Nuro Becomes First Company To Receive Commercial Autonomous Vehicle Permit From California DMV (venturebeat.com) 44
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Hours after announcing that it acquired self-driving truck startup Ike, Nuro revealed it's the first company to receive permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to charge a fee and receive compensation for its driverless delivery service. Unlike the autonomous testing licenses the California DMV previously granted to Nuro and others, which limited the compensation self-driving vehicle companies could receive, the deployment permit enables Nuro to make its technology commercially available. The California DMV permit allows Nuro to use a fleet of light-duty driverless vehicles for a delivery service on surface streets within designated parts of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, including the cities of Atherton, East Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, and Woodside. The vehicles have a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour and are only approved to operate in fair weather conditions on streets with a speed limit of no more than 35 miles per hour.
"This permit will allow our vehicles to operate commercially on California roads in two counties near our [Mountain View, California] headquarters in the Bay Area. Soon we will announce our first deployment in California with an established partner. The service will start with our fleet of Prius vehicles in fully autonomous mode, followed by our custom-designed electric R2 vehicles," Nuro chief legal and policy officer David Estrada wrote in a blog post. "We have extensively tested our self-driving technology and built a track record of safe operations over the past four years, including two successful commercial deployments in other states and driverless testing with R2 in the Bay Area communities where we plan to deploy."
"This permit will allow our vehicles to operate commercially on California roads in two counties near our [Mountain View, California] headquarters in the Bay Area. Soon we will announce our first deployment in California with an established partner. The service will start with our fleet of Prius vehicles in fully autonomous mode, followed by our custom-designed electric R2 vehicles," Nuro chief legal and policy officer David Estrada wrote in a blog post. "We have extensively tested our self-driving technology and built a track record of safe operations over the past four years, including two successful commercial deployments in other states and driverless testing with R2 in the Bay Area communities where we plan to deploy."
This smells of FUD. (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm... My guess as to how this will go:
1) Unheard of company comes out of no where and gets approved for a permit.
2) Company vehicle soon is in a bad accident and kills a person.
3) Massive media press releases from all numbers of political action groups that suddenly pop up
4) Certain politicians start pushing "more study is needed" campaigns
5) A full on blitz to forever delay the release of Self-Driving vehicles (read: Tesla)
FUD.
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SDCs have already killed people. Liability damages were paid. Politicians didn't seem too concerned. The world continued to turn.
Meanwhile, HDCs kill 3000 people per day.
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Am I the only one thinking about the robot Santa in Futurama, and wondering if this isn't part of Skynet's plan to kill as many humans as possible right at Christmas? :-D
Re: This smells of FUD. (Score:3)
People? Tesla has never claimed to be currently offering full self driving. This is like someone enabling cruise control and being shocked when they get in accident when they went to read a book or something. So far an actual non-test mode full self driving car doesnâ(TM)t even exist. The one death that occurred happened in a car that was testing full self driving and in which its safety driver was busy texting. So if you want to include that, self driving cars have killed one person (a person who, unf
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There has been more than one death.
Uber killed the homeless woman in Phoenix. Tesla has also killed several people. There were drivers at the wheel, but the deaths were still caused by software failure.
More people will die in the future. The world will collectively yawn.
The best way to save lives is to push forward with SDC tech, so we can stop the carnage of HDCs as soon as possible.
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Waymo has non-test-mode self driving cars offering a commercial taxi service. There is another company doing it in China too. Limited operating area so only Level 4, but still extremely impressive.
No safety drivers. They have remote assistance. Waymo has had a few minor accidents, mostly caused by other human drivers.
Re: This smells of FUD. (Score:1)
Well,
1. that's what you get when you give citizens driving instructions that don't qualify as such to us Germans, and
2. that's the price of freedom and actually living.
Hint: Life is deadly. More lifeis more deadly. But even more worth it. Sure, you could live 400 years in almost-stasis in a bubble in a bunker under a mountain, and actually living about 20 of those. I'll prefer dying at 40, having lived 120 because I took a damn risk.
Hint 2: The trick is to not take the risk blindly, but first learn to actua
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SDCs have already killed people. Liability damages were paid. Politicians didn't seem too concerned. The world continued to turn.
Meanwhile, HDCs kill 3000 people per day.
That 3,000 number you keep quoting is for the entire planet. In the U.S., roughly 100 people per day are killed in vehicle accidents.
Meanwhile, on December 23rd, over 3,200 people were killed by covid-19 in the U.S.
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That 3,000 number you keep quoting is for the entire planet.
Correct. If you read carefully, you will notice that I said "people" and not "Americans".
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Meanwhile, HDCs kill 3000 people per day.
There's got to be a logical fallacy in there: status quo bias? There's definitely an assumption that the status quo is fine because that's where we are right now. There's also this bizarre demand many people have that SDCs must be much "better" than human drivers.
There are several things.
One is that S's aren't H's so the mistakes they make will be different. There are fatal errors an robot will make eventually than a human wouldn't. Big fireball makes the news. What
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A tiny lightweight vehicle like theirs that never goes above 25 MPH is simply not capable of killing anyone -- even if it develops a blood lust.
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Of course it can. A _bicycle_ can kill a pedestrian by knocking them into oncoming traffic or by surprising them and causing a fatal fall.
Let Us Test The Most Dangerous Vehicles First (Score:3)
Maybe try with some small 2 door cars first then try the big rigs.
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Sure.
Re: Let Us Test The Most Dangerous Vehicles First (Score:1)
Most dangerous?
That would be SUVs. ... you get the privilege of paying a lot more, and fitting into no unamerican parking spot and paying more on fuel too and looking like an idiot on top of it too. Because bad is good and go
Turns out more mass at the same speed equals more energy equals harder work for the crash protection means regularly worse crash results for SUVs than for anything else.
The intentionally high center of mass and by definiton always worse steering and braking don't help it either.
But hey,
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May 28, 2020
Luxury SUVs had the lowest death rates in the three-year study by the highway safety research organization. Small cars had the highest.
When it comes to vehicle crashes, size and weight matter a great deal. Thatâ(TM)s the conclusion of a comprehensive, three-year study into how drivers fared in their vehicles over time by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The fatality rates were far higher in small cars and mini cars t
Re: Let Us Test The Most Dangerous Vehicles First (Score:3)
That's death rates for the driver. You need to look at the death rate of people hit to see how SUVs are dangerous.
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The OP did not specify that it was the SUV driver or passengers he was talking about.
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The liability insurance premiums by model can be a decent (albeit flawed) proxy for an initial look.
No, they're not dispositive. When I bought my Crown Victoria thirty years ago, it had the lowest overall premiums of any vehicle in the US at the time. Some was the better protection, but a major factor was probably that they were *very* low on the list of what someone who drives like a maniac would buy--but countered somewhat by the heavy number of older drivers with fading skills who chose them.
Again, the
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There's no human driver in the car so it's by definition no longer the most dangerous vehicle on the road.
Exchange of Insurance Requirement after crash? (Score:1)
How do these driverless vehicles comply with the requirement to exchange insurance information after a crash?
Do they include an external printer that will shoot out paper copies of proof of their insurance and contact information?
How will they take/accept when I try to give them my insurance information?
How do they know if the crash is minor and requires moving to the side of highway out of other vehicles way. Or if crash is major to not move?
For previous minor crashes, have the driverless vehicles complie
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Fair questions. I'd guess that:
(a) owners of the SDV would want to know (immediately) if their vehicle was in an accident, if only at least to know that the vehicle might be disabled
(b) relevant exchange of information with the other party (SDV or HDV) may (and should) be a part of the relevant state law regarding such vehicles
(c) exchange of information doesn't have to be done via paper (and often isn't done today between human drivers)
(d) any contact with another vehicle, whether damage occurred or not, s
And you thought grannies were slow... (Score:2)
" The vehicles have a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour and are only approved to operate in fair weather conditions on streets with a speed limit of no more than 35 miles per hour."
Yeah, like having fleets of these things inching their way along, pulling out into the middle lane every time something in the curb lane spooks them isn't going to back traffic up for a thousand miles.
On the up side, at least they're so slow it won't be difficult to pull up along side and tag them, or do a drive-by hit with pai
Re: And you thought grannies were slow... (Score:2)
Also, what if the weather stops being fair while you're in it?
Re: And you thought grannies were slow... (Score:1)
If the weather is going to play dirty, then I'll play dirty too.
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This is for a delivery service; there will be no passengers. So presumably, if weather becomes inclement, they call you and tell you that you'll have to make other plans for dinner, because your food won't be arriving.
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That, my friend, is an excellent question!
Drone plus Truck (Score:2)
Wouldnâ(TM)t this work more efficiently if they had a truck that could load drones with packages and deliver them to peopleâ(TM)s QR-coded drone delivery boxes (not at front door so that packages are less likely to be stolen)?
If it's gonna be like e-scootern and the like .. (Score:2)
We're gonna see the streets littered with more cars than we'd ever need due to the duplication of having multiple competitors,
and everyone of them trying to be a monopolist (or, in corporate thug language, a "platform"), by turning you from an owner who pays once, into a renter who pays forever ... until one of them actually becomes a monopolist, and prices go up and up, while quality and innovation go Internet Explorer 6 ... if the race to the bottom did not already do that.
And then it will only be broken
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I hope you're not trying for a career as a sci-fi writer, you're not very good at it.
what (Score:2)
No words on testing, bugs, code quality versus whoever's product, sensors, etc.
say what??? (Score:2)
oh...It is Nuro, not Nuru...a bit disappointed...
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I'm waiting for my Neuralink-Tesla interface. Hopefully it will be a no-charge upgrade.
Let the senseless deaths begin (Score:1)
You want real self-driving cars? It has to be full-on, general AI, not this half-assed 'machine learning' shit.
At the rate they're going, I'll be sure to come back in about 100 years to see how they're doing with that.
Wrong use AGAIN (Score:3)
There is one clear and obvious use for commercian AI vehicles.
Garbage Trucks.
Currently large cities use huge garbage trucks that:
1) Drive one of 3-4 identical routes every day.
2) Drive at 10 mph for most of that route.
3) Typically start very early when most cars are not on the road.
4) Under normal circumstances have 2 handlers and 1 driver.
Near perfect test for a commercial AI. You are keeping 2/3 of the human employees, who may intervene if things go wrong. Best possible driving conditions. Large vehicle with lots of places to mount sensors. Vehicles can be owned by a municipality, allowing for self-insurance.