GM's Cruise Delays Driverless Taxi Project Indefinitely

[Harley Lover]

The hype met reality. I hope GM enjoys the crow:

Quote

GM Cruise LLC, the autonomous-vehicle unit of General Motors Co., confirmed Wednesday it will delay indefinitely its plan to deploy driverless taxis in the streets of San Francisco — explicit acknowledgement that hype generated by tech enthusiasts and investors is outpacing both engineering reality and safety concerns.

"The technology is simply not ready yet," said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Navigant Research who focuses on mobility. "It is not sufficiently safe, reliable and robust to be able to handle all these situations that people are going to encounter in the real world."

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2019/07/24/gm-delays-driverless-taxis-over-safety-concerns/1813618001/

Edited July 25, 2019 by Harley Lover

[rperez817]

33 minutes ago, Harley Lover said:

The hype met reality. I hope GM enjoys the crow:

It's not hype. Rather it's that education and outreach to the public by AV companies haven't kept pace with technical and operational advancements. One of the main issues with AVs right now is that many people are still skeptical about their benefits. Engineers and investors in AV companies understand those benefits, but the general public to a large extent does not.

GM Cruise is doing the right thing by not only building, testing, and improving AV hardware and software at a very fast pace, but just as importantly building trust with the communities where it tests its vehicles (San Francisco in particular). Here is Dan Ammann's article from yesterday where he talks about GM Cruise's strategy. He summed it up nicely saying "Delivering self-driving cars at scale isn’t just about winning the tech race, it’s about winning the tech race and the trust race." https://medium.com/cruise/the-next-steps-to-scale-start-in-san-francisco-713315f3a142 

[Harley Lover]

Dude, please smell the coffee. Dan has to sell his backtracking. Don't buy the hype. GM has been hyping their technology lead and how they were going to deploy in 2019. What's the reality? Delayed indefinitely. Read it again:

"The technology is simply not ready yet," said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Navigant Research who focuses on mobility. "It is not sufficiently safe, reliable and robust to be able to handle all these situations that people are going to encounter in the real world."

Nobody forced GM to hype but GM and its hubris. They can reap the rewards now.

Ford has a better idea in this arena, and has been going about its business quietly. GM has once again been engineering by press release, and once again comes up short.

[rperez817]

18 hours ago, Harley Lover said:

Nobody forced GM to hype but GM and its hubris. They can reap the rewards now.

Ford has a better idea in this arena, and has been going about its business quietly. GM has once again been engineering by press release, and once again comes up short.

GM Cruise is behind only Waymo when it comes to results of AV testing on public roads in California last year. Cruise actually tested more vehicles than Waymo. That may be due to Waymo doing testing in other states like Arizona. But Cruise had fewer miles driven by AVs per disengagement (when AV hands control to a safety driver). Waymo has a big lead on that measure. Cruise is #2, then there is a big drop off from there.

Edited July 26, 2019 by rperez817

[akirby]

21 hours ago, rperez817 said:

It's not hype. Rather it's that education and outreach to the public by AV companies haven't kept pace with technical and operational advancements. One of the main issues with AVs right now is that many people are still skeptical about their benefits. Engineers and investors in AV companies understand those benefits, but the general public to a large extent does not.

GM Cruise is doing the right thing by not only building, testing, and improving AV hardware and software at a very fast pace, but just as importantly building trust with the communities where it tests its vehicles (San Francisco in particular). Here is Dan Ammann's article from yesterday where he talks about GM Cruise's strategy. He summed it up nicely saying "Delivering self-driving cars at scale isn’t just about winning the tech race, it’s about winning the tech race and the trust race." https://medium.com/cruise/the-next-steps-to-scale-start-in-san-francisco-713315f3a142 

It's not about public perception, it's about the technology not being ready.

[rperez817]

16 minutes ago, akirby said:

It's not about public perception, it's about the technology not being ready.

Public perception of AV technology and benefits is a major issue in the U.S. Along with regulatory and liability concerns, it's probably the biggest hindrance to getting AV products and services deployed on a wide scale. If these perception and acceptance issues aren't addressed, automakers and others in the AV industry are going to have a very hard time meeting their goals.

Some examples.

Pew Research.

Nerdwallet.

Reuters/Ipsos.

[akirby]

The public is skeptical because the technology cannot be proven to be safe yet.

[Harley Lover]

The public is skeptical because the OEM's are now admitting to their own hype.

[rperez817]

1 hour ago, akirby said:

The public is skeptical because the technology cannot be proven to be safe yet.

This is one of the reasons why GM Cruise continues to expand real world testing on San Francisco streets. And why it's doing more than ever to involve citizens of San Francisco in their efforts.

"Proving" AV technology safety is important. But it raises a number of policy, business, and technical questions. Here are some. How safe is "proven safe"? Do AVs have to be 10% safer than human driven cars? 70%? 200%? How much safety testing data do AV companies need to collect? What test protocols should be used? How much of the testing can be done via simulation or on closed courses versus public roads?

There's a big downside to waiting for AVs to be proven "perfectly safe". And why GM Cruise's announcement they are delaying deployment of their AV taxi service in San Francisco, logical as it may seem, is not one sided. There are benefits as well as costs to this decision, and not just for GM Cruise itself. RAND Institute did a study on the topic titled 'The Enemy of Good - Estimating the Cost of Waiting for Nearly Perfect Automated Vehicles'. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2150.html

Quote

"In this report, we use the RAND Model of Automated Vehicle Safety to compare road fatalities over time under (1) a policy that allows HAVs to be deployed for consumer use when their safety performance is just 10 percent better than that of the average human driver and (2) a policy that waits to deploy HAVs only once their safety performance is 75 or 90 percent better than that of average human drivers — what some might consider nearly perfect.

We find that, in the long term, under none of the conditions we explored does waiting for significant safety gains result in fewer fatalities. At best, fatalities are comparable, but, at worst, waiting has high human costs — in some cases, more than half a million lives. Moreover, the conditions that might lead to comparable fatalities — rapid improvement in HAV safety performance that can occur without widespread deployment — seem implausible. This suggests that the opportunity cost, in terms of lives saved, for waiting for better HAV performance may indeed be large. This evidence can help decisionmakers better understand the human cost of different policy choices governing HAV safety and set policies that save more lives."

Edited July 26, 2019 by rperez817

[akirby]

It's not just safety - it's being able to operate in all conditions and all situations.  It's proving to be just as difficult as many of us said it would be and these companies are just now admitting it.   And you don't test safety on a public road - you test it to the best of your ability in lab conditions first.  

[silvrsvt]

On 7/26/2019 at 2:00 PM, Harley Lover said:

The public is skeptical because the OEM's are now admitting to their own hype.

I don't think it was Old Detroit pushing this-it was the newer players from Silicon Valley trying to expand their product lines (Nvidia,etc) to keep their stock prices going up. The IT industry has great history of over promising and under delivering when it comes to new product. Or just doing incremental performance boosts to products. 

[rperez817]

46 minutes ago, silvrsvt said:

The IT industry has great history of over promising and under delivering when it comes to new product. Or just doing incremental performance boosts to products. 

"Over promising and under delivering when it comes to new product" describes much of the global automotive industry from the end of World War 2 to the present. The transformation underway in this industry from autonomous vehicles plus electrification and mobility services should change that stagnation.

 IT industry (assume you are referring to computer, telecom, and data processing companies) by contrast has already been completely transformed more than once since World War 2. 

[silvrsvt]

35 minutes ago, rperez817 said:

"Over promising and under delivering when it comes to new product" describes much of the global automotive industry from the end of World War 2 to the present. The transformation underway in this industry from autonomous vehicles plus electrification and mobility services should change that stagnation.

 IT industry (assume you are referring to computer, telecom, and data processing companies) by contrast has already been completely transformed more than once since World War 2. 

Seriously? Nice cherry picking of facts-the Automotive industry moved more or less at the same pace as the IT industry its first 50 years or so in business.

The IT industry as a whole has significantly slowed down since the late 1990s growth and speed-wise (using Moore's law as an example-CPU manufactures are adding more cores then CPU speed and other things to say CPU's are getting faster-while we are lucky that software can use more then 2-4 cores at a time when we have double and triple (cores) that in some CPUs) and the growth/revenue of those products are now a mature market place, much like autos, with little future growth in market share because of the competition. Thus this lead companies to bank on bleeding edge tech that won't see pay off for at least another 10-20 years and make others slow their roll because they don't want to piss away $$$ if they don't have to, Like Apple and now GM and others. 

To me the stagnation is with the IT industry not wanting their stock prices to flatline. 

[akirby]

The reason they’re going multi core and hyper threads is to support virtualization and cloud where you have dozens of vms running on the same server.

Running bare metal with one os instance is extremely inefficient nowadays.

[rperez817]

20 minutes ago, silvrsvt said:

To me the stagnation is with the IT industry not wanting their stock prices to flatline. 

Stagnation is much more widespread in the automotive industry than in the IT industry (computer, telecom, data processing).

In any case, autonomous vehicles will transform companies in both industries.

[92merc]

1 hour ago, akirby said:

The reason they’re going multi core and hyper threads is to support virtualization and cloud where you have dozens of vms running on the same server.

Running bare metal with one os instance is extremely inefficient nowadays.

7 years ago, our case management vendor we were switching to didn't support VMware and virtual machines.  They said it wasn't tested and reliable.  We went ahead and did it anyway.  It's saved our bacon more times than I can count.  Our vendor would randomly switch the specs on the servers needed.  With VM's, we could add/remove cores, memory, and HD space at will.  If we had gone pizza boxes, we'd be constantly replacing them.  Not to mention reliability.

Of course now our vendor likes to use us as their "success" story as to why VM's can work.  Never mind they have no idea how we've deployed our blades and storage array's for maximum utilization.

[silvrsvt]

2 hours ago, akirby said:

The reason they’re going multi core and hyper threads is to support virtualization and cloud where you have dozens of vms running on the same server.

Running bare metal with one os instance is extremely inefficient nowadays.

I know this already-just that the end user (if your using a Laptop/Desktop) doesn't "see" this.

[silvrsvt]

2 hours ago, rperez817 said:

Stagnation is much more widespread in the automotive industry than in the IT industry (computer, telecom, data processing).

In any case, autonomous vehicles will transform companies in both industries.

Your still missing the point-the IT market is saturated for the most part (see Apple with iPhone, Nvidia with Graphic cards, so on and so forth), There is no "easy" money to be found out there. The reason they where branching out into autonomous vehicles is they looked at it as a way to create a new market for their products-the problem is that market is about 10 years from being anywhere from being "mature"...sorta like going from dial-up BBS system to the internet with a cable modem....where it was actually useful for the non-geeky computer user. 

[CurtisH]

42 minutes ago, silvrsvt said:

...sorta like going from dial-up BBS system to the internet with a cable modem....where it was actually useful for the non-geeky computer user. 

Hey, dial-up BBS systems rocked! ?