining but SF is free of winter driving conditions. Other than that it is as challenging as any city in the US, Europe or Japan.
After the core software problems have been solved, the key challenge shifts to discovering edge cases, which become progressively more marginal the further advanced the software becomes, and the only way to find these edge cases is through 1000s of miles of driving waiting for unexpected situations to show up.
Not quite the same problem but the Starship delivery vehicles work a bit like that - remote link to a control center. http://uk.businessinsider.com/doordash-delivery-robots-stars...
http://fortune.com/2017/02/28/starsky-self-driving-truck-sta...
Maybe those are training runs or the drivers are letting the wheel guide them.
Source: I work at Cruise
You don't know that. Doesn't the car simply slowly stop if it doesn't know what to do?
> A small corporate shuttle service that "only had a few accidents" would not be considered a very safe service.
As soon as it's safer than a human-operated one, it's already good enough - there's literally no safer option.
I'm not sure that's a safe presumption. The car could have done the right thing but not been confident enough in the planned course of action. Still not great, but not a presumed accident either.
I haven't been to Phoenix, so can't comment on the difficulty of running a self driving car there, but I would guess its easier than SF.
Without significantly reworking current infrastructure the challenges presented by city driving are too fuzzy to guarantee safety. For example, traffic lights can be obscured, out of order, or spoofed; unless they are modified to support av; I don't think this is solvable.
Although autonomous vehicles will require a safety driver for a while, interim benefits still exist and services like this will potentially provide the momentum needed to make those infrastructure changes.
But, there's no guarantee of safety now. Human drivers are fallible and fail all the time.
A guarantee of safety is a crazy metric to require before we can allow autonomous vehicles. A better metric is: "before the vehicle is more safe than the median human driver". Once it hits that level of safety, it should be in the streets.
Wouldn't that also potentially impact human drivers?
Not trying to pour cold water on this but.. it's all about those "few occasions". The difference between level 2 and level 4/5 autonomy is vast. Those "few occasions" would presumably be accidents without the intervention of the safety driver. A small corporate shuttle service that "only had a few accidents" would not be considered a very safe service.
So for a service that really only makes sense at level 4, the reporting really ought to focus on those "few occasions", the stringent safety standard that needs to be met to remove drivers, and the actual progress towards it. That's the real meat of the story.