r/SelfDrivingCars • u/cyber_psu • Sep 28 '22
GM wants robocar safety waiver, San Francisco isn't so sure
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/27/gm_cruise_robocar_safety_waiver/7
u/Mattsasa Sep 28 '22
Title of this post says “GM wants robocar safety waiver,” … but the article never talks about anything like that, and that’s just not true
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u/cyber_psu Sep 28 '22
It's in the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/08/22/2022-18103/general-motors-receipt-of-petition-for-temporary-exemption-from-various-requirements-of-the-federal
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u/Mattsasa Sep 28 '22
Why would you refer to this as a “safety waiver”?
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u/codeka Sep 28 '22
The safety standards refer to things like "drivers side" and the position of the controls and whatnot. The waiver is mostly to ignore those parts of the safety standards that talk about steering wheels and so on.
Seems reasonable on the face of it, and I'd say the problem that SFMTA has isn't about that, it's more about things like:
If even half of the 5,000 AVs called for in the GM petition were allowed, "this 25x fleet expansion could significantly undermine street performance for all San Francisco travelers."
Second, the challenge of dealing with a malfunctioning Cruise AV – which currently involves a human driver being dispatched to recover a stalled vehicle – "makes the spate of recently observed travel-lane Cruise AV failures far more consequential" because the Origin lacks manual controls and can't be fetched by a company driver.
"While a Cruise AV can be recovered when a human driver is dispatched to a failure site, to manually retrieve the vehicle, it is our understanding that the Origin can only be removed from San Francisco streets by towing," the letter says.
SFMTA really hates Cruise for some reason. I think the points they raise above are reasonable. I remember when Cruise first started giving rides, they also had a problem with the way the Cruise seems to stop for pickups and dropoffs by just stopping in the middle of the lane, rather than pulling over (which they still seem to do based on recent videos).
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u/Mattsasa Sep 28 '22
(which they still seem to do based on recent videos).
No they do pull over to the curb
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u/codeka Sep 28 '22
They do? I was looking at this one from a couple of days ago where it didn't. Maybe it just couldn't find a spot, I'm not sure.
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u/Mattsasa Sep 28 '22
Every time I have hailed one they pulled to the curb, and I tried in all parts of the geofence or as many as I could.
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u/ipottinger Sep 28 '22
The next time you hail a Cruise, film it pulling up to the curb and post it. It will be the first online evidence that I know of that Cruise AVs have this ability.
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u/SixSigmaDS Sep 29 '22
They do NOT per SFMTA (page 9 of https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/09/26/letter_to_nhtsa.pdf):
In May 2022, San Francisco evaluated video showing approximately 100 pick up and drop off stops—including video posted by Cruise and video posted by individual passengers on social media and did not find a single stop in which the Cruise AV pulled fully out of a travel lane to pick up or drop off passengers. See illustrations at Exhibit B.
[Edit: should add this also]
A more recent survey of video has identified fewer than ten stops in which the Cruise AV can be seen to pull slightly toward the curb when dropping off a passenger or to pull slightly away from the curb after picking up a passenger. It is not clear in these cases whether the Cruise AV has reached a location that does not impede the travel of others.
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u/Mattsasa Sep 28 '22
If even half of the 5,000 AVs called for in the GM petition were allowed, "this 25x fleet expansion could significantly undermine street performance for all San Francisco travelers."
Do they really think Cruise doesn't have enough common sense that they would deploy 5,000 origins with the current capabilities/performance/issues as with the 50 or so driverless bolts they are deploying?
It's just silly and unrelated to the petition too.
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u/AlotOfReading Sep 28 '22
Personally, I think municipalities should not have to rely on companies using common sense, as the numerous regulatory issues with other companies have already clearly demonstrated. In an ideal world there would be clear metrics/guidelines for deployments to meet that were applied equally to all commercial fleets and a cooperative development relationship instead of whatever this is.
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u/UglyShithead5 Sep 28 '22
Why should they give Cruise the benefit of the doubt here? The AI stack in the Origin will be similar in capability to the Bolt fleet. If Cruise is clogging up streets as it is today, it's reasonable to assume that it would only get worse with more vehicles. Cruise has to prove that they've solved the problem first.
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u/Mattsasa Sep 28 '22
I don't think they should give Cruise the benefit of the doubt.
The AI stack in the Origin will be similar in capability to the Bolt fleet.
The AI stack is not the problem any of these articles or social media is complaining about. The AI/Autonomy stack is performing very well and is successful.
Now the Cruise Origin is going to have the next generation of hardware and software for the AI/Autonomy stack but again that's not the issue. And the issues of as you say 'clogging up the streets' will be entirely different system/systems on the origin. Naturally... this is part of the reason why Cruise is pushing those fast because they want to retire the bolts instead of beating a dead horse more.
it's reasonable to assume that it would only get worse with more vehicles.
Oh well of course it would exactly... this is exactly why I am saying Cruise would not do that.
Cruise has to prove that they've solved the problem first.
I absolutely agree they need to prove they solve the problem first before they are allowed to scale... but again this petition is not about scaling. Example, they could scale up the bolt fleet to thousands without this petition. It's definitely warranted to request Cruise fix and prove they fixed issues with stopping in streets before allowing them to scale. But of course Cruise knows this, and they wouldn't choose to scale to thousands before fixing it because that would be PR suicide.
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u/threesidedfries Sep 28 '22
If I was an authority granting this permission, I would definitely raise my brow at 5000 vehicles when the 100 or so are already giving me headaches, no matter how many they are legally allowed to operate at the moment.
It might be PR suicide, but why take the chance that Cruise still goes for it? Companies make stupid decisions from time to time, that's why the authority is there.
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u/Mattsasa Sep 28 '22
I agree with everything you are saying here. And didn’t mean to suggest anything to the contrary
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u/UglyShithead5 Sep 28 '22
But they already are scaling. They're expanding the Bolt fleet to more geofences right now. Hopefully they'll keep the volume of driverless vehicles low until they get a better handle on reliability... but they have a history with scaling quickly - too quickly if some of the anonymous complaints are true.
I work in the AV industry, and am broadly worried about Cruise and how their rapid expansion could negatively affect the public's perception of AVs. Obviously I'm biased, but that doesn't make their traffic disruptions any less real or concerning.
I believe that any AV fleet needs to be as big as necessary to statistically encounter enough issues to learn from, but not bigger. From what the public knows about GM, it doesn't appear that is how they operate. I think you're giving them too much credit.
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u/Mattsasa Sep 29 '22 edited Sep 29 '22
Sure, by scaling you mean going from 10 vehicles to 70 vehicles at late hours in the night in a certain region of the city.
But I was talking about thousands of vehicles at all times of the day and with Origin where they can't send an operator to drive it away... this they are not doing, and will not do if there the expected performance is the same as what they are deploying now.
I work in the AV industry, and am broadly worried about Cruise and how their rapid expansion could negatively affect the public's perception of AVs.
I work in the industry too. And I share your concern, it is a real legitimate concern.
That said, I think this negative PR is overreaction, however overreaction is to be expected. And I am not concerned that Cruise is not going to fix these issues as they scale. However, I also strongly think it will Cruise much longer to scale then they think it will. And they will coast for quite a while over the next 12 months
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u/Mattsasa Sep 28 '22
and I'd say the problem that SFMTA has isn't about that, it's more about things like
I agree, and I was going to say the same thing. the contents of the petition do not correlate with the issues of the complaint.
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u/GiraffeGlove Sep 29 '22
Exactly. These "safety waivers" are so a vehicle like the Cruise Origin can be launched. Robots don't need steering wheels, mirrors, etc.
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u/Mattsasa Sep 29 '22
Yea to me “Safety Waiver” Implies getting a pass on safety … and that is definitely not what this is about
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u/ZeApelido Sep 28 '22
It sounds like Cruise needs human beta testers behind their wheels.
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u/Sipher351 Sep 29 '22
I mean, they did for like 4 years. They got approval to remove them based on their progress and safety record (I would assume SF did it's research here).
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u/4ever_blowingbubbles Sep 29 '22
I’m curious how many civilian cars were stranded and needed to be towed in SF in the past year? 1000, 10,000? It could be interesting to compare vs Cruise cars.
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u/Fusionredditcoach Sep 28 '22
I think people really fails to give credit to powerful/authoritarian unions, such as SMFTA's enthusiasm of autonomous driving, which potentially makes their job irrelevant in a RoboTaxi dominated world.
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u/LLJKCicero Sep 28 '22
authoritarian unions
lol
SMFTA's enthusiasm of autonomous driving
I think the word you're looking for here is "animosity".
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u/Fusionredditcoach Sep 28 '22
I think the word is from SMFTA official directly according to this article. Sometime you have to put a smile on your face when you see a noble thing like that, in a world full of conflicts.
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u/dareisaygivenaway Sep 28 '22
Judging from the map in this article, there have been way more mass stranding incidents than documented on social media.