Can't see the steering wheel, but assuming that this was a full self-driving video without human interference, this was very impressive. Driving in SF is very challenging with cars, electric buses, pedestrians, cyclists etc. In addition, there are some really complicated intersections which are difficult to navigate for even humans. We also saw a few instances of delivery trucks blocking one lane. Hoping that they can move this to production sooner rather than later.
They’re operating Taxi services in San Francisco. A city that doesn’t experience any real-world weather, with an area of like 50 square miles where speeds generally never exceed 25MPH. They also have humans watching cameras that take over when the self driving breaks down.
It’s a completely different problem space, like claiming someone built a train and therefore they can easily build self driving cars since they are both “driverless”.
> Cruise and Waymo have fully autonomous cars deployed in SF and are scaling up.
Is that it? SF only? After billions invested? There is a laundry list of those that tried and failed especially with burning an insurmountable amount of VC money even with billions of their own money.
Lyft: Scrapped and sold their self-driving project. [0]
Uber: Scrapped their robot-taxi project and sold it off. [1]
Zoox: Once valued at $3BN, acquired by Amazon for $1BN after nearly going bankrupt and is still using specialised cars for self driving only in SF. [2]
Cruise: Acquired by GM and still using specialised cars for self driving in SF [3]
Drive.ai: Ran out of money and almost bankrupt and acquired by Apple. [4] No where to be found on the roads.
Waymo: Same situation as Cruise, but Google keeping them alive.
Comma has lasted longer than these over-valued companies and is already in lots of consumer grade vehicles beyond SF today and not in specialised cars and taxis unlike Cruise and Waymo who are still stuck in SF [5].
Ha, I saw these cars multiple times this past week in San Francisco, including turning from Broadway onto Columbus in heavy traffic. If that was done autonomously, then I'd be very impressed since I have trouble navigating through those intersections without hitting the many bold pedestrians.
So the last point is a fair one. Tech companies have a history of skirting laws to achieve market share, then using their customer base to get the law changed.
That isn’t what’s happening here though. The driverless car companies don’t have customers yet except for a small pool of beta testers, so there’s no constituency to advocate for them like there was with Uber/Lyft.
The State of California, anticipating that the development of self-driving cars would inevitable cause tensions, set up an expert board within the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC.)
This board is empowered to set safety and operations standards. These standards lay out rules for approval, including for accident safety, data reporting, and disruptions to city services such as the ones you mentioned.)
The driverless car companies have to meet these standards to be able to expand their operations in SF.
The driverless car companies have made significant improvements, empowered by better auto-segmentation and labeling. This incidents do occur less, are on their way to being totally eliminated, and the data now shows that they are safer than human drivers in SF.
The driverless car companies are seeking to expand operations, having met the criteria the State of California itself laid out, including for safety and prevention of disrupting public services.
Let me be clear: I am not opposed to guerrilla protest action in and of itself. And frankly this was a really cool hack in many ways: in effect, use of materials readily at hand, and virality potential.
But on this topic, the driverless car companies did things the right way. We should reward them for regulatory cooperation to reinforce that behavior in the future.
And they delivered an awesome piece of tech!
It’s a car that doesn’t need a driver! Just goes where you tell it while you relax!
It’s a miracle, and we built it here in SF.
For now, our community is bleeding people, tax dollars, and soon public services. We all want to prevent that.
To do so, we all need to row in the same direction for a while. We need the hacking cleverness of this campaign put toward getting SF back on its feet, and a big part of that is selling complex tech only our people can make to other cities that need it, then using that money to fund everything else we want to do here.
The amusing thing is that there are both articles saying self-driving cars are far away, and articles complaining there are too many self-driving cars in their neighborhood.
> The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite.
> Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco [...]
From the outside, it sure does look like driverless is still firmly at "sort of works":
"After California regulators approved the expansion of driverless taxi services in San Francisco earlier this month, it took only a little more than 24 hours for a series of events to begin that seemed to justify the taxis’ detractors.
The day after the vote, 10 autonomous vehicles operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, abruptly stopped functioning in the middle of a busy street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Posts to social media showed the cars jammed up, their hazard lights flashing, blocking traffic for 15 minutes.
A few days later, another Cruise vehicle drove into a paving project in the Western Addition and got stuck in freshly poured concrete.
And then last week, a Cruise car collided with a fire truck in the city, injuring a passenger in the car.
So it was that last Friday Cruise agreed to a request from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to cut in half the number of vehicles it operated in San Francisco, even though regulatory approval for more remained in place. The company, which has had 400 driverless vehicles operating in the city, will now have no more than 50 cars running during the day and 150 at night."[0]
Weekly? Now, this is nowhere near SF levels, but I live in South Austin, and I probably see at least 1-2 autonomous cars every single day I go driving in town.
Is this what Garry Tan's video (The Truth and Lies About Driverless Cars in SF [1]) was all about? I find him to be pretty credible in general, and he makes a strong case that there are some folks within the city government who are misrepresenting the safety record of self-driving cars. I don't know much about the situation, and I'm glad this testing isn't happening where I live (we do have tons of testing on the peninsula, but it's with humans in the vehicle). But I think it's important for companies and regulators to be honest about what is happening, whichever way the facts come out.
I read this comment after taking a cruise in SF, which is a self driving cab with no driver. It basically reminds me of all the comments saying that VR has no future, written by people who have never tried VR and would get their mind blown by it if they tried the latest iteration. Maybe you should come to SF and try one of these self driving cars yourself :)
They seem to be doing alright for a technology which is supposedly "going nowhere". (Yes I know these cars sometimes stop, but that's better than having them crash).
Yes, I routinely drive next to these driverless things and they are negotiating plenty of annoying & complicated stuff. I think I must live in a peak location because they are everywhere in my neighborhood in SF, which has lots of fast cars and pedestrians and bikers and skateboarders doing all sorts of crazy things.
Like these actually exist, I guess people on the East coast don't realize it yet?
Lol we're literally people living in SF upset about self driving cars. And the no the youth comissioner you're referring to is not some mastermind behind this, but we appreciate his political activism both with coning and with volunteering to be on the youth commission advisory board :)
I can't read the article, so only going off the headline, but how does the conjecture that self driving cars are far off jive with the fact that my understanding is they are already deployed in production in Phoenix, AZ? And are being used regularly in the bay area in testing?
Obviously it's incremental. I fully expect in the next 24 months I will be able to call an autonomous car via an app on my phone in the bay area under certain known conditions, like good weather and common, low-risk routes. Or, specifically, that I'll be able to direct my model 3 to drive me to the San Jose airport (a 10 minute drive) without the need for me to actually take any manual interventions along the way. (Though I will still be asked, by Tesla, to be ready to take control.) If true, that's progress, and I expect the progress to continue until eventually this technology is widespread and covers the vast majority of routes and conditions.
This is the most San Francisco thing I've ever laid eyes on.
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