Cruise driverless vehicles involved in 3 separate traffic incidents in SF(kron4.com)
kron4.com
Cruise driverless vehicles involved in 3 separate traffic incidents in SF
https://www.kron4.com/news/cruise-driverless-vehicles-involved-in-two-separate-sf-traffic-incidents-thursday/
70 comments
Cruise is a mess internally. The product is unreliable garbage.
For more details, see this recent whisteleblower account of the situation: Cruise robotaxi service under review following anonymous letter (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/cruise-robotaxi-under-revi...)
I work directly with the employee who submitted the complaint. He is understating the problem.
The letter also states that Cruise ... intentionally hides from the majority of employees the results of investigations into collisions involving Cruise vehicles and other sensitive, potentially damaging matters.
Cruise has been covering up safety incidents since before the GM acquisition, including an early incident where an engineer suffered a concussion due to violent cabin motion caused by bad motion control code.
For more details, see this recent whisteleblower account of the situation: Cruise robotaxi service under review following anonymous letter (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/cruise-robotaxi-under-revi...)
I work directly with the employee who submitted the complaint. He is understating the problem.
The letter also states that Cruise ... intentionally hides from the majority of employees the results of investigations into collisions involving Cruise vehicles and other sensitive, potentially damaging matters.
Cruise has been covering up safety incidents since before the GM acquisition, including an early incident where an engineer suffered a concussion due to violent cabin motion caused by bad motion control code.
I looked through your comment history and didn't actually see additional details. What specifically are you referring to?
I inserted the details into my comment to save you the trouble, and accidentally didn't edit out that sentence. I have to be careful not to reveal my identity by saying too much.
Totally fair, I understand. I'm an ex-employee that might return soon, so I was curious how things changed so much since I left.
Well if the whole fleet is 30 cars (asof this summer according to electrek - https://electrek.co/2022/06/23/gm-cruise-takes-first-fares-f...)
3 out of 30 is pretty pretty bad!
3 out of 30 is pretty pretty bad!
I'd assume that the cars see significantly more utilization than a normal passenger vehicle. An autonomous vehicle doesn't have a driver that gets tired, so in theory it's possible to operate it 24x7, minus the downtime for repairs, cleaning, and charging.
A better metric would be incidents per hour driven, not per vehicle.
A better metric would be incidents per hour driven, not per vehicle.
There's lot of ways you can measure it to make it sound better.
However it comes across as a sort of centralized future cyberpunk failure mode.
Again we are talking about 3 of the 30 vehicles they have on road failing at the same time. Imagine if 10% of taxis in your city suddenly froze in place for 20 minutes until a special tow truck came after a pedestrian called the number on the back?
Or if all taxis in your city, when traveling through a particular intersection froze in place, requiring bystanders to call a response team from the taxi dispatch to come out and show the driver what to do?
It would be interesting to see the metrics of number of interventions/calls/responses Cruise is experiencing daily/weekly/montlhy.
Again we are talking about 3 of the 30 vehicles they have on road failing at the same time. Imagine if 10% of taxis in your city suddenly froze in place for 20 minutes until a special tow truck came after a pedestrian called the number on the back?
Or if all taxis in your city, when traveling through a particular intersection froze in place, requiring bystanders to call a response team from the taxi dispatch to come out and show the driver what to do?
It would be interesting to see the metrics of number of interventions/calls/responses Cruise is experiencing daily/weekly/montlhy.
That has happened already, although for human driven vehicles. Yandex taxi was hacked earlier this year and all taxis were made to go to a certain location, causing massive traffic jams.
In practice, if companies have these kinds of issues regularly, it'll be similar to how scooters and dock free bikes have been rolled out: they'll be allowed initially, then the city officials will kick them out if they're causing more trouble than they're worth.
In practice, if companies have these kinds of issues regularly, it'll be similar to how scooters and dock free bikes have been rolled out: they'll be allowed initially, then the city officials will kick them out if they're causing more trouble than they're worth.
Idk if it is bad. The way the article headline is worded it sounds like the cars are crashing into puppies and grandmas. In reality they just caused traffic to get backed up for about 20 minutes because a sensor broke or something. This seems like a misleading headline by kron4.
I think techies make a lot of excuses for tech that just isn't even remotely there yet. Driverless cars is very much that category of tech.
If 10% of the Toyota Camrys on the road in a given city suddenly froze in place and caused traffic jams simultaneously in a major US city, requiring roadside assistance, we'd all be laughing at those incompetent dinosaurs.
If 10% of the Toyota Camrys on the road in a given city suddenly froze in place and caused traffic jams simultaneously in a major US city, requiring roadside assistance, we'd all be laughing at those incompetent dinosaurs.
Not remotely there? It already drives better than very old and very young drivers, as well as people who are drunk or tired. At least this tech should get our worst drivers off the road.
another article claiming 30 driverless fleet size - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/driverless-taxis-a...
3 out of 30 may or may not be bad. How many miles over how many hours have these cars driven?
If only there was some sort of math “journalist” can use to make the article less sensational that takes into account of other evidence like how many hours it drove and how many cars there are on the streets driven by humans. We can even call them priors!
I mean, how many driverless cars are there even? You can just compare absolute numbers. I can't believe I even have to bring it up on here. You mentioned yourself the number of hours. Are we comparing it to the total number of hours for ALL the cars in the same area?
You tell me. Is 3 a significantly high number, or is this a non-story? It doesn’t sound very high to me.
There clearly don't seem to be too many of these cars.
> UNITED STATES—A self-driving vehicle created by Cruise, a self-driving arm of General Motors Co., crashed into another car in San Francisco, leading to the recall of 80 more vehicles. One person who drove the car was arrested for suspicion of DUI. The algorithm that controls Cruise’s cars is reportedly capable of counting pedestrians and cyclists and detecting steel guardrails.[1]
Just found another somewhat amusing link as I was looking for the number of cars. Here's two cruise drivers blocking the street. I guess they deadlocked[2].
[1] https://www.thesfnews.com/san-francisco-cruise-crash-leads-t...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xloemd/two_se...
> UNITED STATES—A self-driving vehicle created by Cruise, a self-driving arm of General Motors Co., crashed into another car in San Francisco, leading to the recall of 80 more vehicles. One person who drove the car was arrested for suspicion of DUI. The algorithm that controls Cruise’s cars is reportedly capable of counting pedestrians and cyclists and detecting steel guardrails.[1]
Just found another somewhat amusing link as I was looking for the number of cars. Here's two cruise drivers blocking the street. I guess they deadlocked[2].
[1] https://www.thesfnews.com/san-francisco-cruise-crash-leads-t...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xloemd/two_se...
>3 is a pretty low number
3 complete shutdowns blocking traffic in one city on the same day.
3 complete shutdowns blocking traffic in one city on the same day.
Right and I think if driverless taxis ever work (they won't outside small geo fenced localities & narrow use cases) only incentivizes oversupply.
In a taxi or even perma-loss-leading Uber/Lyft, there is a labor component which disincentives between-ride transient driving. Whether they are paid employees costing company money, or independent contractors looking at hours worked vs take home pay..
In a high fixed cost, low operating cost driverless taxi this is not the case. Very easy to imagine fleets of these stupid things clogging the streets even worse than Uber ever did.
Note NYC traffic + TL&C stats already show Uber/Lyft have always had much lower utilization rate per hour/mile than yellow cabs, and thus require more cars on the road to serve the same passenger miles.
In a taxi or even perma-loss-leading Uber/Lyft, there is a labor component which disincentives between-ride transient driving. Whether they are paid employees costing company money, or independent contractors looking at hours worked vs take home pay..
In a high fixed cost, low operating cost driverless taxi this is not the case. Very easy to imagine fleets of these stupid things clogging the streets even worse than Uber ever did.
Note NYC traffic + TL&C stats already show Uber/Lyft have always had much lower utilization rate per hour/mile than yellow cabs, and thus require more cars on the road to serve the same passenger miles.
What if we just built infrastructure for trains and bikes? Heck, give folks subsidies to buy ebikes.
Like, traffic is a solvable problem with what we have today. This obsession with the automobile is going to cause such a continued headache for us. And yeah, we probably still need a few cars and taxis around, but surely we can just have a human drive the taxi?
Like, traffic is a solvable problem with what we have today. This obsession with the automobile is going to cause such a continued headache for us. And yeah, we probably still need a few cars and taxis around, but surely we can just have a human drive the taxi?
Yup.
It's a shame SV took advantage of ZIRP to fund never-going-to-work software and perma-unprofitable businesses, subsidizing the urban upper class lifestyle.. but governments did not use the same cheap funding to build some trains.
It's a shame SV took advantage of ZIRP to fund never-going-to-work software and perma-unprofitable businesses, subsidizing the urban upper class lifestyle.. but governments did not use the same cheap funding to build some trains.
Yes, it's a damn shame that the so-called innovators in SV didn't tackle actual problems the solutions to which would materially improve human existence. Imagine if those billions went to companies like TerraPower or NuScale instead of unprofitable food deliveries.
Human existence being miserable perpetuates demand for half-baked solutions forever. Actually solving the problem once and for all would eliminate said demand.
If that was true, we'd still be riding around horse buggies, instead of the imperfect-but-better cars. Because we live in an imperfect world populated by imperfect human beings, every solution is a half-baked solution, and misery will only be reduced at the margins, one small step at a time.
There's no cabal of greedy capitalists who are purposely holding us back in order to profit off of more misery.
Edit: I take that back: there is a group of greedy people who do actually benefit from misery, and that would be our dear politicians ;-)
There's no cabal of greedy capitalists who are purposely holding us back in order to profit off of more misery.
Edit: I take that back: there is a group of greedy people who do actually benefit from misery, and that would be our dear politicians ;-)
> There's no cabal of greedy capitalists who are purposely holding us back in order to profit off of more misery.
The advertising industry's continued existence and expansion seems to disprove this. There's absolutely no reason most tech products out there should intentionally waste user's time by showing them ads for things to buy when they're doing unrelated tasks, and yet they can and do so because a minority can benefit.
The advertising industry's continued existence and expansion seems to disprove this. There's absolutely no reason most tech products out there should intentionally waste user's time by showing them ads for things to buy when they're doing unrelated tasks, and yet they can and do so because a minority can benefit.
Could be that the programmers didn't think they could get an emotionally-correct element of courtesy or responsibility into their AI, and might not have even tried to tackle this type of thing at all.
How does a cop give a ticket to one of these anyway?
And what should be the fine? Should it scale to the size of the owner's pocketbook like some jurisdictions advocate as the only way to truly supress traffic violations?
Or should there be a whole new category of inhuman violations with penalties exorbitant enough to supress cars getting out on the road while impaired with Artificial Stupidity to begin with?
Maybe there needs to be a higher standard here where natural stupidity needs to be allowed for with ordinary humans which is bad enough, but any artificial stupidity can not be tolerated at all.
Some would probably think you should lose your license for a long time.
How does a cop give a ticket to one of these anyway?
And what should be the fine? Should it scale to the size of the owner's pocketbook like some jurisdictions advocate as the only way to truly supress traffic violations?
Or should there be a whole new category of inhuman violations with penalties exorbitant enough to supress cars getting out on the road while impaired with Artificial Stupidity to begin with?
Maybe there needs to be a higher standard here where natural stupidity needs to be allowed for with ordinary humans which is bad enough, but any artificial stupidity can not be tolerated at all.
Some would probably think you should lose your license for a long time.
And who is criminally liable when there is loss of life or limb, caused by one of these cars? This looks like a way of load-balancing culpability so that no one human is actually on the hook.
The board at Cruise should be the answer.
Not the first time, here is a story about seven stopped Cruise cars from last July just a few months ago.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/01/self-driving-cars-from-gms-c...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/01/self-driving-cars-from-gms-c...
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Yet another incident from last night: https://reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/xmivfn/five_avs_w...
"This content is not available in your country/region."
Seriously? In this day and age? On the internet?
I believe HN should have a policy of deleting links to content that isn't accessible worldwide. Either we play the Internet game, or a "bunch of walled gardens" game.
Seriously? In this day and age? On the internet?
I believe HN should have a policy of deleting links to content that isn't accessible worldwide. Either we play the Internet game, or a "bunch of walled gardens" game.
I assume you live in Europe? Honestly seems like a fair approach to gdpr laws. A local city news station in the US that doesn't care about European visitors can either just ignore gdpr entirely and piss off Europeans or block them from visiting and piss off Europeans.
To which "gpdr laws" do you refer, specifically?
GDPR is about protecting personal information (specifically, giving people the right to access, correct and delete personal information), and I do not believe showing a web page would somehow cause the web site to come into possession of my personal information and thus fall under any of the GDPR regulations.
In other words, this has nothing to do with GDPR.
Also, after we've had this tangent discussion, I would submit that if a site is (deliberately) available only to a part of the Internet, it should not be HN material. Unless HN wants to be a "US-only" site.
GDPR is about protecting personal information (specifically, giving people the right to access, correct and delete personal information), and I do not believe showing a web page would somehow cause the web site to come into possession of my personal information and thus fall under any of the GDPR regulations.
In other words, this has nothing to do with GDPR.
Also, after we've had this tangent discussion, I would submit that if a site is (deliberately) available only to a part of the Internet, it should not be HN material. Unless HN wants to be a "US-only" site.
This seems pretty tame to me. It's exactly the sort of failure when testing this tech I'd like to see. "Cars blocked traffic for some reason" is way better than cars hitting people.
I'm impressed it works as well as it already does, and I'm looking forward to more bugs getting worked out.
I'm impressed it works as well as it already does, and I'm looking forward to more bugs getting worked out.
These Cruise cars didn't have anyone in them at all.
No company should be running "experiments" like this on a public road with a 5000+ lb vehicle.
No company should be running "experiments" like this on a public road with a 5000+ lb vehicle.
At some point, if the tech were ever to be used, it would have to be on a public road. And at that point we'd certainly see some bugs that hadn't been exposed on closed course testing.
(Are those cars really 5000 lbs? They seem small for that, but point taken.)
(Are those cars really 5000 lbs? They seem small for that, but point taken.)
Blocking traffic isn’t something I’d like to see when I or someone else needs emergency vehicles to get to them. It is also unnecessary if the companies have a safety driver who can take over, or more robust teleoperation for a human to remotely assist
If you’ve ever been to NYC you will see human drivers block emergency vehicles all the time on purpose, even when they are blaring sirens. I have way more confidence in one of these driverless cars to gtfo out of the way of a firetruck than your average Uber driver who’s hustling for a few extra bucks.
When we started with cars we had accidents all over the place. Not even close to this. It's so hard to know if this is worse than actual drivers or better without the full picture. For all I know this might actually be orders of magnitude better.
Everyone who isn't Waymo seems to be doing more harm than good with their self driving programs by either killing people (Uber/Tesla) or having accidents and scaring the public away from self-driving (Cruise).
Yes. But also I think it's the sort of white elephant project that can only thrive in a ZIRP environment. Once money has an actual cost, and investors require actual returns, there are 1000s of better business models than this.
Hopefully there is consolidation & regulation in the space before we have too much testing in public gone wrong.
In my mind the entire self driving industry is trying to apply ML/AI practices from use cases that just require ~51%-ish "right more often than wrong" precision onto driving which needs 99.999+%.
If some of your phones images are mis-tagged as a cat instead of dog, or some of your cat photos are not tagged as a cat, it's not a huge issue..
In quant trading as long as your trade makes money 51+% of the time, you are going to accumulate returns in the long run.
Car license plate readers for speed tickets / tolls / etc have a similar "pretty close / pretty good" requirement.
Hopefully there is consolidation & regulation in the space before we have too much testing in public gone wrong.
In my mind the entire self driving industry is trying to apply ML/AI practices from use cases that just require ~51%-ish "right more often than wrong" precision onto driving which needs 99.999+%.
If some of your phones images are mis-tagged as a cat instead of dog, or some of your cat photos are not tagged as a cat, it's not a huge issue..
In quant trading as long as your trade makes money 51+% of the time, you are going to accumulate returns in the long run.
Car license plate readers for speed tickets / tolls / etc have a similar "pretty close / pretty good" requirement.
Having owned a Tesla for 4 years, and watching other "self driving" American competitors perform like this, I wonder if the Germans will slowly but surely get there first.
Tesla & others are trying a SV "disrupt" type approach that also requires the car to basically work for every use case. City driving is horribly difficult. I would argue that handling city driving without intervention is not far off AGI. The amount of situations you can encounter in city driving are essentially infinite. And you need a self driving car to be able to handle things the first time they see it, not just once that particular type of scenario has been tagged in training set.
Germans (BMW, MB specifically) are following a more methodical, legalistic approach to driver assistance towards autonomous driving. Adaptive cruise & lane keeping, emergency braking. Then automated lane changing. Then hands-free below 35mph. Then handles on/off ramps. Etc etc, step by step. But at each step, the system actually works will for the well-define feature set they have sold you, and doesn't regress month to month with bad releases.
For many people if your car could handle the highways entirely and you just hand to get yourself to/from the highway, they'd be really happy. And this is a far more achievable goal than essentially solving AGI.
Tesla & others are trying a SV "disrupt" type approach that also requires the car to basically work for every use case. City driving is horribly difficult. I would argue that handling city driving without intervention is not far off AGI. The amount of situations you can encounter in city driving are essentially infinite. And you need a self driving car to be able to handle things the first time they see it, not just once that particular type of scenario has been tagged in training set.
Germans (BMW, MB specifically) are following a more methodical, legalistic approach to driver assistance towards autonomous driving. Adaptive cruise & lane keeping, emergency braking. Then automated lane changing. Then hands-free below 35mph. Then handles on/off ramps. Etc etc, step by step. But at each step, the system actually works will for the well-define feature set they have sold you, and doesn't regress month to month with bad releases.
For many people if your car could handle the highways entirely and you just hand to get yourself to/from the highway, they'd be really happy. And this is a far more achievable goal than essentially solving AGI.
Once upon a time I was a young punk with a fairly nice car. I had about 6 years of driving under my belt, and less than half of it was with a manual transmission.
I was up in Palo Alto during a light rainstorm, and we were on our lunch break. I was driving two coworkers in my 1988 Acura, one of whom was an absolute freak who drove his sports car super-aggressively.
I was at an intersection in the left turn lane, waiting for an opening. Traffic was fairly heavy and the roads were slick. I saw a possible opening and took it, but there was a car in oncoming traffic faster than I had anticipated. Having begun my maneuver, I counterintuitively held my foot to the accelerator, rather than stomping the brake, and my Integra obediently sped through the turn without incident.
Both of my coworkers commended my presence of mind and I was relieved that my driving skills were validated. Our company was involved in selling software components, and I have no idea what a "self-driving" car would've done in that situation, but as I had discovered, staying the course and stomping the gas pedal was counterintuitive in that place and time, but ultimately correct and safe.
I was up in Palo Alto during a light rainstorm, and we were on our lunch break. I was driving two coworkers in my 1988 Acura, one of whom was an absolute freak who drove his sports car super-aggressively.
I was at an intersection in the left turn lane, waiting for an opening. Traffic was fairly heavy and the roads were slick. I saw a possible opening and took it, but there was a car in oncoming traffic faster than I had anticipated. Having begun my maneuver, I counterintuitively held my foot to the accelerator, rather than stomping the brake, and my Integra obediently sped through the turn without incident.
Both of my coworkers commended my presence of mind and I was relieved that my driving skills were validated. Our company was involved in selling software components, and I have no idea what a "self-driving" car would've done in that situation, but as I had discovered, staying the course and stomping the gas pedal was counterintuitive in that place and time, but ultimately correct and safe.
Hopefully, a self-driving car would have waited for a safe opening to make the turn.
Bad weather & bad visibility, most of the self driving solutions to date just hand back control to a human driver. In other words, hand back control at the last possible second in the most difficult driving to a human who has been in an otherwise relaxed and lest alert state. Winning!
It's like if spell check only worked on words shorter than 6 letters.
It's like if spell check only worked on words shorter than 6 letters.
This is wrong, only the shittiest self driving in name only systems have that behavior. Any real attempts at it (i.e. not Tesla or comma) do not expect or require a human takeover immediately. For example, Cruise and waymo don't even have humans to take over, MB has a 10 second warning (and actually the human doesn't even need to takeover at that point, the system will slowly bring the car to a stop).
Well as we see Cruise's solution is to stop dead in the middle of the street until a service team comes out to resolve. If there was a human driver they would be handing back control.
Probably pretty fun if you happen to be a passenger when this happens.
Probably pretty fun if you happen to be a passenger when this happens.
I’m sure there has to be a No True Scotsman fallacy regarding self-driving cars.
No true self-driving car would have attempted the turn.
No true self-driving car would have attempted the turn.
A self driving car wouldn't be in that situation in the first place.
That is a bad assumption to make. It absolutely has to be able to handle scenarios like that since it will need to be able to navigate low visibility corners and very unpredictable drivers. There are some videos on Youtube of a Tesla navigating tight hilly suburbs and it is surprisingly aggressive given the low visibility and low margins for error.
Yup. There's a great video of someone driving in .. I want to say the smokey mountains, talking about how well FSD is doing in his Tesla. Casually driving, chatting with his wife in the passenger seat.
Until it.. out of nowhere, crosses the double yellow lines around a turn and is barreling straight towards a cliff. 3 if not 4 of the cars wheels crossed the double yellow lines before the driver was able to intervene and basically save their lives. Had their been oncoming traffic, there may not have been a driver alive to post the video after. Another 1-2 seconds and they would have been been over the cliff.
Until it.. out of nowhere, crosses the double yellow lines around a turn and is barreling straight towards a cliff. 3 if not 4 of the cars wheels crossed the double yellow lines before the driver was able to intervene and basically save their lives. Had their been oncoming traffic, there may not have been a driver alive to post the video after. Another 1-2 seconds and they would have been been over the cliff.
I wonder if low-visibility areas can be mapped and self-driving cars could route around those areas to begin with.
Low visibility is contextual and temporal. You cannot map what an intersection looks like until you get there and it is too late.
If you were to blacklist every intersection that could possibly be low visibility given weather, season, time of day and traffic conditions.. the car is going to be taking a lot of long routes around many many blacklisted intersections.
Probably 50% of residential driveways could be classified this way, and yet the vast majority of people make it out of their driveway the vast majority of mornings.
If you were to blacklist every intersection that could possibly be low visibility given weather, season, time of day and traffic conditions.. the car is going to be taking a lot of long routes around many many blacklisted intersections.
Probably 50% of residential driveways could be classified this way, and yet the vast majority of people make it out of their driveway the vast majority of mornings.
Exactly, it would have crashed at the previous intersection already. /s
I am pretty confused about this German thing, only startups that don't have a current business like Cruise and Waymo are going for the disrupt approach. Literally every automaker that currently sell cars are doing incremental level 2/3 features, including Tesla.
Every company has invested in l4 including ze germans. They just usually run it as spin off
The Germans are not charging users $15k to add these test features to their production vehicles.
Instead they're charging users a monthly fee to use their heated seats.
It's kind of weird, how each brand is trying to monetize / software-ize / subscription-ize different pieces. Tesla has very much unfortunately been a leader here that others are following.
For example, Tesla for a while was shipping cars their cheapest with the heated seat hardware installed but software locked, and then offering buyers to pay later to unlock. Similar for some battery capacities.
Likewise, Tesla charges for the monthly cellular data you almost certainly want/need after the first year, while BMW includes it free for the lifetime of the car or warranty (I don't recall offhand). BMW does offer you to upgrade the cellular service to let the car be a wifi hotspot, whereas Tesla doesn't offer that at all.
You can use CarPlay on your BMW and therefore be relying on your phone data as well, while Tesla does not.. so if you want functional streaming music & GPS with traffic data on that big screen you are going to pay up after year 1.
On the self driving software, Tesla has tried different ways of pricing & slicing (AP/EAP/FSD) over the years. Aside from the now free base AP offering, EAP/FSD has always been quite pricey compared to optioning out some of the assistance packages on BMW and other competitors. Similarly because Tesla has included the same hardware, they'll gladly sell you the software later (at progressively increasing pricing).
Porsche also offers "function on demand" to add software packages later to unlock various automations you didn't buy initially..
For example, Tesla for a while was shipping cars their cheapest with the heated seat hardware installed but software locked, and then offering buyers to pay later to unlock. Similar for some battery capacities.
Likewise, Tesla charges for the monthly cellular data you almost certainly want/need after the first year, while BMW includes it free for the lifetime of the car or warranty (I don't recall offhand). BMW does offer you to upgrade the cellular service to let the car be a wifi hotspot, whereas Tesla doesn't offer that at all.
You can use CarPlay on your BMW and therefore be relying on your phone data as well, while Tesla does not.. so if you want functional streaming music & GPS with traffic data on that big screen you are going to pay up after year 1.
On the self driving software, Tesla has tried different ways of pricing & slicing (AP/EAP/FSD) over the years. Aside from the now free base AP offering, EAP/FSD has always been quite pricey compared to optioning out some of the assistance packages on BMW and other competitors. Similarly because Tesla has included the same hardware, they'll gladly sell you the software later (at progressively increasing pricing).
Porsche also offers "function on demand" to add software packages later to unlock various automations you didn't buy initially..
I’m not talking about tesla scammers I’m talking about direct competition to waymo, cruise and others
What features Tesla does/doesn't support in what modes and whether they are prod or beta is a complete disaster.
Read the car's user manual, Autopilot marketing page and car sales page to come back with 3 different answers. Not to mention tweets & press releases.
Autopilot is safe & will prevent accidents and avoid accidents.. but also Autosteer (which is the steering part of autopilot) is beta and shouldn't be used near pedestrians.
FSD is a 5-figure software beta, test gated and essentially should work anywhere with supervision, but also no one knows what scenarios it doesn't support other than "discovering" them in the wild & excusing Tesla for yet another "first", such as oncoming trolley cars vs your unprotected left turn. It avoids pedestrians and obstacles, unless they are short. etc etc.
The Germans are not charging users for ill defined, beta, work-in-progress software.
Read the car's user manual, Autopilot marketing page and car sales page to come back with 3 different answers. Not to mention tweets & press releases.
Autopilot is safe & will prevent accidents and avoid accidents.. but also Autosteer (which is the steering part of autopilot) is beta and shouldn't be used near pedestrians.
FSD is a 5-figure software beta, test gated and essentially should work anywhere with supervision, but also no one knows what scenarios it doesn't support other than "discovering" them in the wild & excusing Tesla for yet another "first", such as oncoming trolley cars vs your unprotected left turn. It avoids pedestrians and obstacles, unless they are short. etc etc.
The Germans are not charging users for ill defined, beta, work-in-progress software.
It's a valid complaint but it's goalpost moving. Also aside from Tesla every automaker has pretty clear level 2/3 features including GM, Ford, Toyota, Kia, etc everyone.
All of these "incidents" sounds far less severe than what I see human drivers doing on urban streets day in and day out. And I bet that unlike half of human drivers, these robots at least have the capacity to use a fucking blinker.
City cultures are weird af.
Albuquerque NM has/had issues with older drivers (lots of retirees there and Santa Fe) who would refuse to use turn signals and would purposefully drive slow on the highways to slow the flow of traffic.
Police and highway patrol had to start issuing tickets and instituted minimum highway speeds.
Here in California, drivers all use their highbeams in the city. Police refuse to enforce it so it's become rampant.
Blinds me and sears my retinas thanks to my astigmatism. Like staring at the sun with those damned halogen lights.
When I was a young man with a new wife and child I applied with a local IT company to be a 'desktop expert' (they only knew business/IT solutions).
Part of the interview was driving around talking.
A person was pulling to a dog leg to turn, we were far from them and the other car had plenty of time/room to turn...since so were we. The owner- an older man, said 'I'm not going to signal because if I do, he will go first.'
Blew my mind someone could do that on purpose .
Moved back to California years later and it was endemic. People all over now do this and it infuriates me every time.
Or they see you waiting to turn and speed up until they see you give up on going, then slow to a crawl.
Contrast all of this with rural Texas and all of Washington where people wave, give right of way, always dim lights, move over for bikers, and are generally nicer, more respectful on the roads and in general.
Albuquerque NM has/had issues with older drivers (lots of retirees there and Santa Fe) who would refuse to use turn signals and would purposefully drive slow on the highways to slow the flow of traffic.
Police and highway patrol had to start issuing tickets and instituted minimum highway speeds.
Here in California, drivers all use their highbeams in the city. Police refuse to enforce it so it's become rampant.
Blinds me and sears my retinas thanks to my astigmatism. Like staring at the sun with those damned halogen lights.
When I was a young man with a new wife and child I applied with a local IT company to be a 'desktop expert' (they only knew business/IT solutions).
Part of the interview was driving around talking.
A person was pulling to a dog leg to turn, we were far from them and the other car had plenty of time/room to turn...since so were we. The owner- an older man, said 'I'm not going to signal because if I do, he will go first.'
Blew my mind someone could do that on purpose .
Moved back to California years later and it was endemic. People all over now do this and it infuriates me every time.
Or they see you waiting to turn and speed up until they see you give up on going, then slow to a crawl.
Contrast all of this with rural Texas and all of Washington where people wave, give right of way, always dim lights, move over for bikers, and are generally nicer, more respectful on the roads and in general.
Fun dirty secret of most current "self driving" implementations - they don't even recognize other cars turn signals, lol.
Let alone read subtle cues from the surrounding cars "body language" where you can take a pretty good educated guess they are going to change lanes or make a turn even though they haven't signaled, and therefore give them space. Generally they are pretty bad at anticipating things based on various indirect signals that are instinctual to a human.
There's a long way to go in the space, and the software hasn't even begun to play the "meta game" of driving required to be a halfway decent driver.
Let alone read subtle cues from the surrounding cars "body language" where you can take a pretty good educated guess they are going to change lanes or make a turn even though they haven't signaled, and therefore give them space. Generally they are pretty bad at anticipating things based on various indirect signals that are instinctual to a human.
There's a long way to go in the space, and the software hasn't even begun to play the "meta game" of driving required to be a halfway decent driver.
A lot of human drivers indeed are awful, but at least you can put a name and a face to them and punish them if they hurt you out of negligence, and maybe that makes people feel better about them than driverless cars owned by faceless corporations.
Exactly, imagine if we had food robot delivery and it worked like 99.999% of the time, but 0.001% of the time it consistently maims or murders the customer. How many 9s are enough? How do you punish and regulate the large entity behind the bulk main&murder?
I just wish we could have less cars overall and more bikes, scooters, trains, buses, etc.