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The decision came over a month after an incident in which a hit-and-run victim became pinned under a Cruise vehicle and then was dragged 20 feet to the side of the road. As a result, California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permit to operate driverless cars in the state.
Why haven’t they banned all cars over the many more incidents caused by human drivers? Including incidents where pedestrians are killed deliberately, as with the cases where idiots drove straight into protest crowds?
If we’re ever going to get past the lethality of human drivers, we need to at least judge the technology by the same standards.
We’re at 80% with human drivers and they want to throw out driverless tech because it’s 92% and not 100%.
There’s a high probability that if that taxi was a normal human driver they also would have hit and ran like the actual offending driver in the black sedan.
At least with the robotaxi they have dashcam footage of the assailant that ran.
Why haven’t they banned all cars
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
I think we should actually ban the production of metals. Between the deaths from guns and cars, metal is a hazardous technology that needs to be proven safer before we unleash it upon our populace, much though the steel billionaires would love to profit from it while people die.
That’s what they’re doing about driverless cars though. Instead of looking at the data overall they banned all cars from a company as a result of a single event.
I’m not saying driverless cars are there or they aren’t. But let’s not pretend this is a cool headed data driven decision. This is political.
It’s the same set of reasons we don’t have miniture nuclear reactors creating clean energy around the place
While self driving cars seem like a good way for enterprise to bypass the cost of paying a driver, the driver’s other function isn’t just to drive the car, but to be liable for its operation.
I wonder if it’s gonna take an insurance company to push for driverless before we see any driverless cars for sale. And if insurance companies don’t want to be liable then we may never see them.
The insurance companies will go for it if the data shows driverless cars cause fewer accidents and lower claims versus human drivers, but it seems like that data will be a long time coming because right now the court of public opinion goes nuts when a driverless car hits someone while ignoring all the times that a human does the same. It makes no sense, and I hope the insurance companies can make it make sense soon.
They can always put some money to back it up, if the statistics really tell them so. I guess we’ll see it when it happens.
The thing that bothers me is if you watch the first need report a human wouldn’t handle the situation any better than the robotaxi did.
A human driver hit and ran and it threw the person into the robotaxi
This investment is taking longer than the myopic financial outlooks that traded companies possess. But the idea of autonomous cars is not flawed.
You might think humans could at least think as long term as “it has to benefit my children in order for me to care” but the entire commercial world runs on “it has to make me as much money as possible within 3 months for me to care” and it’s just embarrassing.
Some if these companies have been at this for decades now. I don’t think lack of commitment is the problem.
Maybe it’s just the way the author wrote this article, but they make it sound like a 7 year investment that hasn’t matured is an epic disaster.
It’s been a tumultuous seven years since GM first announced its plan to acquire Cruise with the goal of rapidly commercializing the technology. The company has scored some significant victories in recent months, only to see most of that progress evaporate after a series of errors have exposed major problems with Cruise’s management. And now Vogt’s resignation puts GM in a tough position: continue to fully embrace self-driving cars, or cut its losses.
Job #1 for self driving vehicles should be don’t hit anything. Self driving should be able to have better senses, 100% attention, and better reflexes than human drivers. Until the vehicles can operate without hitting things they should never be allowed on public roads.
To be fair, the incident they’re referring to was from a driver hitting a pedestrian which then knocked them into the path of the Cruise vehicle. They actually do a pretty good job of not hitting things but every incident gets amplified greatly.
Good lord is that what happened? Damn. The misdirection of attention here is astounding. I’m surprised people aren’t trying to ban the production of metal because it was involved in vehicular deaths.
The issue was that the Cruise didn’t detect the collision and dragged the victim along, not that it caused the accident.
You just articulated the “100% or nothing” standard, which totally ignores how unsafe human drivers are. Let’s say humans score an 80% on safety today (after all hundreds of thousands are killed on the roads annually). You’re saying that a technology that’s only 92% safe should not be permitted. Nope. We need that last 8% to be there and we’ll withhold the 12% improvement from the public until it is - even though that has a cost of thousands of lives.
This is a way to get nowhere and kill as many people as possible.
I didn’t say 100% but they are not ready to be on public roads when they hit parked fire trucks. Huge objects on the road.
It’s hilarious how many massive sectors of the economy bet billions on computers that could function like human brains, when that technology is clearly impossible right now. We might not even get close for the foreseeable future.
I’m curious whether the people working on these projects genuinely believed they could deliver, or if the whole thing was billion dollar snake oil the entire time.
As long as they get a paycheck no outcome is an outcome.
