What sized city? Public transport is not as convenient as driving your own car except where congestion and parking are factors. In small-town USA, that’s not generally a problem. In many larger cities in the US, buses - and to a lesser degree metros - are populated by drunks and thugs …
That's only true if you aren't properly staffing your trains. Large cities like SF should not be encouraging more cars but they should be building out more metros and trains to the suburbs so I really wonder what kind of a stranglehold the car conglomerates have on big cities to prevent them from investing in public transportation. @@Clyde-2055
I think that interaction with the guy who kicked the car underscores how many problems are left to solve in this realm. A human driver would have intuitively understood the guy wanted to parallel park and either would have backed up or gone around him. Many situations require understanding the intention of humans, which seems like a much harder problem to solve than recognizing lanes and obstacles.
To be fair, driving in San Francisco is usually pretty similar to that first ride anyway. As a 10-year resident of SF, being stuck behind a jerk with their hazards on every 500 feet, some thug or vagrant spitting on your car or kicking it, and feeling generally uneasy about the next block is on par.
@@rfenton19851 most major cities are like that. Drive around downtown Chicago and you'll see the same things; coupled with taxi drivers driving like they are insane.
Yep. It feels stupid to me to have SF be one of the first cities to test this new technology. It should be one of the last places in the U.S. (along with NY) to use this kind of new tech given the challenges of driving there. Obviously there is a lot of money to be earned in SF with a good AV product and a lot of the tech is worked on in the Bay Area. But a city like San Jose would probably be so much easier to test out the product compared to SF if they were going to pick a major bay area city.
While that is a good idea, that still takes precious time away from the emergency responders. If anything, the vehicles should be programmed to stay clear of Emergency vehicles at all times.
@@dr_pibby That too yes. I think it's emblematic of their reckless attitude that they didn't put that near the top of their to-do list. Human drivers know to get out the way of emergency vehicles.
I was thinking more inline of using trackers and signals already installed in emergency vehicles. Not sure how much data is transfered but from what I know ambulances do send signals to traffic lights to change, so it could be used with AV to send "avoid".
@@Stratos1988 Yes. And of course it should be relatively easy just to detect sirens and certain colours of flashing light. That's what some traffic lights do.
Honestly that part felt like a parody/comedy bit, she treated the guy like an NPC or something. People loathe those self-driving cars for a reason, she's a reporter, so why doesn't she at least try to talk to the guy? Instead she's basically shooting a commercial for big-tech
@@BdR76 it seems drivers there are not much better than these self driving cars. The first thing that guy should do is signaling that he wanted to park. With drivers like him, no surprise he is that stressed.
@@BdR76 I wouldn't feel safe with his behaviour and totally understand why she kept the windows up. She was critical of the ride saying it was like a student driver and that they got honked at 4 times. She basically said it wasn't ready for prime time. Doesn't sound like a commercial to me.
The business pressure to push these should be a giant red flag. This is about saving money paying people not making the roads safer. Public transportation would be a much bigger effect on safety.
What's the point? These should be cheaper because there's no driver to pay, but they're going to charge the exact same amount and pocket all the extra profit. What's the value proposition for the consumer?
Drivers or AVs who drive "carefully" but are also largely oblivious of road conditions and don't drive well with traffic flows may cause collateral incidents or accidents that aren't counted in the safety statistics of that driver. Such as a driver getting confused and stopping dangerously may cause another car that then veers around it to get into an unnecessary crash. So I think saying these cars are safer because of their crash statistics when they're clearly being observed as driving badly and causing traffic interruptions is probably misleading
Correct. AVs can drive very conservatively with an extremely low risk tolerance, but such a driving style may not integrate well into the current urban traffic conditions.
@@laod7192 Just a consequence of DMVs all over issuing permits to monkeys. I'd bet AVs will do extremely well in places such as Germany where the bar is just a tad bit (much) higher for drivers. They don't just hand licenses to anyone
I was recently teaching my step-son how to drive. Almost none of my tutoring was about the general rules of driving, 99% of what I was teaching him was how to be prepared for the stupid stuff people might do. As a programmer myself, I don't see how you can make a proper self driving car without having a true artificial intelligence that can literally process thoughts (like a human) on it's own. Referring to a database of similar scenarios is never going to be sufficient because people can do some pretty random things
Ideally, the problem shouldn't exist to begin with, but considering the average American driver, and them remembering half of the US driving population is worse than that... Probably just bolt the tech onto buses. At least they run a predictable route, sometimes on dedicated lanes
I disagree with you, driving in London expose you for very predictable behaviour, people opening door , bicycle passing too close, lines that merge, speed cameras, kids coming out of the bus and so on. In the past 3years there had been an expansion of 20MPH zone , with that speed I recon selfdriving car can get you to destination but probably will cause more traffic because it will stick to rules and be extra cautious.
@waltzsofa1602 they do understand that, but the problem is that the stupid stuff people might do is infinite, way beyond the general rules of driving and thus any standard algorithm is going to be unprepared and inefficient to respond to infinite possibilities. You really need something like general AI to replicate an appropriate response to the stupid stuff people do while driving.
It depends on what you mean by responsibility. I assume cruise was fined for this in the same way that a human driver impeding an ambulance will also gain you a fine as a human. This would not send you to jail for murder if that is what you mean.
@@arturodelarosa4394 are you saying if a faulty algorithm, sensor, camera, etc in a self-driving vehicle causes death of a person, the penalty prescribed by current law is a fine for the company that manufactured the vehicle or one operating it?
@@rok1475 The company that operates the vehicle. Not the manufacturer. Although depending on what it is, in this case night be one and the same. But it is not out of the question that if a particular sensor falls repeatedly and causes issues for Cruise, then after they take the responsibility and pay for it. They in turn might sue the manufacturer. But that is just legal action. Although in a way is cruise morally shifting the blame but not the responsibility in the eyes of the law.
Not to worry. They're also developing a robot that will be fully capable of taking legal responsibility in such instances and even be capable of serving time in prison.
What the fire chief doesn't understand is that the people who invested billions of dollars in these cars, WANT THEIR MONEY BACK. They're going to push these out whether they are ready or not.
They can want what they want, but it's THEIR commercial risk. No way a public service has to bow for commercial actions. And at the end of this story also still is the courtroom where a complete company can be taken down after a lawsuit. THAT's also a reality.
The fire chief probably understands that. But they also understand that emergency services being able to get to people is and always should be more important than pushing robotaxies for the sake of investors
It would be good if more emphasis was made in the differences between the two companies. All of the issues shown and discussed in this segment involved Cruise vehicles. They're the ones sprinting out the gate, who's permit was pulled and decided to slow down and pause operations. Meanwhile, Waymo has slowly and quietly operated under the radar, without incidents, which I think says a lot. Yes, both companies operate autonomous vehicles but I think comparing the two would be like night and day.
You miss the point, Yes Waymo is doing a lot better. But the issue is not in normal operation, but in rare cases that are not included in training data and normal operations. Like the emergency services cases. Or just a road clossure that the system is not aware of getting stuck causing traffic jams and so on.
@@davidbeppler3032I mean... Compare that to the amounts of accidents by humans after the same amount of kilometers - I am pretty sure waymo wins in regards of the statistics. And that at the beginning of the implementation in actually complex scenarios - give it 10 more years to develop, and we will be talking about restricting humans to drive, and that for very good reasons
@@ac0rpbgand that's the amazing thing - one accident, and it is learning data for all other automated cars. Unlike with humans, where each one has to make the same experience on their own. Will autonom cars be perfect? Never, that's not realistic. The goal is to be significantly better than human drivers, statistically speaking.
"One of those damn robotaxis is blocking our ambulance again. Go call the company to move the car!" "Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line... Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line..."
You talk as if they are mutually exclusive. Govt can work on public transport infrastructure. Most of this driverless car is private sector. You might as well shout “first improve the wall insulation in our homes before doing useless stuff like improving cell phone technology”
I'd hope driverless cars take honking as input into their system, just as a human drivers would interpret it as 'hazard', 'slow down' or 'provide extra space'. Certainly at least taking number of honks as a course-grain statistical metric
@@ericgol7 In many countries, honking without "active danger present" is a trafic violation. (In most countries, honking is defined as warning others from DANGER. Nothing else.)
@@jackbteachingIt makes sense to me. It was trained on many experiences of real (human) drivers and if any of the drives didn't perfectly follow the rules of the road it would adopt that mindset to its driving. Not too long ago I saw a Waymo not using its turn-single when I was behind it on the road. I'm very skeptical about this technology and it's gathering of road driving data.
@@ourfamilyaccount I agree! I also feel the newer technologies, from EVs, hybrids, to autopiloted vehicles, need to be placed or focused on use cases that maximizes benefit. For example if auto makers, or law makers focused efforts on urban use/ commutes and smaller EVs, as complimentary vehicles for suburban homes;for postal and package deliveries -that would have been a good start, logical, and likely less push-back and hostility from those folks who feel threatened that the gov't is trying to take away their ICE vehicles. So those all or nothing mandates to me are misguided and ineffective. Especially when tech is evolving, to make such mandates that by xxxx year we should have xx% of EVs on the road takes away the potential of better technologies competing in this space. EV pickups make zero sense. We don't need these tremendously heavly, super fast trucks as everyday vehicles, they have short range when doing 'truck stuff' like towing, I feel hybrids, using smaller battery packs, less weight, to increase efficiency and per tank range would have been a great solution. Anyways, my soapbox...
Now in many cities in China like Shenzhen, Wuhan, Beijing and Shanghai, there are lots of self-driving taxis already (called 萝卜快跑), welcome to have a try and the experience is much better than this one. Also it's very very cheap (about $0.5 for 10km)
This technology can easily be moved to bigger cars, trucks, buses etc. Why risk the lives of a shuttle full of people, when you can test it with 2-3 passengers
I Love that Deirdra is doing field reporting now! Seeing her on this report is a pleasant surprise! Can't wait to see you on the next one, Deirdra! 👍🏾👍🏾
Only way self-driving cars would really work is to make it 100% self-driving, not one human behind any wheel anywhere. The chances of that ever happening is... ZERO. TONS of people would refuse to let it happen. And I don't mean just gearheads. and public transportation sucks. In regards to transporting one's self, just like in almost anything, the best way to get the job done the way you want it is to do it yourself.
“Chances of that happening is zero” There was a time smartphones were expensive and lot of people said - “I don’t need all that in a phone. I just use it to make phone calls”. Now all those people have e smartphones. Right now the technology is improving. Once it’s extremely safe, more and more use cases of it will show up (just like the concept of installing apps on phones), and people will switch. Time horizon for this maybe longer than what it was for smartphones, but it will happen.
The ability to take orders from a Cop, Firefighter, or Paramedic is required for a driver. It's technically a requirement for everyone in a country regardless of whether or not they are driving. Self-driving cars will probably need full AI so they can understand orders from Emergency Personnel.
Great job by Deirdre to show the pros and cons! I think the companies need to have people working 24/7 with the city FD/PD so that if/when these issues come up, it's a quick resolution because there is someone available from Waymo or Cruise to handle it and not have to call a toll free number and explain it all. Yes, there is a cost with that, but it will quickly reduce these stupid issues of the car "getting confused". Those things also need to be addressed by the companies involved.
When the car gets "confused" it should just quickly drop out of autonomous mode and go into remote control mode, and someone in a 24 hr call center somewhere else can immediately remotely control the car away from the situation. Why is this so hard?
What's the point of hiring more for that? The point is to severely limit the amount of people you can hire to maximise the profits of automation. The people they hire for dispute resolution probably get paid more than the Taxi or Uber drivers.
What could go wrong? Driverless vehicles that weigh tons… I would like to know what’s the benefit in this? Improved service? A better experience? No, my guess would be: profits. Forget the public: profits. And these companies are so well vested that they will fight relentlessly to avoid financial responsibility. Who allowed this? Money under the table? 🤷🏻♂️
Yes, but also significantly lowers the cost of the transport service, right now companies will opt to pocket those savings, but with competition in time those savings will come to your pocket. The other thing they offer is increased safety of our streets. A very significant increase in safety. Considering car crashes are responsible 46k deaths a year in the US alone, you can see how that is important. Not to mention the savings on property damage, etc.
Having worked for Waymo under a temporary contract back in 2018, I can say the tech and software has come so very far. I now use it on the regular, and have had many friends and family ride along with, for what almost always seems like a quiet smooth ride. Consider the manuever @7:56, which is no easy feat. I can't explain what's going on with Cruise but Waymo has it figured out.
It would be interesting to see how autonomous vehicle compare not to the average driver, but to professional drivers. Since this technology is supposed to be used as taxis, it should be compared to human operated taxis. It's good to know that robo-taxis experience 75% less collisions than the average driver (whatever that is), but I want to know how do they compare with human-driven taxis in the same operation areas.
word is still out on whether people who drive for a living crash less or more than an average driver. I couldn't find anything conclusive stating either way. If the tech is better than your average driver by an obvious margin, it's probably better than a professional driver too.
My friend recently began work at Cruise I feel bad for him because the CEO sounds like a chucklehead I hope he doesn’t get laid off I’ve had both Cruise and Waymo driverless vehicles do some crazy maneuvers in front of me One made a left in front of active traffic (no protected left) Another got stuck at a passenger crossing signal
@Harcorwrestler So true. An autonomous vehicle cannot give a visually impaired person the attention they need during the ride. As a rideshare driver, I always make sure to properly accommodate riders with disabilities. Everyone, please stop basing your disdain for any and every rideshare driver on the actions of a few in number disrespectful drivers.
Really , that's your thinking..my thinking was his dealt with this self driving joke before.. The guy didn't look for no driver so who's the idiots. You!!!
And it dosent matter whether there's a driver or not, damaged panel is a damaged auto panel..And at least you won't get shoot by some americian loon!!!.
Way back in July, I sent Cruise a video and filled two online complaints about what i witnessed in regards to their vehicles and a problem i know would turn into sometime getting hurt if not corrected immediately. They promised me in their response emails. I'm a professional driver, Class A with Class B passenger endorsement. Drove big rigs across the country, and city bus in upstairs New York. I drive Uber in SF. A month goes by and i notice the problem still persists. I contact them again. Then i see that they're pulling all of their vehicles off the road. I offered to train their Cruise trainers FOR FREE. I was ignored. Waymo hasn't had these problems. The big issue i saw was that when people are in the crosswalk, the Cruise vehicle would pull to within a foot of the pedestrian, wheels turned and aimed right at them. If a vehicle hits that Cruise from behind, the pedestrian is going to get hit. I saw this behavior every day so day from their vehicles. Each individual vehicle is trained by a person, and I've seen the trainers making bad decisions, and i see exactly why the vehicles act the way they do. It's not the technology, because Waymo doesn't have these problems. It seemed that Cruise care more about hiring issue that knew the city, than they did prior that would drive correctly when training the vehicles. All they needed were people that knows the rules of the road and that you cannot rush pedestrians and you cannot sin your vehicles towards them. In addition, they need street supervisors to keep an eye on both the vehicles, and trainers. Now they pulled all of their passenger services until further notice. I could have saved them time and money. They were too busy counting the pennies, that they ended up losing the dollars.
Jeez, the idea of vehicles being that aggressive around pedestrians is horrifying. I am not comfortable with a car stopping within 2 YARDS of me. I would feel like I was going to be hit every single time. That also makes me trust them less when people are crossing anywhere other than a crosswalk. Would they even try to stop before it is too late?
In drivers Ed they told us to never turn the wheels to turn if we’re stopped, wait to do it when you can start moving. I’m surprised they aren’t programmed that way.
probably because they can't recognize the human in time. prolly a sensor problem because it has to distinguish people walking on the side walk and people crossing the sidewalk.
The cars' behavior are not "trained" individually. They are mostly designed and programmed, though researchers have been exploring the ideas of vehicles imitating human drivers behavior but still the "training" or imitation is done "collectively". You might have confused a remote vehicle operator who monitors and occasionally takes over vehicle control as a "trainer". The performance disparity between Waymo and Cruise indeed shows a safety culture issue within certain companies.
Who is asking for this technology exactly? Can we please just perfect the automatic sink, soap, and towel-dispenser situation in every bathroom everywhere first?
I’m not gonna lie, as a blind person it really would be nice if this was perfected as well. Just imagining being able to drive not having to worry about certain things. I could go wherever I wanted on my own and that would be amazing to me. Yes I could take an Uber or a lift, but I am a female and so sometimes it can be a little scary, so yes a self driving car would be absolutely amazing. But I understand that there are a lot of issues with it and I honestly think that these things should be fixed. They shouldn’t be focusing on rolling them out so fast but yes, I also agree. Automatic soap dispenser should absolutely be worked on as well.
The self driving is just one part of the equation. Good luck managing a nationwide fleet of self driving cars. All those repairs, maintenance, and cleaning every day, hell, every couple hours. Imagine how the general public will trash and abuse these cars. They are about to find out just how hard the cab business is.
Here's why Waymo and Cruise will lose in SF. No one outside of the CEOs are fighting for them to stay. The average citizen couldn't care less if the stay or go. They really don't add anything to the city other than controversy. No one will miss them.
15:57 All you need to know to decide if you want AVs on your city is this. (this happens to be a cruise stat) but if you can confirm that the numbers are anywhere near to this. You would be a fool to stop those vehicles from using the roads. Across the US every year 46k people die in car crashes, if cruise data is right that means potentially 30k lives saved a year. To put that in perspective that is 10 times more people than those who died in 9/11. If you could prevent a 10th of that number (that is literally cruise inflating their stats by an entire order orden of magnitud -10x) it would be the equivalent of stopping 9/11 every year. I do not know what fool would sign off on a regulation that stops them from rolling out and sleep well at night. This reminds me of the foolishness / stubbornness at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns. People easily lose sight of the big picture, aided by the media.
Every elevator has a switch for the fire rescue to take over in emergency. Apparently it is too difficult for the geniuses working on the self-driving technology to come up with a similar system for robotaxis. The best they could come up with is 1-800 number for the emergency to call, in a situation where every second counts…
@@alexCh-ln2gw there were several situations described in this video. If the self driving car stops and blocks the traffic, having an override switch could help. It would not do much for a stupid algorithm for handling a collision that programmers without any knowledge or experience in collision analysis came up with.
Robotaxis may be safer than human-driven ones for routine and anticipated scenarios, but right now they are at a loss when it comes to unusual situations.
I'll take it. Unusual situations are rare and the companies like Waymo will focus on making them even more so. This is the true power of automating driving -- we can treat problems like we treat aircraft problems and engineer them out of existence.
Yeah but that's fine. Because by definition unusual situations don't happen very often. So by enlarge they are still an improvement in all fronts, including safety. You ban them from the road and how do you expect them to get better? This is a technology that needs to be thrown in the pool so it learns to swim, even if it caused more damage than humans at the beginning it would be worth it on the long run. But it doesn't, it's already safer, by quite a big margin. This is as the CEO correctly called it: "sensational" news.
@@mrdeebo313 Why not? and more importantly, how else are you going to test this? They had their controlled environment test, then they moved to having human driver supervisors. now we are here: when they need real world, non-supervised experience. Let's be clear about this: this has been going on for almost a decade, you cannot say we rushed this, it has been done way too carefully if you ask me. And the consequences are for the most part, they are inconveniencing the public but they are still statistically safer than human drivers. By a huge 70% margin of safety. Come on! What else do you want? Perfection? I say letting perfect getting in the way of good enough is a mistake. Specially when we are talking about a technology with the potential to save thirty thousand lives a year, in the US alone. It would be like withholding the covid vaccine for another decade because some people experienced arm pain.
Unpopular opinion: Technical problems aside, you can't have high tech around low people.. 0:55 spitting and kicking, this is ridiculous. Try this in a place like Tokyo, Zürich, Singapur.. not in a drug infested city full with human feces all around (if you've ever been to SF you know what I'm talking about)
Replacing real divers with unregulated technology that operates above the laws of the land without regard to emergency vehicles is premature and irresponsible. These vehicles should not be in operation in big cities where emergencies are frequent. There is a higher risk of violating the laws, and no one gets a ticket. A driver operated car would be penalized for violating a law. How does the driverless cars get a drivers license? Did the go to the DMV and take a test? How is it that technology doesn’t have to follow the laws especially in regards to safety. The aeronautics industry is the safest industry for transportation. Wouldn’t it make sense to create a autonomous airplanes first? But who would ride a plane without a pilot. The world is not ready for these vehicles in big cities. Take them to the real areas and make them pass the DMV test before putting them on the road. What I’m seeing here is money over safety. The owners and investors of these firms are more interested in profit that follow the laws and the safety of our civilians. They need to slllllllooooooowwwwww down!
@@ashleyshim2078It's much worse than that, skidding around slippery corners, failing to accellerate sufficiently to get through a patch of snow, failing to drive in lanes appropriately when lines are not visible, or the worst case scenario: confusing snowflakes for obstacles or failing to detect obstacles appropriately due to interference in the images and sensor by snowflakes.
I was thinking the same thing. Besides the reduced visibility, the cameras & sensors will be covered with a randomly changing layer of muck. Us humans have to keep moving our head around to see through the snow-covered windshield. Cameras & sensors are stationary. I expect that AI can deal with the slipperiness reasonably well, but not the navigation.
Waymo uses proprietary technology that allows for human personnel to remotely control the vehicles in the rare case that the automated system needs help.
It is actually happening in many major US cities. New bikes lanes, new bus routes, and (attempts) at metros/trains. I say attempts because the politicians are too stupid to make it work.
Why self driving companies for the failure of government? How are they stopping you from building public transport. Plus even in a cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong people own cars and drive.
you are the embodiment of the joke i wrote earlier: they should uses buses instead they are 10 times heavier per axle then a car so they destroy the road 10 000times faster then cars (the generlized fourth power law) and electric buses use over 200kwh/100 compared to 10kwh/100km for cars in the city and thanks to buses we can be extremely limited when it comes to where we can travel, how much stuff you can take with you and of course while obeying strict timetables also buses are great at spreading viruses i cant wait for my daddy government to "free" me from my car by outpricing me out of car ownership, because the 500$ I paid for my old japanese car from the 90s really ruined me financially, and all the oil changes that take me like 10minutes that I have to do every 6months are really unbearable... I dream about a world where noone is allowed to own a car (ofc we would still have to pay taxes for road infrastructure so the semi trucks can drive around, business funtion, and all the services reach you) And we would have to pay even more then before because all the new buses that replaced cars would do way more road damage (the generalized fourth power law) and the drivers who paid for roads (50% tax in fuel, 10$ per h parkings=87k per year for a 2x5m patch of asphalt, etc.) before are now gone and omg, dont get me started about my single family house with my private pool, if I didnt own a car I would finally have a great excuse to live in a small flat apartment where I can hear my neighbour's fart.
Im a black American ride share driver in Nashville. This car don't need to come to Nashville. Im gone do what I gotta do to not let an outsider take my job or money.
@@skkedys1t36 I'm just talking but this wouldn't work in Nashville for a million reasons. Cost of living too high for a lot of people and someone will try to get hurt by it for an easy payday.
Zero possibility I’ll be getting into one of these anytime soon (without a backup driver). I and every human driver I know has a self-preservation instinct. These vehicles have none and therefore I have no confidence in their ability to react in a difficult or dangerous situation. My self preservation instinct is creaming “stay away” !
indeed it could be done with some sort of predictive geo-fencing, making the vehicles pull over in advance. the destination of the firetruck is also known in advance so just fit a GPS in it and it can be done remotely. National standards and V2V communication would help in this sense, so that all fire emergency vehicles are fitted with the same system and can communicate with the same protocols.
The problem with Waymo’s approach is scaleability. As in it won’t scale. Their vehicles cost $150,000 a pop and are only trained on one small geofenced area of San Francisco. That vehicle will simply not operate in any other part of San Francisco, let alone another city. Bringing new vehicles online is an involved, cumbersome, expensive headache. It’s simply difficult to see any road to profitability for them.
Humans are unpredictable. There are rules but humans don't really follow rules. No matter how hard the computer tries to dodge and drive politely, there'll always be things that programmers cannot consider or think about. It's just human nature. Also machines have marginal errors, and sensors could be malfunctioning at a moment. These people want to make self-driving cars as safe as heaven, and that will not happen if you don't purge all humans and pets out of the environment and leave ONLY machines on the road.
I would correct real world is unpredictable not merely humans in it. Animals can do unpredictable things, are we going to expect teaching moose, dogs, cats and birds to follow traffic rules? All the other animals? Weather can do unpredictable things. Wind blown tree blocking the road. Heavy rain turning road to mud. Wind blowing plastic bag or other light debris along the road. Flood has caused a new bit of road that has never previously flooded to flood out. Snow storm causing white out conditions. Humans are mean and don't follow rules is cop out to the bigger problem..... real world will always have chaotic and unpredictable things to it. System operating in it has to be able to handle encountering new things it has never encountered. That is why autonomous robots can easily work in a ware house, but have real problems on city streets. Unexpected things don't happen in warehouse, it is controlled environment. City Street will never be a fully controlled environment.
Generally speaking, these cars are not "programmed". They use "machine learning" to study thousands of hours of recordings, and emulate competent human drivers. Also, although sensors can output errors, you typically have multiple redundant sensors, so you can employ error correction. This gives vastly more detailed and reliable information than the human eye. So although progress will be gradual, I don't think there's any reason for the technology to plateau. I think it's inevitable that one day, automated vehicles will surpass human drivers.
Sorry but N. America unfortunately has repeatedly failed at having decent public transit despite throwing hundreds of millions of dollars per year at it non-stop. The culture, climate, high labor cost and low urban density makes N. American public transit an inefficient money pit. ruclips.net/video/0nsPGMoXqX0/видео.html ruclips.net/video/-ZDZtBRTyeI/видео.html AV taxis (all EVs of course) are the way to go because it uses shared infrastructure and provides key door-to-door service wherever you are and wherever you're going. Most N. American transit systems are built on a hub-and-spoke model (downtown hub + suburb spokes) which makes traversing between sub-urban spokes so much inefficient with long travel times. Private companies are mostly footing the bill for the AV taxi R&D too.
No not like other parts of the world. Public transit in US won't get better because of what type of people also ride on it. It often gets smelly and filthy and cleaners are hard to keep pace. Yeah it's not a big group and most people are doing great. But that tiny 5% can easily ruin it for all. I really hope public transit become privately operated, but personnel and facilities be federal properties. Any damage to stations, trains, buses and people get charged as damaging federal properties and get those ppl locked up forever.
No not like other parts of the world. Public transit in US won't get better because of what type of people also ride on it. It often gets smelly and filthy and cleaners are hard to keep pace. Yeah it's not a big group and most people are doing great. But that tiny 5% with behavioral and mental issues can easily ruin it for all. I really hope public transit become privately operated, but personnel and facilities be federal properties. Any damage to stations, trains, buses and people get charged as damaging federal properties and get those ppl locked up forever.
Isn't it possible to have a few people always on call to remotely control the vehicle when it's experiencing technical difficulties that requires a human driver? That way you fix the 'rare' occurrences that these vehicles run into due to not having human intellect
A family member of mine works for waymo, and they can log into a car and controll it when an issue happens. But the complaint here is how long it takes to get that person to do so. The ambulance argument says 1 minute is too much.
Ah I see, it should be possible to improve the response times though 🤔like if you have maybe 1 person to monitor 25 cars since these occurrences are rare. The passenger can just hit an emergency button to let the person in monitoring that vehicle to take it over. Another way to improve speed for emergency vehicles is to give those government agencies the ability to see all driverless cars currently on the road so they can either alert the people monitoring the cars of their route or change their route if they can. Of course this would only be a temporary solution since someday in the future most if not all cars might be driverless but by then emergency vehicles and driverless vehicles should be advanced enough to communicate with each other and all vehicles on the emergency route would be notified a few minutes before the emergency vehicle even gets close to the driverless vehicle
I just spoke to them yesterday at a career fair. They said the biggest obstacle was their vans don't have any steering wheels. The government is giving them beef on that aspect. But they allow handicapped people to be able to have mobility. This will be normal in about 50 years. Everything that was crazy at first is normal now such as a car, a phone, internet, etc.
I have no cofidence in GM nor any of their subsidiaries as a software company and certainly not as an AI company. The company is ran from top to bottom by MBAs and lawyers and not by engineers. When an innovative startup like Cruise is acquired by GM, the first thing the engineers do is cash out and LEAVE to greener pastures populated by like-minded engineers. This is why I am not surprised by Cruise's downfall in recent months. Cruise is doomed. And since GM has not yet made a profit on any of its EVs sold, GM is doomed as well once demaind for ICE and hybrids die off.
Bad drivers who don’t follow rules or orderly driving are a problem for autonomously driving vehicles. That jerk spitting and kicking a machine to get a result is prime evidence of the ididiocy that permeates our society.
It would make sense for police and fire team dispatch to have access to a map where they can just click to block off various roads as needed to cause these cars to avoid getting in the way. If a fire is happening, they can just block off the nearby roads.
@@mrdeebo313 Maybe it could be, but it would still require integration into the self driving cars' systems for it to actually do anything, so they would still need to cooperate. That said, this is an industry that wants to justify itself, so the burden is on them to ensure that they are _not_ a burden on existing systems. They are much better positioned to develop such a tool than individual first responder programs would be, and in the long run, it would actually be a lot CHEAPER for them to develop it themselves, since if left to police and fire departments, each of them would arrive at their own solutions, and the self-driving cars would need to adapt to ALL of them.
Down with self driving cars! Aside from the safety issues and the excuse to employee less people, it's a technology we don't need or want! Just implement mass transit, especially electric trains and trolleys.
Just back fro San Francisco visiting my son. San Francisco is not ‘teaming’ with self drive cars. It’s fantastic to see the Waymo drive past you. It’s a great tourist attraction. There is a huge waiting list to ride in one. I was there for three weeks and was too late for the waiting list. Go visit San Francisco, California. It’s one of the most beautiful cities in our world. Sun shone all the time. Visited Embarcadero. Sausalito, half moon bay. My son took us to vibrant Mission and the Mexican music was amazing. People so lovely in cafes, my son who lives in San Francisco, is learning Spanish and wonderful to hear him conversing with lovely Mexican people. Don’t down a city. Driverless cars are the future as are flying cars. Thank you SAN FRANCISCO for a wonderful time. Thank you Waymo, you are a beautiful car.
@@Clyde-2055they operate in my neighborhood in Phoenix and I ride them pretty regularly. They drive much better than most Uber drivers I’ve had. I have videos of some of my rides in them on my channel.
@@markmeachen6927 - That’s absurd … The Tesla can’t dependably navigate through a parking lot to pick up its owner (smart summons), much less drive across town to pick up a fare …
I've taken a Waymo during a business trip to San Fran. I was impressed, and I am a electrical engineer that works on embedded systems. I was not aware how advanced some of these autonomous vehicle companies have become. Tesla dominates the conversation in autonomous cars, yet they are so far behind the curve compared to these companies. I wish the public was more aware of these advancements. This story has a very negative tone, yet, the autonomous cars are probably driving far safer and more considerate than the average real driver. They will just be judged on a much higher level.
I think they should have the ability for an immediate remote human override. The cars could send their video signals to a person in an office with a simulator of the car, and they can perform any necessary actions. Of course lag and connection issues would make it dangerous for high speed or full time use, but it should be good enough to get the cars out of a pickle if needed. However, designing and implementing such a system would cost money that these companies don't want to spend.
The better solution would be to avoid the "pickles". As in, stop painting themselves into a corner so frequently where they end up stuck. There was no reason to get so close to a car that was about to park.
What an idiot for kicking the car, he doesnt see that nobody is behind the wheel? And US needs better public transport, especially in cities and places with growing population when they start building before it gets too bad.
Used to work for Cruise and they do pay well when compared to the other companies such as Google, Tesla, and Waymo, however when it comes to operations it's way too soon. It needs at least 2 decades of a track record in order to see if it will be a success to put it out there for public use.
Self Driving Cars will only work in a small controlled confined area. They will never work in a open city. We have all seen this in movies and tv shows about computers and robots...they all lack the ability to judge. They can only do what was programmed. But, they just cannot judge, which is very easy for a human being. The cannot tell right from wrong, and cannot react to an unusual situation outside of the programming. They cannot follow instructions from a policeman or fire fighter. As shown in this video....some guy was trying to backup and do a parallel park, and the self driving taxi did not understand it. A human driver would have understood it, and gave the guy room to park or went around it.
Here in dc we’ve had self driving cars since the 70s. The way we did it is we put them in separate lanes under and above ground and connected 8 together so the person supervising them can do so in person
This really seems like it's all about Cruise's software not being up to snuff and less about driverless cars as a whole. Especially when Cruise got their permit suspended but Waymo didn't.
Yeah, it does give that impression. 😕 It seems like Cruise's software may need some improvements in order to meet the standards set by regulatory authorities. It's interesting that Waymo didn't face the same permit suspension. Perhaps they have a more advanced or reliable software system. 🚗💨
It also seems like Cruise have a generally rather reckless attitude. _"Move fast and break things."_ might be a reasonable approach to web software stacks, but not human bones.
As a pedestrian in San Francisco, I breathe a sigh of relief if I see a Waymo car when I'm crossing in the crosswalk. They don't blow through stop signs, unlike many of the human drivers here. I don't have to worry about being hit by a driver that's not paying attention, because they're talking on their phone or texting. Having ridden twice in a Waymo, you can see that their situational awareness is far beyond what's possible for a human. They have a little screen in the back console that shows you their understanding of the physical space around them. At night, half way up the block, behind a tree, it will spot 5 humans walking - a human would never be able to detect that.
@@allgoo1990 - I meant what I said. The driver of the car not at fault has to take responsibility. Isn’t that why you clowns have to carry “uninsured motorist” coverage now in most states - because the government is too weak to hold guilty parties responsible? After all - it’s the American way. How many US men are paying child support for kids that aren’t even theirs because they were lied to by the kid’s mother ? You Americans aren’t too bright … The entire world is laughing at you, and you’re too dense to realize it …
Look at it on the bright side...all those taxi & Uber etc. (Driving Jobs) jobs are No longer available. We can look forward to long haul truckers loosing their jobs too. Who do we thank ??
Companies need to work together to get this working well. Create a universal framework with minimum hardware requirements that is sensor agnostic that can be modified/extended by individual companies for their specific uses and markets.
@@TheMattsem Completely removing the human element sounds like the ultimate goal. Perhaps start with AV only lanes. Ideally all AV's should communicate with each other visually/wirelessly. Integrate all emergency vehicles, including fire engines, into the AV network with the highest priority.
@TheMattsem Except Asian countries also have far better metro systems, making AVs something that fills in the gaps left by the other stuff that fills in the gaps. Only smaller Asian cities don't use subway systems, opting for very well maintained busses instead
Sounds like perhaps there needs to be some sort of data integration with emergency services and robotaxi routes. While privacy concerns will emerge from this, this would allow the robo taxi computers to avoid routes actively in use by emergency vehicles and vice versa.
AVs need to be held to a higher standard if they are saying it is increasing safety. The fact of the matter is that more vehicles on the road is not a scalable safety solution. Can you imagine how much gridlock would be induced by having a swarm of AVs descend into downtown and circle around, waiting to pickup workers for rush hour? Mass transit and more space/energy efficient transportation (bicycles) are the only scalable solutions to safer streets and more equitable transportation. The only niche I see these fulfilling in any meaningful sense is helping with the last mile of a public transportation trip or filling in the gaps late at night.
@shrimpflea What does the person going to jail? Have to do with the person living or not. Does the punishment make the pain go away the scarring? Why does someone always have to be punished when it doesn't help or change what actually happened or prevent it from happening in the future.
A human would not have pulled off to the side, though. They would have simply halted, and said pedestrian was dragged because the car pulled off to the side.
This is the best report I've seen on self driving cars. It's a new technology and regulators are definitely behind the curve just like the FAA were with small UAV's (drones). The FAA has taken them 10 years to catch up but they're still behind; in the meantime technology is improving faster than they can come up with regulations since they don't want to take any risks. I think with new technology some risk has to be tolerated until more experienced is gained. But I can understand the first responders hesitance in having their progress impeded.
@@markmeachen6927 - That’s laughable, Mark. Tesla’s FSD can’t even dependably drive itself across a parking lot to pick up its owner, much less drive across town to pick up a fare …
It's a nice idea, but that takes time as well. Possibly even longer. Imagine getting 2 factor authentication text sent to your phone to login. That's bad enough but it would probably go to a different number of someone on staff. Or never arrive, etc.
I don't understand why they didn't start in a smaller city, sure large cities you get more data a lot faster, but you probably can slowly ramp up and protect people better starting in a smaller city with less issues. Once you 80-90% that city move to the next larger city and continue your data models.
It's baffling how US cities don't try to improve public transport instead of trying to increase cars on the road
What sized city? Public transport is not as convenient as driving your own car except where congestion and parking are factors. In small-town USA, that’s not generally a problem.
In many larger cities in the US, buses - and to a lesser degree metros - are populated by drunks and thugs …
That's only true if you aren't properly staffing your trains.
Large cities like SF should not be encouraging more cars but they should be building out more metros and trains to the suburbs so I really wonder what kind of a stranglehold the car conglomerates have on big cities to prevent them from investing in public transportation.
@@Clyde-2055
Agreed. Public transport would pretty much eliminate all aspects of traffic.
Public transportation is over.
People with no alternative and poor people use public ttransit, this is taxi service.
Self driving cars are an example of a technology where 90% of the problems have been solved but the other 10% is going to take decades if at all.
The problem isn't with technology is with people. The cars are safer than humans, let the cars drive
@@alpz6295yeah that's a problem with automation in general. even the smallest amount of human intervention can really mess up your architecture
That last 10 percent is probably where most serious accidents happen too
@@taylortoggaf8543 Exactly.
I think that interaction with the guy who kicked the car underscores how many problems are left to solve in this realm.
A human driver would have intuitively understood the guy wanted to parallel park and either would have backed up or gone around him.
Many situations require understanding the intention of humans, which seems like a much harder problem to solve than recognizing lanes and obstacles.
To be fair, driving in San Francisco is usually pretty similar to that first ride anyway. As a 10-year resident of SF, being stuck behind a jerk with their hazards on every 500 feet, some thug or vagrant spitting on your car or kicking it, and feeling generally uneasy about the next block is on par.
I am not sure I can think of a more difficult city to drive in. You have to "improvise" a lot to actually get anywhere.
@@rfenton19851 most major cities are like that. Drive around downtown Chicago and you'll see the same things; coupled with taxi drivers driving like they are insane.
@@rfenton19851 Check any major city in europe... only lacks the thugs
Yep. It feels stupid to me to have SF be one of the first cities to test this new technology. It should be one of the last places in the U.S. (along with NY) to use this kind of new tech given the challenges of driving there. Obviously there is a lot of money to be earned in SF with a good AV product and a lot of the tech is worked on in the Bay Area. But a city like San Jose would probably be so much easier to test out the product compared to SF if they were going to pick a major bay area city.
Kicking and spitting? Cussing? So the AI was accepted as one of their own?😅
I think it's reasonable that emergency services should be given a "master key" so they can jump into any autonomous taxi and move it.
Excellent idea !
While that is a good idea, that still takes precious time away from the emergency responders. If anything, the vehicles should be programmed to stay clear of Emergency vehicles at all times.
@@dr_pibby That too yes. I think it's emblematic of their reckless attitude that they didn't put that near the top of their to-do list. Human drivers know to get out the way of emergency vehicles.
I was thinking more inline of using trackers and signals already installed in emergency vehicles. Not sure how much data is transfered but from what I know ambulances do send signals to traffic lights to change, so it could be used with AV to send "avoid".
@@Stratos1988 Yes. And of course it should be relatively easy just to detect sirens and certain colours of flashing light. That's what some traffic lights do.
Her "He kicked the car, he just spat on the car." Customer service "Do you feel safe?" Her "yes" this must happen alot in san fransico.
Honestly that part felt like a parody/comedy bit, she treated the guy like an NPC or something. People loathe those self-driving cars for a reason, she's a reporter, so why doesn't she at least try to talk to the guy? Instead she's basically shooting a commercial for big-tech
@@BdR76 it seems drivers there are not much better than these self driving cars. The first thing that guy should do is signaling that he wanted to park. With drivers like him, no surprise he is that stressed.
@@BdR76 I wouldn't feel safe with his behaviour and totally understand why she kept the windows up. She was critical of the ride saying it was like a student driver and that they got honked at 4 times. She basically said it wasn't ready for prime time. Doesn't sound like a commercial to me.
@@BdR76Why would talk to a disgusting person that behaves worse than an animal? What can they teach you? 😂😂
@@BdR76 yeah just roll down your window and be nice. I'm sure he'll be reasonable. OK dude
The business pressure to push these should be a giant red flag. This is about saving money paying people not making the roads safer. Public transportation would be a much bigger effect on safety.
The fire chief is one of the most reasonable public officials I've ever listened to.
What's the point? These should be cheaper because there's no driver to pay, but they're going to charge the exact same amount and pocket all the extra profit. What's the value proposition for the consumer?
People feel safer than getting in a car with a stranger.
Drivers or AVs who drive "carefully" but are also largely oblivious of road conditions and don't drive well with traffic flows may cause collateral incidents or accidents that aren't counted in the safety statistics of that driver. Such as a driver getting confused and stopping dangerously may cause another car that then veers around it to get into an unnecessary crash. So I think saying these cars are safer because of their crash statistics when they're clearly being observed as driving badly and causing traffic interruptions is probably misleading
Correct. AVs can drive very conservatively with an extremely low risk tolerance, but such a driving style may not integrate well into the current urban traffic conditions.
@@laod7192
Just a consequence of DMVs all over issuing permits to monkeys. I'd bet AVs will do extremely well in places such as Germany where the bar is just a tad bit (much) higher for drivers. They don't just hand licenses to anyone
That's true. I've driven in 20 countries in 4 continents, and have by far one of the worst driving experience in Cali.@@Demopans5990
If people start veering around other cars and performing dangerous manoeuvres to get around a car, that's their fault!
You should always be able to stop before you strike a vehicle in front of you... What you are describing is irresponsible driving.
I was recently teaching my step-son how to drive. Almost none of my tutoring was about the general rules of driving, 99% of what I was teaching him was how to be prepared for the stupid stuff people might do. As a programmer myself, I don't see how you can make a proper self driving car without having a true artificial intelligence that can literally process thoughts (like a human) on it's own. Referring to a database of similar scenarios is never going to be sufficient because people can do some pretty random things
Ideally, the problem shouldn't exist to begin with, but considering the average American driver, and them remembering half of the US driving population is worse than that...
Probably just bolt the tech onto buses. At least they run a predictable route, sometimes on dedicated lanes
Just load the database with Jacksonville drivers for a few weeks, and every situation will be covered. Or China for about 15 minutes.
@@B3Bandfor real , jax speeders go 100+ and weave in and out of traffic, no matter the vehicle
I disagree with you, driving in London expose you for very predictable behaviour, people opening door , bicycle passing too close, lines that merge, speed cameras, kids coming out of the bus and so on. In the past 3years there had been an expansion of 20MPH zone , with that speed I recon selfdriving car can get you to destination but probably will cause more traffic because it will stick to rules and be extra cautious.
@waltzsofa1602 they do understand that, but the problem is that the stupid stuff people might do is infinite, way beyond the general rules of driving and thus any standard algorithm is going to be unprepared and inefficient to respond to infinite possibilities. You really need something like general AI to replicate an appropriate response to the stupid stuff people do while driving.
Who is accepting legal responsibility for a death of a person as a result of self-driving car impeding fire or ambulance service?
It depends on what you mean by responsibility. I assume cruise was fined for this in the same way that a human driver impeding an ambulance will also gain you a fine as a human. This would not send you to jail for murder if that is what you mean.
@@arturodelarosa4394 are you saying if a faulty algorithm, sensor, camera, etc in a self-driving vehicle causes death of a person, the penalty prescribed by current law is a fine for the company that manufactured the vehicle or one operating it?
@@rok1475 The company that operates the vehicle. Not the manufacturer. Although depending on what it is, in this case night be one and the same. But it is not out of the question that if a particular sensor falls repeatedly and causes issues for Cruise, then after they take the responsibility and pay for it. They in turn might sue the manufacturer. But that is just legal action. Although in a way is cruise morally shifting the blame but not the responsibility in the eyes of the law.
Not to worry. They're also developing a robot that will be fully capable of taking legal responsibility in such instances and even be capable of serving time in prison.
😂😂@@Marmocet
What the fire chief doesn't understand is that the people who invested billions of dollars in these cars, WANT THEIR MONEY BACK. They're going to push these out whether they are ready or not.
yes yes indeed
@@doords the fire chief is not asking google or gm to shut the idea down simply delay it or make the tech more realiable
They can want what they want, but it's THEIR commercial risk. No way a public service has to bow for commercial actions. And at the end of this story also still is the courtroom where a complete company can be taken down after a lawsuit. THAT's also a reality.
The fire chief probably understands that. But they also understand that emergency services being able to get to people is and always should be more important than pushing robotaxies for the sake of investors
It would be good if more emphasis was made in the differences between the two companies. All of the issues shown and discussed in this segment involved Cruise vehicles. They're the ones sprinting out the gate, who's permit was pulled and decided to slow down and pause operations. Meanwhile, Waymo has slowly and quietly operated under the radar, without incidents, which I think says a lot. Yes, both companies operate autonomous vehicles but I think comparing the two would be like night and day.
Such bias’s waymo also has the same issues
Yep, Waymo has only killed one dog, had 2 major crashes and 18 minor fender benders. If you ignore that, it has been smooth sailing.
You miss the point, Yes Waymo is doing a lot better. But the issue is not in normal operation, but in rare cases that are not included in training data and normal operations.
Like the emergency services cases. Or just a road clossure that the system is not aware of getting stuck causing traffic jams and so on.
@@davidbeppler3032I mean... Compare that to the amounts of accidents by humans after the same amount of kilometers - I am pretty sure waymo wins in regards of the statistics.
And that at the beginning of the implementation in actually complex scenarios - give it 10 more years to develop, and we will be talking about restricting humans to drive, and that for very good reasons
@@ac0rpbgand that's the amazing thing - one accident, and it is learning data for all other automated cars. Unlike with humans, where each one has to make the same experience on their own.
Will autonom cars be perfect? Never, that's not realistic.
The goal is to be significantly better than human drivers, statistically speaking.
"One of those damn robotaxis is blocking our ambulance again. Go call the company to move the car!"
"Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line... Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line..."
Improve our existing public transport infrastructure before this useless garbage …
You talk as if they are mutually exclusive.
Govt can work on public transport infrastructure. Most of this driverless car is private sector.
You might as well shout “first improve the wall insulation in our homes before doing useless stuff like improving cell phone technology”
I am beyond confuse why anyone would honk at a driverless car. You get nothing out of it.
I'd hope driverless cars take honking as input into their system, just as a human drivers would interpret it as 'hazard', 'slow down' or 'provide extra space'. Certainly at least taking number of honks as a course-grain statistical metric
People who honk are idiots 90% of the time.
Because they can do it without consequences. Good luck acting like that in another country, hell, good luck doing it in another state.
@@ericgol7 In many countries, honking without "active danger present" is a trafic violation. (In most countries, honking is defined as warning others from DANGER. Nothing else.)
Don't worry. We can program robotaxies to honk at other cars.
I saw one of these run a red light in Houston. No joke.
so it was simulating what real drivers do. 😅
@@jackbteachingIt makes sense to me. It was trained on many experiences of real (human) drivers and if any of the drives didn't perfectly follow the rules of the road it would adopt that mindset to its driving.
Not too long ago I saw a Waymo not using its turn-single when I was behind it on the road. I'm very skeptical about this technology and it's gathering of road driving data.
@@ourfamilyaccount I agree! I also feel the newer technologies, from EVs, hybrids, to autopiloted vehicles, need to be placed or focused on use cases that maximizes benefit. For example if auto makers, or law makers focused efforts on urban use/ commutes and smaller EVs, as complimentary vehicles for suburban homes;for postal and package deliveries -that would have been a good start, logical, and likely less push-back and hostility from those folks who feel threatened that the gov't is trying to take away their ICE vehicles. So those all or nothing mandates to me are misguided and ineffective. Especially when tech is evolving, to make such mandates that by xxxx year we should have xx% of EVs on the road takes away the potential of better technologies competing in this space. EV pickups make zero sense. We don't need these tremendously heavly, super fast trucks as everyday vehicles, they have short range when doing 'truck stuff' like towing, I feel hybrids, using smaller battery packs, less weight, to increase efficiency and per tank range would have been a great solution. Anyways, my soapbox...
16:58 - Cruise CEO goes "I think we are doing a great job there..." as they're showing a clip of their vehicle straddling between 2 lanes LOL.
I bet you *think* a lot of things, bro...
She was in the car for 5 minutes. Got kicked, spat on, and honked at three times, almost got in an accident and had to calk for help. Crazy.
USA !!!! Nothing new here !
@@supa3ek I live in the USA and no one's kicked my car or spit it on, interesting 🤔
Well it doesn’t happen if your only neighbours are bears in the forest.
I think they paid that guy to do that
Now in many cities in China like Shenzhen, Wuhan, Beijing and Shanghai, there are lots of self-driving taxis already (called 萝卜快跑), welcome to have a try and the experience is much better than this one. Also it's very very cheap (about $0.5 for 10km)
Self-driving car "robo-taxis" are a _"solution"_ in search of a problem. 🙄
Rideshare driver here. Paying us is the problem for their bottom line. YW
The problem is too many employed people in America. Robo-taxis will help fix all that.
Self driving shuttles would be better than self driving cars
Shuttles? Like a tram or bus?
This technology can easily be moved to bigger cars, trucks, buses etc. Why risk the lives of a shuttle full of people, when you can test it with 2-3 passengers
Imagine having a self driving taxi take someone directly into an active bank robbery. It just parks right in front of the getaway car…
AI can sense trouble
A human driven taxi could do the same thing unless you’re really paying attention.
How often to banks get robbed where you live?
Chat GPT could spot the robbery and decide to stay away from it very well. So it's not far future.
@@XOPOIIIO chatgpt would say that the bank robbers aren't felons, just like it said that jeffrey epstein wasn't a felon until a few months ago.
Displacing $15 billion annually and concentrating that profit to a few. And you wonder why homelessness is increasing.
I Love that Deirdra is doing field reporting now! Seeing her on this report is a pleasant surprise! Can't wait to see you on the next one, Deirdra! 👍🏾👍🏾
Only way self-driving cars would really work is to make it 100% self-driving, not one human behind any wheel anywhere. The chances of that ever happening is... ZERO. TONS of people would refuse to let it happen. And I don't mean just gearheads.
and public transportation sucks. In regards to transporting one's self, just like in almost anything, the best way to get the job done the way you want it is to do it yourself.
“Chances of that happening is zero”
There was a time smartphones were expensive and lot of people said - “I don’t need all that in a phone. I just use it to make phone calls”. Now all those people have e smartphones.
Right now the technology is improving. Once it’s extremely safe, more and more use cases of it will show up (just like the concept of installing apps on phones), and people will switch.
Time horizon for this maybe longer than what it was for smartphones, but it will happen.
This aged like milk
Nobody else thought that the guy arguing with the autonomous car was pure comedy!
That could have ended badly! Thanks for story&stay safe!
I'm surprised a man wearing a purse acted so aggressively 😭😉
Why?
Its that time of the month...
The ability to take orders from a Cop, Firefighter, or Paramedic is required for a driver. It's technically a requirement for everyone in a country regardless of whether or not they are driving. Self-driving cars will probably need full AI so they can understand orders from Emergency Personnel.
@@KeeperRL_official_channel In the video, that didn't work.
Why would he even kick the car? WTF.
Great job by Deirdre to show the pros and cons! I think the companies need to have people working 24/7 with the city FD/PD so that if/when these issues come up, it's a quick resolution because there is someone available from Waymo or Cruise to handle it and not have to call a toll free number and explain it all. Yes, there is a cost with that, but it will quickly reduce these stupid issues of the car "getting confused". Those things also need to be addressed by the companies involved.
When the car gets "confused" it should just quickly drop out of autonomous mode and go into remote control mode, and someone in a 24 hr call center somewhere else can immediately remotely control the car away from the situation. Why is this so hard?
Absolutely! 😊 Deirdre did an incredible job highlighting the pros and cons of the situation.
What's the point of hiring more for that? The point is to severely limit the amount of people you can hire to maximise the profits of automation. The people they hire for dispute resolution probably get paid more than the Taxi or Uber drivers.
Just like how they turn off traffic lights in real time as a fire truck meets its destination.
All of these cars are non-Tesla, Waymo cars. Keep that in mind.
What could go wrong? Driverless vehicles that weigh tons…
I would like to know what’s the benefit in this? Improved service? A better experience? No, my guess would be: profits. Forget the public: profits. And these companies are so well vested that they will fight relentlessly to avoid financial responsibility.
Who allowed this? Money under the table?
🤷🏻♂️
Yes, but also significantly lowers the cost of the transport service, right now companies will opt to pocket those savings, but with competition in time those savings will come to your pocket. The other thing they offer is increased safety of our streets. A very significant increase in safety. Considering car crashes are responsible 46k deaths a year in the US alone, you can see how that is important. Not to mention the savings on property damage, etc.
Having worked for Waymo under a temporary contract back in 2018, I can say the tech and software has come so very far. I now use it on the regular, and have had many friends and family ride along with, for what almost always seems like a quiet smooth ride. Consider the manuever @7:56, which is no easy feat. I can't explain what's going on with Cruise but Waymo has it figured out.
very far my ass
Waymo is a child on training wheels. Tesla FSD is going to wipe Waymo off the map eventually. It actually interprets what it sees vs. what is mapped.
It would be interesting to see how autonomous vehicle compare not to the average driver, but to professional drivers. Since this technology is supposed to be used as taxis, it should be compared to human operated taxis. It's good to know that robo-taxis experience 75% less collisions than the average driver (whatever that is), but I want to know how do they compare with human-driven taxis in the same operation areas.
I bet Tesla fanboys hate you …
Taxi drivers are about as shocking as these autonomous vehicles. It would probably pass that test easily.
word is still out on whether people who drive for a living crash less or more than an average driver. I couldn't find anything conclusive stating either way. If the tech is better than your average driver by an obvious margin, it's probably better than a professional driver too.
Probably a lot better. Taxi drivers are usually pretty bad since they are incentivized to drive fast and aggressively.
My friend recently began work at Cruise
I feel bad for him because the CEO sounds like a chucklehead
I hope he doesn’t get laid off
I’ve had both Cruise and Waymo driverless vehicles do some crazy maneuvers in front of me
One made a left in front of active traffic (no protected left)
Another got stuck at a passenger crossing signal
All things humans are also guilty of. What's the big deal?
The only human I can think of getting stuck in a pedestrian crossing is Rain Man.
Who doesnt sound like a chucklehead these days in the bay area. It's the culture here.
Probably making hundreds of thousands with stock options.
@Harcorwrestler So true. An autonomous vehicle cannot give a visually impaired person the attention they need during the ride. As a rideshare driver, I always make sure to properly accommodate riders with disabilities. Everyone, please stop basing your disdain for any and every rideshare driver on the actions of a few in number disrespectful drivers.
I do as well but to be fair, disabled pax are like .02% of my rides.
It‘s actually hella funny to see people road rage against driverless cars. Tells a lot about their intellect 😂
You can determine his intellect just by looking at him …
Really , that's your thinking..my thinking was his dealt with this self driving joke before.. The guy didn't look for no driver so who's the idiots. You!!!
And it dosent matter whether there's a driver or not, damaged panel is a damaged auto panel..And at least you won't get shoot by some americian loon!!!.
Got an angry black dude trying fight an inanimate object. 😂
Not a mess at all Waymo is awesome
Way back in July, I sent Cruise a video and filled two online complaints about what i witnessed in regards to their vehicles and a problem i know would turn into sometime getting hurt if not corrected immediately. They promised me in their response emails. I'm a professional driver, Class A with Class B passenger endorsement. Drove big rigs across the country, and city bus in upstairs New York. I drive Uber in SF. A month goes by and i notice the problem still persists. I contact them again. Then i see that they're pulling all of their vehicles off the road. I offered to train their Cruise trainers FOR FREE. I was ignored. Waymo hasn't had these problems. The big issue i saw was that when people are in the crosswalk, the Cruise vehicle would pull to within a foot of the pedestrian, wheels turned and aimed right at them. If a vehicle hits that Cruise from behind, the pedestrian is going to get hit. I saw this behavior every day so day from their vehicles. Each individual vehicle is trained by a person, and I've seen the trainers making bad decisions, and i see exactly why the vehicles act the way they do. It's not the technology, because Waymo doesn't have these problems. It seemed that Cruise care more about hiring issue that knew the city, than they did prior that would drive correctly when training the vehicles. All they needed were people that knows the rules of the road and that you cannot rush pedestrians and you cannot sin your vehicles towards them. In addition, they need street supervisors to keep an eye on both the vehicles, and trainers. Now they pulled all of their passenger services until further notice. I could have saved them time and money. They were too busy counting the pennies, that they ended up losing the dollars.
Jeez, the idea of vehicles being that aggressive around pedestrians is horrifying. I am not comfortable with a car stopping within 2 YARDS of me. I would feel like I was going to be hit every single time. That also makes me trust them less when people are crossing anywhere other than a crosswalk. Would they even try to stop before it is too late?
In drivers Ed they told us to never turn the wheels to turn if we’re stopped, wait to do it when you can start moving. I’m surprised they aren’t programmed that way.
probably because they can't recognize the human in time. prolly a sensor problem because it has to distinguish people walking on the side walk and people crossing the sidewalk.
The cars' behavior are not "trained" individually. They are mostly designed and programmed, though researchers have been exploring the ideas of vehicles imitating human drivers behavior but still the "training" or imitation is done "collectively". You might have confused a remote vehicle operator who monitors and occasionally takes over vehicle control as a "trainer". The performance disparity between Waymo and Cruise indeed shows a safety culture issue within certain companies.
Why are you offering free labor to a company that has millions of investors money? … training people for free is crazy
Who is asking for this technology exactly? Can we please just perfect the automatic sink, soap, and towel-dispenser situation in every bathroom everywhere first?
the tech lobbyists
I’m not gonna lie, as a blind person it really would be nice if this was perfected as well. Just imagining being able to drive not having to worry about certain things. I could go wherever I wanted on my own and that would be amazing to me. Yes I could take an Uber or a lift, but I am a female and so sometimes it can be a little scary, so yes a self driving car would be absolutely amazing. But I understand that there are a lot of issues with it and I honestly think that these things should be fixed. They shouldn’t be focusing on rolling them out so fast but yes, I also agree. Automatic soap dispenser should absolutely be worked on as well.
The self driving is just one part of the equation. Good luck managing a nationwide fleet of self driving cars. All those repairs, maintenance, and cleaning every day, hell, every couple hours.
Imagine how the general public will trash and abuse these cars. They are about to find out just how hard the cab business is.
Right now it seems that way. But people will adapt, and technology will continue to improve. What we have today seemed inconceivable 20 years ago.
Here's why Waymo and Cruise will lose in SF. No one outside of the CEOs are fighting for them to stay. The average citizen couldn't care less if the stay or go. They really don't add anything to the city other than controversy. No one will miss them.
15:57 All you need to know to decide if you want AVs on your city is this. (this happens to be a cruise stat) but if you can confirm that the numbers are anywhere near to this. You would be a fool to stop those vehicles from using the roads. Across the US every year 46k people die in car crashes, if cruise data is right that means potentially 30k lives saved a year. To put that in perspective that is 10 times more people than those who died in 9/11. If you could prevent a 10th of that number (that is literally cruise inflating their stats by an entire order orden of magnitud -10x) it would be the equivalent of stopping 9/11 every year. I do not know what fool would sign off on a regulation that stops them from rolling out and sleep well at night. This reminds me of the foolishness / stubbornness at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns. People easily lose sight of the big picture, aided by the media.
Every elevator has a switch for the fire rescue to take over in emergency.
Apparently it is too difficult for the geniuses working on the self-driving technology to come up with a similar system for robotaxis.
The best they could come up with is 1-800 number for the emergency to call, in a situation where every second counts…
Not like it would've even mattered in this situation. The car was dragging the person long before anyone thought to call fire rescue people.
@@alexCh-ln2gw there were several situations described in this video.
If the self driving car stops and blocks the traffic, having an override switch could help.
It would not do much for a stupid algorithm for handling a collision that programmers without any knowledge or experience in collision analysis came up with.
0:40 Yep of course, usual suspect. Not surprised.
Robotaxis may be safer than human-driven ones for routine and anticipated scenarios, but right now they are at a loss when it comes to unusual situations.
Right.
Human behavior is unpredictable
I'll take it. Unusual situations are rare and the companies like Waymo will focus on making them even more so. This is the true power of automating driving -- we can treat problems like we treat aircraft problems and engineer them out of existence.
Yeah but that's fine. Because by definition unusual situations don't happen very often. So by enlarge they are still an improvement in all fronts, including safety. You ban them from the road and how do you expect them to get better? This is a technology that needs to be thrown in the pool so it learns to swim, even if it caused more damage than humans at the beginning it would be worth it on the long run. But it doesn't, it's already safer, by quite a big margin. This is as the CEO correctly called it: "sensational" news.
@@arturodelarosa4394city streets shouldn't be proving grounds
@@mrdeebo313 Why not? and more importantly, how else are you going to test this? They had their controlled environment test, then they moved to having human driver supervisors. now we are here: when they need real world, non-supervised experience. Let's be clear about this: this has been going on for almost a decade, you cannot say we rushed this, it has been done way too carefully if you ask me. And the consequences are for the most part, they are inconveniencing the public but they are still statistically safer than human drivers. By a huge 70% margin of safety. Come on! What else do you want? Perfection? I say letting perfect getting in the way of good enough is a mistake. Specially when we are talking about a technology with the potential to save thirty thousand lives a year, in the US alone. It would be like withholding the covid vaccine for another decade because some people experienced arm pain.
Unpopular opinion: Technical problems aside, you can't have high tech around low people.. 0:55 spitting and kicking, this is ridiculous. Try this in a place like Tokyo, Zürich, Singapur.. not in a drug infested city full with human feces all around (if you've ever been to SF you know what I'm talking about)
Replacing real divers with unregulated technology that operates above the laws of the land without regard to emergency vehicles is premature and irresponsible. These vehicles should not be in operation in big cities where emergencies are frequent. There is a higher risk of violating the laws, and no one gets a ticket. A driver operated car would be penalized for violating a law. How does the driverless cars get a drivers license? Did the go to the DMV and take a test? How is it that technology doesn’t have to follow the laws especially in regards to safety. The aeronautics industry is the safest industry for transportation. Wouldn’t it make sense to create a autonomous airplanes first? But who would ride a plane without a pilot. The world is not ready for these vehicles in big cities. Take them to the real areas and make them pass the DMV test before putting them on the road. What I’m seeing here is money over safety. The owners and investors of these firms are more interested in profit that follow the laws and the safety of our civilians. They need to slllllllooooooowwwwww down!
Would love to see one of these autonomous cars drive in a snow storm ☃️
There is a reason they chose California first. One of tge sunniest places on earth
unless they have 4wheel drive they will get stuck
@@ashleyshim2078It's much worse than that, skidding around slippery corners, failing to accellerate sufficiently to get through a patch of snow, failing to drive in lanes appropriately when lines are not visible, or the worst case scenario: confusing snowflakes for obstacles or failing to detect obstacles appropriately due to interference in the images and sensor by snowflakes.
@@agilemind6241or even a rainstorm.
I was thinking the same thing. Besides the reduced visibility, the cameras & sensors will be covered with a randomly changing layer of muck. Us humans have to keep moving our head around to see through the snow-covered windshield. Cameras & sensors are stationary. I expect that AI can deal with the slipperiness reasonably well, but not the navigation.
Waymo uses proprietary technology that allows for human personnel to remotely control the vehicles in the rare case that the automated system needs help.
Thanks for that. I was about to ask about remote driving.
Given that human intervention is needed every 5 miles it seems a stretch to call this autonomous driving.
This feature is what keeps Waymo moving through all the hurdles of SF while Cruise gets stuck behind a cone in the road causing mass traffic buildup.
Something like a driver? So they need a driver to control a self driving car?
@@NyanyiCpopp
Build proper public transit instead of transport gimicks?
America: Impossible
It is actually happening in many major US cities. New bikes lanes, new bus routes, and (attempts) at metros/trains. I say attempts because the politicians are too stupid to make it work.
Public transport does not work everytime and everywhere. It cant do point to point transportation and it doesnt work for everyone everytime
Why self driving companies for the failure of government? How are they stopping you from building public transport. Plus even in a cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong people own cars and drive.
you are the embodiment of the joke i wrote earlier:
they should uses buses instead
they are 10 times heavier per axle then a car so they destroy the road 10 000times faster then cars (the generlized fourth power law)
and electric buses use over 200kwh/100 compared to 10kwh/100km for cars in the city
and thanks to buses we can be extremely limited when it comes to where we can travel, how much stuff you can take with you and of course while obeying strict timetables
also buses are great at spreading viruses
i cant wait for my daddy government to "free" me from my car by outpricing me out of car ownership, because the 500$ I paid for my old japanese car from the 90s really ruined me financially, and all the oil changes that take me like 10minutes that I have to do every 6months are really unbearable...
I dream about a world where noone is allowed to own a car (ofc we would still have to pay taxes for road infrastructure so the semi trucks can drive around, business funtion, and all the services reach you)
And we would have to pay even more then before because all the new buses that replaced cars would do way more road damage (the generalized fourth power law) and the drivers who paid for roads (50% tax in fuel, 10$ per h parkings=87k per year for a 2x5m patch of asphalt, etc.) before are now gone
and omg, dont get me started about my single family house with my private pool, if I didnt own a car I would finally have a great excuse to live in a small flat apartment where I can hear my neighbour's fart.
You don’t understand how our cities are laid out at all, you sound ignorant. Cars are freedom, public transport works in limited places
Im a black American ride share driver in Nashville. This car don't need to come to Nashville. Im gone do what I gotta do to not let an outsider take my job or money.
You’ll still have a job … It’s unlikely that companies will deploy their robotaxis to the ghetto …
@@skkedys1t36 I'm just talking but this wouldn't work in Nashville for a million reasons. Cost of living too high for a lot of people and someone will try to get hurt by it for an easy payday.
Humans' mistakes and poor behaviors perhaps cause more delays, accidents, injuries and deaths and self-driving cars
Beta testing with human lives
Don't worry the only ones getting hurt are human beings, no corporations were harmed in the production of this technology 😂
Zero possibility I’ll be getting into one of these anytime soon (without a backup driver). I and every human driver I know has a self-preservation instinct. These vehicles have none and therefore I have no confidence in their ability to react in a difficult or dangerous situation. My self preservation instinct is creaming “stay away” !
Taxi drivers have the instinct to go fast, drop you off fast and make more money fast. I am not sure I want that kind of instinct.
Emergency crews should be able to move robotaxis out of way remotely
No
indeed it could be done with some sort of predictive geo-fencing, making the vehicles pull over in advance. the destination of the firetruck is also known in advance so just fit a GPS in it and it can be done remotely. National standards and V2V communication would help in this sense, so that all fire emergency vehicles are fitted with the same system and can communicate with the same protocols.
The problem with Waymo’s approach is scaleability. As in it won’t scale. Their vehicles cost $150,000 a pop and are only trained on one small geofenced area of San Francisco. That vehicle will simply not operate in any other part of San Francisco, let alone another city. Bringing new vehicles online is an involved, cumbersome, expensive headache. It’s simply difficult to see any road to profitability for them.
I agree. Just waiting to see the maintenance cost.
why do I have to sit in the back seat when there is a lot more leg room in the front seats? why doesn't it have a detachable steering wheel?
Humans are unpredictable. There are rules but humans don't really follow rules. No matter how hard the computer tries to dodge and drive politely, there'll always be things that programmers cannot consider or think about. It's just human nature. Also machines have marginal errors, and sensors could be malfunctioning at a moment. These people want to make self-driving cars as safe as heaven, and that will not happen if you don't purge all humans and pets out of the environment and leave ONLY machines on the road.
I would correct real world is unpredictable not merely humans in it. Animals can do unpredictable things, are we going to expect teaching moose, dogs, cats and birds to follow traffic rules? All the other animals?
Weather can do unpredictable things. Wind blown tree blocking the road. Heavy rain turning road to mud. Wind blowing plastic bag or other light debris along the road. Flood has caused a new bit of road that has never previously flooded to flood out.
Snow storm causing white out conditions.
Humans are mean and don't follow rules is cop out to the bigger problem..... real world will always have chaotic and unpredictable things to it. System operating in it has to be able to handle encountering new things it has never encountered.
That is why autonomous robots can easily work in a ware house, but have real problems on city streets. Unexpected things don't happen in warehouse, it is controlled environment. City Street will never be a fully controlled environment.
Humans generally have very little issue interpreting the intentions of other human drivers, so the problem is the tech.
Generally speaking, these cars are not "programmed". They use "machine learning" to study thousands of hours of recordings, and emulate competent human drivers.
Also, although sensors can output errors, you typically have multiple redundant sensors, so you can employ error correction. This gives vastly more detailed and reliable information than the human eye.
So although progress will be gradual, I don't think there's any reason for the technology to plateau. I think it's inevitable that one day, automated vehicles will surpass human drivers.
I would not lie about feeling safe when someone is kicking and spitting on the car I was in!!
From what i hear this is not uncommon on SF
Safer inside the car than out.
Can we just have decent public transit please lol
only if you live outside north america
No. See the beauty of private companies doing this research for profitable private transportation, the tax payer doesnt need to pay a penny
Sorry but N. America unfortunately has repeatedly failed at having decent public transit despite throwing hundreds of millions of dollars per year at it non-stop. The culture, climate, high labor cost and low urban density makes N. American public transit an inefficient money pit.
ruclips.net/video/0nsPGMoXqX0/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/-ZDZtBRTyeI/видео.html
AV taxis (all EVs of course) are the way to go because it uses shared infrastructure and provides key door-to-door service wherever you are and wherever you're going. Most N. American transit systems are built on a hub-and-spoke model (downtown hub + suburb spokes) which makes traversing between sub-urban spokes so much inefficient with long travel times.
Private companies are mostly footing the bill for the AV taxi R&D too.
No not like other parts of the world. Public transit in US won't get better because of what type of people also ride on it. It often gets smelly and filthy and cleaners are hard to keep pace. Yeah it's not a big group and most people are doing great. But that tiny 5% can easily ruin it for all. I really hope public transit become privately operated, but personnel and facilities be federal properties. Any damage to stations, trains, buses and people get charged as damaging federal properties and get those ppl locked up forever.
No not like other parts of the world. Public transit in US won't get better because of what type of people also ride on it. It often gets smelly and filthy and cleaners are hard to keep pace. Yeah it's not a big group and most people are doing great. But that tiny 5% with behavioral and mental issues can easily ruin it for all. I really hope public transit become privately operated, but personnel and facilities be federal properties. Any damage to stations, trains, buses and people get charged as damaging federal properties and get those ppl locked up forever.
just ban them! its ridiculous
After that we should ban smartphones too. And then ban Internet too.
Totally unsafe.
Isn't it possible to have a few people always on call to remotely control the vehicle when it's experiencing technical difficulties that requires a human driver? That way you fix the 'rare' occurrences that these vehicles run into due to not having human intellect
A family member of mine works for waymo, and they can log into a car and controll it when an issue happens. But the complaint here is how long it takes to get that person to do so. The ambulance argument says 1 minute is too much.
Ah I see, it should be possible to improve the response times though 🤔like if you have maybe 1 person to monitor 25 cars since these occurrences are rare. The passenger can just hit an emergency button to let the person in monitoring that vehicle to take it over. Another way to improve speed for emergency vehicles is to give those government agencies the ability to see all driverless cars currently on the road so they can either alert the people monitoring the cars of their route or change their route if they can. Of course this would only be a temporary solution since someday in the future most if not all cars might be driverless but by then emergency vehicles and driverless vehicles should be advanced enough to communicate with each other and all vehicles on the emergency route would be notified a few minutes before the emergency vehicle even gets close to the driverless vehicle
That seems reasonable, what is not reasonable is banning them off the road.@@phantasyphotography3813
I just spoke to them yesterday at a career fair. They said the biggest obstacle was their vans don't have any steering wheels. The government is giving them beef on that aspect.
But they allow handicapped people to be able to have mobility. This will be normal in about 50 years. Everything that was crazy at first is normal now such as a car, a phone, internet, etc.
@luke5100 We might have to up the driving age to make the public safe from each other or stricter driving tests.
i hope much sooner than that. what a mobility boon for seniors!
@@davek1943 Yep!
Not sure how a human operator can move the car in case of an emergency. Maybe they have a controller built in?
wait until you find out about mobility buses
I am so glad that driverless cars are becoming a reality. I am also so glad that they aren't testing them here.
I’m ready to start using the Waymo service now. I think they are doing a fantastic job …
I have no cofidence in GM nor any of their subsidiaries as a software company and certainly not as an AI company. The company is ran from top to bottom by MBAs and lawyers and not by engineers. When an innovative startup like Cruise is acquired by GM, the first thing the engineers do is cash out and LEAVE to greener pastures populated by like-minded engineers. This is why I am not surprised by Cruise's downfall in recent months. Cruise is doomed. And since GM has not yet made a profit on any of its EVs sold, GM is doomed as well once demaind for ICE and hybrids die off.
Bad drivers who don’t follow rules or orderly driving are a problem for autonomously driving vehicles. That jerk spitting and kicking a machine to get a result is prime evidence of the ididiocy that permeates our society.
After seeing that man kick the car I'd rather not visit San Fransisco at all.
boohoo someone kicked a rental car 😭😭
It would make sense for police and fire team dispatch to have access to a map where they can just click to block off various roads as needed to cause these cars to avoid getting in the way. If a fire is happening, they can just block off the nearby roads.
That shouldn't be the responsibility of police and fire.
@@mrdeebo313 Maybe it could be, but it would still require integration into the self driving cars' systems for it to actually do anything, so they would still need to cooperate. That said, this is an industry that wants to justify itself, so the burden is on them to ensure that they are _not_ a burden on existing systems. They are much better positioned to develop such a tool than individual first responder programs would be, and in the long run, it would actually be a lot CHEAPER for them to develop it themselves, since if left to police and fire departments, each of them would arrive at their own solutions, and the self-driving cars would need to adapt to ALL of them.
Down with self driving cars! Aside from the safety issues and the excuse to employee less people, it's a technology we don't need or want! Just implement mass transit, especially electric trains and trolleys.
It amazes me that they would give permission for this in the first place.
Just back fro San Francisco visiting my son. San Francisco is not ‘teaming’ with self drive cars. It’s fantastic to see the Waymo drive past you. It’s a great tourist attraction. There is a huge waiting list to ride in one. I was there for three weeks and was too late for the waiting list. Go visit San Francisco, California. It’s one of the most beautiful cities in our world. Sun shone all the time. Visited Embarcadero. Sausalito, half moon bay. My son took us to vibrant Mission and the Mexican music was amazing. People so lovely in cafes, my son who lives in San Francisco, is learning Spanish and wonderful to hear him conversing with lovely Mexican people. Don’t down a city. Driverless cars are the future as are flying cars. Thank you SAN FRANCISCO for a wonderful time. Thank you Waymo, you are a beautiful car.
I was following a Waymo car around the other day. It was crazy how confident it was driving! Better then most humans I would say!
The Waymos are impressive … I’d certainly like to try one.
@@Clyde-2055they operate in my neighborhood in Phoenix and I ride them pretty regularly. They drive much better than most Uber drivers I’ve had. I have videos of some of my rides in them on my channel.
And definitely worse than TESLA’s FSD.
@@markmeachen6927 - That’s absurd … The Tesla can’t dependably navigate through a parking lot to pick up its owner (smart summons), much less drive across town to pick up a fare …
@@markmeachen6927 by what metric?
Interesting that these companies don’t choose smaller markets first before jumping into big cities.
I agree. My guess is no one would use them if it was a small city. They have to deploy them in tech cities for now
Bigger equals more data
Who kicks and spits on a car with live passenger(s) and no driver? Animals, that's who.
SF has no shortage of such animals …
Oh that was nothing. You should visit San Francisco some time.
I've taken a Waymo during a business trip to San Fran. I was impressed, and I am a electrical engineer that works on embedded systems. I was not aware how advanced some of these autonomous vehicle companies have become. Tesla dominates the conversation in autonomous cars, yet they are so far behind the curve compared to these companies. I wish the public was more aware of these advancements.
This story has a very negative tone, yet, the autonomous cars are probably driving far safer and more considerate than the average real driver. They will just be judged on a much higher level.
Judging from videos, the Waymo is much more advanced than the Cruise system.
I’m actually eager to give Waymo a try.
I think they should have the ability for an immediate remote human override. The cars could send their video signals to a person in an office with a simulator of the car, and they can perform any necessary actions. Of course lag and connection issues would make it dangerous for high speed or full time use, but it should be good enough to get the cars out of a pickle if needed.
However, designing and implementing such a system would cost money that these companies don't want to spend.
After all, investing in the development of such a system can lead to even safer autonomous vehicles on our roads in the future! 🌟🛣
The better solution would be to avoid the "pickles". As in, stop painting themselves into a corner so frequently where they end up stuck. There was no reason to get so close to a car that was about to park.
IIRC they do that already
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened when it blocked the guy parking. He triggered the manual override by kicking it.
Waymo already does.
What an idiot for kicking the car, he doesnt see that nobody is behind the wheel?
And US needs better public transport, especially in cities and places with growing population when they start building before it gets too bad.
If it was infront of your parking sport, of course you would.
Used to work for Cruise and they do pay well when compared to the other companies such as Google, Tesla, and Waymo, however when it comes to operations it's way too soon. It needs at least 2 decades of a track record in order to see if it will be a success to put it out there for public use.
Let's hope Cruise can continue to grow and prove themselves in the long run! 🚗💨
Self Driving Cars will only work in a small controlled confined area. They will never work in a open city. We have all seen this in movies and tv shows about computers and robots...they all lack the ability to judge. They can only do what was programmed. But, they just cannot judge, which is very easy for a human being. The cannot tell right from wrong, and cannot react to an unusual situation outside of the programming. They cannot follow instructions from a policeman or fire fighter. As shown in this video....some guy was trying to backup and do a parallel park, and the self driving taxi did not understand it. A human driver would have understood it, and gave the guy room to park or went around it.
Here in dc we’ve had self driving cars since the 70s. The way we did it is we put them in separate lanes under and above ground and connected 8 together so the person supervising them can do so in person
But over there in San Francisco, you will find a drug addicted sitting next to you in that “self driving car”
This really seems like it's all about Cruise's software not being up to snuff and less about driverless cars as a whole. Especially when Cruise got their permit suspended but Waymo didn't.
Yeah, it does give that impression. 😕 It seems like Cruise's software may need some improvements in order to meet the standards set by regulatory authorities. It's interesting that Waymo didn't face the same permit suspension. Perhaps they have a more advanced or reliable software system. 🚗💨
It also seems like Cruise have a generally rather reckless attitude. _"Move fast and break things."_ might be a reasonable approach to web software stacks, but not human bones.
People like him are the reason San Francisco is a hellhole
As a pedestrian in San Francisco, I breathe a sigh of relief if I see a Waymo car when I'm crossing in the crosswalk. They don't blow through stop signs, unlike many of the human drivers here. I don't have to worry about being hit by a driver that's not paying attention, because they're talking on their phone or texting.
Having ridden twice in a Waymo, you can see that their situational awareness is far beyond what's possible for a human. They have a little screen in the back console that shows you their understanding of the physical space around them. At night, half way up the block, behind a tree, it will spot 5 humans walking - a human would never be able to detect that.
👍
Perceiving the environment and making good judgment calls reliably based on that are two different things.
Who are going to take responsibility when the taxi causes an accident?
The driver of the other car …
@@Clyde-2055
"The driver of the other car …"
==
Who is it?
It's "self-driving".
Are you illiterate?
@@allgoo1990 - I meant what I said. The driver of the car not at fault has to take responsibility. Isn’t that why you clowns have to carry “uninsured motorist” coverage now in most states - because the government is too weak to hold guilty parties responsible?
After all - it’s the American way. How many US men are paying child support for kids that aren’t even theirs because they were lied to by the kid’s mother ?
You Americans aren’t too bright … The entire world is laughing at you, and you’re too dense to realize it …
Look at it on the bright side...all those taxi & Uber etc. (Driving Jobs) jobs are No longer available. We can look forward to long haul truckers loosing their jobs too. Who do we thank ??
Mr spitter should have his drivers license revoked. This kind of behavior will escalate. He is a ticking bomb.
In San Francisco, he’s considered an upstanding citizen …
Companies need to work together to get this working well. Create a universal framework with minimum hardware requirements that is sensor agnostic that can be modified/extended by individual companies for their specific uses and markets.
There is simply social signals in driving and machine cannot copy it if this is going to work you need to remove all the human element in the equation
@@TheMattsem Completely removing the human element sounds like the ultimate goal. Perhaps start with AV only lanes. Ideally all AV's should communicate with each other visually/wirelessly. Integrate all emergency vehicles, including fire engines, into the AV network with the highest priority.
@@Say-Hello I agree but I don't think this is going to work in America I think we all know why maybe it will work with the three big Asian countries
@@TheMattsemwhat is the “we all know why” ?
@TheMattsem
Except Asian countries also have far better metro systems, making AVs something that fills in the gaps left by the other stuff that fills in the gaps.
Only smaller Asian cities don't use subway systems, opting for very well maintained busses instead
I liked the crackhead fighting the driverless car. Also, what kind of idiot honks a robot taxi?
12:12 is this true? Tesla publishes their numbers and they are currently 10x worse than human drivers.
Sounds like perhaps there needs to be some sort of data integration with emergency services and robotaxi routes. While privacy concerns will emerge from this, this would allow the robo taxi computers to avoid routes actively in use by emergency vehicles and vice versa.
That's a great point! 🤔 Integrating data from emergency services with robotaxi routes could definitely help improve efficiency and safety. 🚑🚒
To be fair, even with a human driver, that Pedestrian might have gotten hit and dragged
AVs need to be held to a higher standard if they are saying it is increasing safety. The fact of the matter is that more vehicles on the road is not a scalable safety solution. Can you imagine how much gridlock would be induced by having a swarm of AVs descend into downtown and circle around, waiting to pickup workers for rush hour? Mass transit and more space/energy efficient transportation (bicycles) are the only scalable solutions to safer streets and more equitable transportation. The only niche I see these fulfilling in any meaningful sense is helping with the last mile of a public transportation trip or filling in the gaps late at night.
Yes but with a human driver they can be punished. Who is responiible when a robo-car does it. Does the company go to jail?
@shrimpflea What does the person going to jail? Have to do with the person living or not. Does the punishment make the pain go away the scarring?
Why does someone always have to be punished when it doesn't help or change what actually happened or prevent it from happening in the future.
A human would not have pulled off to the side, though. They would have simply halted, and said pedestrian was dragged because the car pulled off to the side.
@unconventionalideas5683 you know you're right a human has never drag a pedestrian on accident or on purpose. It's impossible.
This is the best report I've seen on self driving cars. It's a new technology and regulators are definitely behind the curve just like the FAA were with small UAV's (drones). The FAA has taken them 10 years to catch up but they're still behind; in the meantime technology is improving faster than they can come up with regulations since they don't want to take any risks. I think with new technology some risk has to be tolerated until more experienced is gained. But I can understand the first responders hesitance in having their progress impeded.
Waymo self-driven. FSD is better, yet no one is mentioning it. So I am.
@@markmeachen6927 - That’s laughable, Mark. Tesla’s FSD can’t even dependably drive itself across a parking lot to pick up its owner, much less drive across town to pick up a fare …
If this robocar kills somebody who is going to jail?
That's the point. It's not about safety. It's about money.
Kyle Vogt …
San Francisco needs Dirty Harry instead of Cruise & Waymo.
Give police and firefighters an emergency override to manually drive the car out of the way if it is causing problems
Back doors can be hacked. Just something to think about
It's a nice idea, but that takes time as well. Possibly even longer. Imagine getting 2 factor authentication text sent to your phone to login. That's bad enough but it would probably go to a different number of someone on staff. Or never arrive, etc.
I don't understand why they didn't start in a smaller city, sure large cities you get more data a lot faster, but you probably can slowly ramp up and protect people better starting in a smaller city with less issues. Once you 80-90% that city move to the next larger city and continue your data models.
The explanation I heard was they wanted a difficult & large city to do the initial testing in. People also use taxis a lot more in big cities.
more data collection, likely.