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Transportation

Cruise Faces Long Road Back To City Streets in Wake of Safety Review (reuters.com) 23

General Motors' Cruise self-driving car unit faces a trip that could last the better part of this year to convince regulators and a wary public that its robotaxis are fit to share the road with human drivers, industry officials said. From a report: After releasing a withering safety report last week that Cruise commissioned, GM said on Tuesday it slashed about $1 billion from Cruise's annual budget and promised to "soon" release a timeline for the unit's return to operations. The U.S. automaker also delayed indefinitely a March update when it was expected to lay out plans.

That has raised questions about when Cruise might get its vehicles back on the road, particularly as it faces various government probes including from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "Investigating defects is a highly deliberative process," said Mark Rosekind, a former NHTSA chief who has also worked for Amazon.com's Zoox autonomous vehicle unit. "It would be months, easily, and for bigger problems up to a year or more to resolve an investigation."

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Cruise Faces Long Road Back To City Streets in Wake of Safety Review

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  • as an open air testing facility. Go prove you can safely run on courses first. Hire some fake pedestrians. Maybe rent out one of those ghost towns out west or something, there's no shortage of them. Don't run untested software in a 2000lb vehicle next to me. It's not as if I agreed to be your test subject, nor am I getting compensation for it.
    • I'm 100% sure it's been tested more than a 16 yr old who just got their drivers license.
      • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2024 @03:23PM (#64204270) Homepage

        I'm 100% sure it's been tested more than a 16 yr old who just got their drivers license.

        Pretty much this. Do these cars really get into more accidents per miles driven than human drivers? Hell, on the street just outside my home there's presently caution tape around the storm drain because someone hit it and broke the concrete cover.

        My main beef with self driving vehicles is that they're ultimately another step on the path towards a "you'll own nothing and be happy" future with cars as a service, where private vehicle ownership is a privilege reserved mostly for the wealthy. I guess there are also probably people who hate self driving vehicles because they're one of those drivers who becomes absolutely enraged when the car in front of them is actually following the speed limit.

        • Honestly, GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, Peugoet, Citroen, EVERY British car maker and more than anyone else, VW... these are companies thoroughly lacking any skills in computer technology. I've driven cars from all of them and it's painfully obvious that fully self-driving isn't even the start of the problems. These companies should be legally banned from using any modern technology in cars and they should be banned from making cars without modern technology. In other words, they should just be banned.

          Let me giv
        • by mjwx ( 966435 )

          I'm 100% sure it's been tested more than a 16 yr old who just got their drivers license.

          Pretty much this. Do these cars really get into more accidents per miles driven than human drivers? Hell, on the street just outside my home there's presently caution tape around the storm drain because someone hit it and broke the concrete cover.

          If a 16 yr old stops in an intersection because they don't know what to do and doesn't move until someone from the car leasing company takes over... I think you seriously have to question your nations right to breed.

          Yes, an autonomous car cannot currently match a 16 yr old in basic decision making... I struggle to see how they are safer, especially given the number of deaths already attributed to Tesla's Autopilot and those are just from straight, wide, clear US roads. I'd hate to see the carnage on my s

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        We have decades of tests showing that 16 year olds TYPICALLY do well enough. How many decades does a similar self driving system have?

        • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

          We have decades of tests showing that 16 year olds TYPICALLY do well enough. How many decades does a similar self driving system have?

          Does testing in simulation count? If so, the self-driving systems have millenia of testing under their belts.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            Meaning we can absolutely trust the self driving systems to drive in a simulator. Clearly the simulator isn't adequate since they did so well there and so routinely have problems in the real world.

      • by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        Yet they appear to drive exactly like a 16 year old. They do the same stupid crap, like just stop where they are when they get confused.

      • How old are you? The demographic with the most accidents is males 21-25, girls aged 16 are safer.

        Also found vehicle crash death rate for male drivers ages 16â"19 years was three times as high as the death rate for female drivers.

        Sooo, why are you picking on the girls, man?

      • Hush. Don’t give us any reasonable arguments about doing a realistic risk analysis. We’re ruled by our fears, we’re hostile to any new tech, we hate change and definitely AI, we resist pretty much anything unfamiliar, and we doomscroll any conspiracy theory that the media feeds us.

        The only reason we’ve progressed past hunter-gathering is because groups of humans can be way more than the sum of our parts.
    • Indeed. Where is all the promotional footage of the robocars successfully dealing with difficult situations in a test environment? Where is the reconstruction of previous accidents to show how the new version robocar can behave safely?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    IMHO, the Cruise cars are about as wanted as the Bird and Limebikes which made commutes hell for everyone except the dolts who liked carving through meat pylons and zooming between cars like they had infinite +1ups. The Cruise cars would just stop indefinitely in intersections, and cause traffic jams. If you read the /r/austin subreddit and look up those vehicles, there were a ton [reddit.com] of issues.

    Glad those are off the road, and hopefully they will stay that way, until someone like Waymo which is doing things s

    • Well that is the question, isn't it? They don't have to be perfect. They just have to be better than humans.

      It would be sad and murderous if fear of lawsuits slowed down this process. Thanks, lawyers.

  • ...and they respond by cutting funding?
    If they cared about solving the problems, they would increase funding

    • to organizational improvement.

      You (Cruise department) have lost us face and honor through your failures.

      (Proceeds to strangle Cruise department.)

      Let that be a lesson to you few remaining minions. Succeed, or die!

      Seems like that's going to work lol.
    • The fact that they are cutting funding tells me that they may well shit-can the whole thing.
  • by njvack ( 646524 ) <njvack@freshforever.net> on Wednesday January 31, 2024 @05:15PM (#64204546)

    I swear to God, you drag one lousy pedestrian screaming beneath the wheels of your robotic car and everyone starts overreacting and posting the video online and yelling about "safety."

    Don't you people understand? This could be the breakthrough that makes riding in a taxi somewhat cheaper!

    • I swear to God, you drag one lousy pedestrian screaming beneath the wheels of your robotic car and everyone starts overreacting and posting the video online and yelling about "safety."

      Don't you people understand? This could be the breakthrough that makes riding in a taxi somewhat cheaper!

      And also safer. You can tell by how videos of slightly evolved monkey behind driver's wheel doing same and worse are so commonplace noone even gives a shit.

  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2024 @05:30PM (#64204570) Journal
    I'm betting they end up scrapping the whole thing when they realize the underlying technology is trash.

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