Cruise CEO Says SF 'Should Be Rolling Out the Red Carpet' for Robotaxis, Threatens To Maybe Leave Town (sfist.com) 104
In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said "we cannot expect perfection" from the self-driving cars, and vaguely threatened to leave town if regulators curtail them any further. From a report: The self-driving robotaxis of GM subsidiary Cruise and Google-owned Waymo seemed like they were heading in a successful direction when they won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last month to run their self-driving robotaxis at all hours in SF without restrictions. But barely a week later, the California DMV demanded Cruise cut it SF fleet in half, following post-Outside Lands stalling incidents, a night of multiple accidents, and SF City Attorney David Chiu filing a motion to get the CPUC to reverse their decision.
Cruse CEO Kyle Vogt sat down for a (very friendly) 40-minute interview Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which can be seen in its entirety above. And he seems to be going on offense against the regulatory pushback his company is getting from SF and California lawmakers. "It's kind of fun as a society to poke at the differences between AVs (autonomous vehicles) and humans, but if we're serious about safety in our cities, we should be rolling out the red carpet for AVs," Vogt said, according to the SF Standard.
Cruse CEO Kyle Vogt sat down for a (very friendly) 40-minute interview Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which can be seen in its entirety above. And he seems to be going on offense against the regulatory pushback his company is getting from SF and California lawmakers. "It's kind of fun as a society to poke at the differences between AVs (autonomous vehicles) and humans, but if we're serious about safety in our cities, we should be rolling out the red carpet for AVs," Vogt said, according to the SF Standard.
Cruise (Score:5, Insightful)
Where did I hear that name? Oh yes when they gridlocked a street. https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com]
What a fucking baby of a CEO. Give us sweet deals or else.
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Where did I hear that name? Oh yes when they gridlocked a street. https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com]
What a fucking baby of a CEO. Give us sweet deals or else.
Yeah, it's amusing how these self declared winners of the great meritocracy tend to become petulant toddlers whenever don't win the great meritocracy and somebody with enough pull won't declare them the winners anyway.
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I've seen a lot of these meritocracy wannabes claiming that they have a brilliant idea, but they just need a lot of funding and a few hundred employees to do the actual work. I presume the wannabes' actual role is to sit back and take credit? Usually they go nowhere, due to lack of funding, but I can hear them whining about how everyone is dumb except them and me (or whoever it is they're talking to at the time).
Re:Cruise (Score:5, Insightful)
If a human car causes gridlock, it gets towed. If an autonomous car causes gridlock, it gets taken off the road.
Re:Cruise (Score:5, Interesting)
They should only be "taken off the road" if they cause more problems than human drivers. I haven't seen any evidence of that.
When an SDC causes a problem, it is headline news. When many more humans cause the same problem, they are ignored.
It is similar to EVs and battery fires. Every time an EV catches fire, it makes the news, creating a public perception that they are dangerous. Yet, the truth is that a gas-car is twenty times more likely to catch fire.
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They should only be "taken off the road" if they cause more problems than human drivers
No, there are other options. For example, they can require a safety driver.
When an SDC causes a problem, it is headline news
False. This is a selection bias you fell for. The problems you've heard about were in the news. If you lived in San Francisco (or even spent a medium amount of time in SF), you likely would have seen problems with the cars that don't make the news.
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But... They shouldn't BE driving!!! They should walk or bicycle as all right thinking people do.
Of course if they're elderly or disabled they're screwed, but thems the breaks, right? Right?!
I kind of get the bicycle thing. I used to ride a lot, but even then I could see there was a significant number that was just NOT going to work for.
Don't EVEN get me started on public transit.
All you kids!!! Get offa my lawn!!!!!
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They should only be "taken off the road" if they cause more problems than human drivers. I haven't seen any evidence of that.
When an SDC causes a problem, it is headline news. When many more humans cause the same problem, they are ignored.
It is similar to EVs and battery fires. Every time an EV catches fire, it makes the news, creating a public perception that they are dangerous. Yet, the truth is that a gas-car is twenty times more likely to catch fire.
The statistics on this are all over the place and badly correlated. There are 284 million vehicles on the road in the US, of which EV's are only a few million.
The average age of vehicles on the road is 12.5 years, but the average for EV's is 3.6 years
It's hard to draw comparisons between how used and abused the massive fleet of ICE vehicles is compared to the EV's.
https://www.spglobal.com/mobil... [spglobal.com]
In addition, you have to take into account the unpredictability of battery fires. The battery could sustain da
Re: Cruise (Score:4, Insightful)
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Human drivers do not regularly prevent emergency vehicles from accessing emergencies.
Oh yes they do, except the story "fire engine stopped by an improperly parked car" rarely ever even makes it to the local media. But when self-driving car does, it's countrywide outrage.
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The difference is that emergency personnel are trained in how to break windows / move the improperly parked car out of the way. If you run fire hoses through a self-driving car and it drives away, it takes your hoses with it. You can gesture to a human driver to move out of the way, where you cannot currently gesture to a self-driving car to move in the direction you need it to.
At the same time, it is true that it is easier to hand-wring about a situation involving new technology that does not transparently
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If someone claims this, then put it up to a true test and trial. Only the most naive person in this day and age would ever take a CEO at their word. They're very often either liars, ignorant of their own company's abilities, or both.
Re:Cruise (Score:4, Insightful)
It is unfair that Cruise be singled out for “causing gridlock” .. lots of humans cause gridlocks in San Francisco all the time and nobody pays attention. Furthermore humans murder people in traffic accidents and that is not even newsworthy.
Sure, but the self driving car industry isn't promising us self driving cars that are as good as humans now are they? They are promising us that self driving cars will be waaaay better than humans drivers and permanently eliminate all that carnage you describe. However, it seems to me that this guy is tacitly admitting that self driving cars just won't be able to deliver on the hype any time soon and that they are struggling to even match human driving skills. It looks as if Cruise's 'self driving robo taxies' simply aren't fit for widespread use in a busy urban environment [ktvu.com] and until they are Cruise's operations should be curtailed. If these things need to be constantly network connected to operate safely and reliably then Cruise needs to ensure they never leave a networked area, if 'intentional pedestrian interference' is a problem then Cruise needs to solve that problem too because pedestrians, even the drunk ass-hole pedestrians, aren't going away any time soon. The one thing that shouldn't happen is the SF authorities letting an inferior robo-taxi service loose on the public.
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It looks as if Cruise's 'self driving robo taxies' simply aren't fit for widespread use in a busy urban environment [ktvu.com] and until they are Cruise's operations should be curtailed.
They don't need to be curtailed exactly. It would be simple enough to include a safety driver, and allowing them to get just as much testing data.
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It wasn't just a matter of "causing gridlock"... the Cruise vehicles caught on a low-hanging power wire and dragged it half a block, and also blocked access to emergency vehicles. Slashdot covered this story only two months ago: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
"Be our guinea pig for our shitty half-assed self-driving cars or we'll take our ball and go home."
I believe a proper response to that statement would be, "OK." An optional wave and smile could be placed after the "OK."
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Respect is earned, yes. But common courtesy (waving instead of giving someone the finger) should be your baseline.
Re: Translation: (Score:2)
After what these assholes have been doing to SF with their lack of safety drivers, a middle finger is more polite than they deserve.
Acceptance of abuse is not tolerance, it is enablement.
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He said "maybe leave town". It's a threat of the highest order, akin to the toddler threatening to run away from home because he had to turn off the TV.
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"Be our guinea pig for our shitty half-assed self-driving cars or we'll take our ball and go home."
I believe a proper response to that statement would be, "OK." An optional wave and smile could be placed after the "OK."
"Your proposal is acceptable." [youtu.be]
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The company should find a way to provide a clear benefit to residents rather than just "too bad, you're guinea pigs". Maybe free rides for drunks or homeless or something. (But I'd hate to get in one after somebody has a "bodily accident" inside.)
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I don't know why he hasn't figured out by now that San Francisco is the least business-friendly large city in the entire country. Dude should read the room sometime. Pack up his shit and move to Houston. Plenty of shitty traffic to test out the vehicles in, and a business friendly climate to boot.
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Not Houston, but they're in Austin, and apparently causing problems there, too. [mysanantonio.com]
I don't blame SF for wanting to curtail them. They're obviously not ready for prime time, and busy city streets aren't a proper testing environment.
Re: Translation: (Score:2)
SF is so unfriendly to business they gave these corporations permits to test their alpha version quality hardware on public streets. Wait, what?
SF is so unfriendly to business that they gave out cheap permits to build unneeded office buildings amidst a housing crisis. Wait, what?
SF is so unfriendly to business they gave permits to build housing developments in industrial areas causing massive gentrification, wait, what?
I can do this all day. LMK if you still haven't got the message.
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I believe a proper response to that statement would be, "OK." An optional wave and smile could be placed after the "OK."
If I were Cruise, I would be looking for cities which are rolling out a red carpet, not ones stuffed full of people who think cars are evil and transportation peaked with the invention of the fixie bicycle. And I'd secure that greeting before launching the service.
Seriously, if I were Cruise or Waymo, SF and NYC would be the absolute last cities on my list to support. I'd start with Houston, Atlanta, or Detroit, something like that.
is the ceo willing to do time in san quentin when (Score:5, Insightful)
is the ceo willing to do time in san quentin when the self driveing car kills someone?
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is the ceo willing to do time in san quentin when the self driveing car kills someone?
The question you should have asked was "Is the CEO willing to have every employee, board member, and shareholder do time in San Quentin when one of his self-driving cars kills someone?"
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Nah. We always hear how the CEOs are the ones making the big bucks because they're the face of the company, make all the big decisions, and take all the big risks.
So let them pay the big consequences if something goes wrong. GP was right on target.
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Qualified Immunity.
That is all.
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It does have side effects, though; they're just very short lived and usually amount to a pounding headache for a day or two after the jab. Compared to, y'know, death and all that nasty stuff I'll take the headache.
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So all those people at my work who scheduled their boosters on a Friday so they could sleep off the weekend were faking it. Got it.
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The effects of Covid vaccines are still being studied. Likely to have reduced deaths. Unknown if infection rate was reduced as studied in this area show results varying from "no effect" to "greatly reduced infection rate". The science is still out on that one.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Autonomous vehicles at this point provide no value over the average human driver. When they are better and can intelligently handle any edge cases as well as humans do these arguments about robotaxis will simply go
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I'm not sure what you think the Nature article links demonstrates.
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It directly says what I said. I didn't come up with that stuff. I'm closely paraphrasing the paper linked there.
I'm not a statistician, haven't collected data on anything, or done any research in this area, the same as everyone else here. Is Nature not considered a reliable source of information anymore?
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Doesn't seem that close to me. In any case, papers like this are pretty useless to laymen. You have to look at the whole pattern of papers and responses, e.g. a systematic review.
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Does the lifted pickup asshole get time in San Quentin when he kills someone while driving recklessly? Obviously not. Especially in CA.
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Since when did California stop enforcing vehicular homicide laws?
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Honestly, from all of the problems and considering SF traffic they probably don't move very fast at all.
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is the ceo willing to do time in san quentin when the self driveing car kills someone?
Just as soon as we jail the CEO of every other company who's product causes a fatality.
Boy, it was nice having pharmaceuticals, air travel, and electricity while it lasted...
ok (Score:4, Insightful)
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Agreed. Don't let the door hit you in the you-know-where on your way out.
Ass! (Score:2)
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Hey, don't sell the solution short!
They could be:
1) Traveling Shelter pods for the homeless, allowing them to sleep comfortably while being ferried in luxury around SF. Come to think of it, they can use them to migrate the homeless out of SF and into Sacramento where they belong.
2) Traveling Porta-Johns. Rather than spending millions for one public bathroom, use the self-driving taxis as portable toilets.
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CEO can better sit in a corner... (Score:2)
If the arrogant bastard wants to take his shit elsewhere, good riddance. Bye bye!
Cruise-ing through the excuses for SF... (Score:2)
"We cannot expect perfection."
I agree. But your shitty excuses as to why SF can't hire human drivers long enough to put up with the smell of excrement while driving through a refuse of a town requiring you to suddenly support robots delivering your workers back into an office to justify your obscene commercial real estate costs, still stinks.
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Make them install 1 public restroom for every 100 bot cars on the road so that homeless have a place to relieve themselves.
Needs to rebrand ... (Score:1)
... as Johnny Cab [fandom.com].
But without the exploding heads.
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Reckless (Score:3)
Mr. Vogt would be better served learning when to keep his mouth shut.
To put AVs on the road in a mixed autonomous/human driver scenario, it would make sense to me to require proof that the accident and severity rates from the AVs be at least as low as for human drivers, preferably lower, in a mixed autonomous/human driver scenario .
It is reckless to purposely allow something less safe on the road. It would increase the risk of injury or death to every driver and or passenger in either type of vehicle.
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Regardless of accidents I'd also like the roads not to gridlock when cellular goes down and the army of babysitters can't nudge the cars in the right direction.
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If all cellular goes down in a city, there'd be more than a bit of gridlock. All the apps and people relying on maps apps and geolocation, the traffic lights and cameras automated managing of flows etc.
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Please point out ANY incident in SF where an AV struck and killed a pedestrian.
By comparison, 30 people die, and over 500 are injured annually in human-driven incidents.
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Please point out ANY incident in SF where an AV struck and killed a pedestrian.
By comparison, 30 people die, and over 500 are injured annually in human-driven incidents.
The fact that, not living anywhere near SF, I personally don't have the data on hand, is not a proper argument to allow them. You didn't pay attention to my post. If Cruise/Vogt indeed has such data, that would satisfy my first condition.
Also notice that I didn't say "pedestrian". You introduced that extra data restriction into this conversation. I'm talking about ALL types of accidents (even fender-benders with no injuries). Again, if Cruise has such data, let them present such to the public.
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So currently there are 0.1% autonomous vehicles with 0 accidents and 99.9% with ~600 injuries/deaths annually in SF.
If you simply extrapolated today's numbers and scaled them to 100,000 autonomous vehicles, the number would remain 0 for the autonomous cars but you'd have an allowance of 60 injuries/deaths before they are any 'worse' than human drivers.
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You need to compare like with like. The cars are driving in safer parts of the city, they don't operate in bad weather, etc. How do humans do in those situations? The cars are observably bad at driving.
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Humans choose to drive less in bad weather and will migrate to safer parts of the city, not sure if you didn't notice the exodus out of SF and similar run cities.
If what you're saying is true, then let's increase the scope and see what happens. Again, you're extrapolating from 0/1000. You can multiply 1000 by any number and you still get 0.
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Again, you're extrapolating from 0/1000. You can multiply 1000 by any number and you still get 0.
You're smarter than that.
Re: Reckless (Score:2)
[citation needed]
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People who keep their mouths shut when they don't know what they're talking about will never become CEOs.
True believer (Score:2)
I think most people are too uncharitable to his intentions, if he was just in it for the money he'd be gone already.
He's a true believer, probably somewhat to justify his extreme wealth to himself ... he will save us all from car crashes, it's real in his mind.
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leave now (Score:1)
The alternative... (Score:2)
...the existing "fleet" of human drivers who never run over pedestrians, block emergency vehicles, shoot at each other, run red lights, or break down unexpectedly.
Misleading and Charged headline (Score:3)
Um.... (Score:2)
I'm guessing he's talking to the politicians he's bribing and not the people in the city. Local politics are ridiculously corrupt.
Give us a deal for beta testing in your town (Score:2)
CEOs (Score:2)
If I were a CEO, especially one whose company is involved in a bit of controversy, I'd be really careful about doing interviews. Especially if when talking to a friendly interviewer.
I couldn't find a transcript, but it seems to me that people are most likely to something really dumb it's usually when they're talking to a friendly reporter who basically agrees with everything they say.
Done deal. (Score:2)
why would anyone town want them? (Score:1)
"Hey let us beta test a product on your streets that may or may not be dangerous, cause traffic problems OH and in the best case scenario we will put a lot of people in your town out of work suddenly. " - Cruise
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Sounds great! How do I sign up my town?
Hahahaha! (Score:2)
Where else would they go? (Score:2)
... AZ having their own bot-car headaches. [azcentral.com]
Cry baby, cry .. (Score:2)
Threatening like a 4 year old is ridiculous.
Pack up and go home cry baby.
Wtf (Score:2)
They win (Score:2)
Mixed feelings (Score:2)
I have mixed feelings on this.
I am in favor of automated vehicles providing on-demand transportation. I think they will be a great benefit.
But they aren't there yet. The regulators job is to see that things don't go wrong... and Cruise isn't doing so great. They may be learning, but they have a ways to go. So it makes sense for the regulator to step in and place restrictions on them until they improve.
And then there is the attitude. Anyone who pulls the "I'm too good for this. Give me what I want or I
Wait. Stop. (Score:2)