
Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car - bobsil1
https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-we-built-the-first-real-self-driving-car-really-bd17b0dbda55
======
arosier
From my discussions with a friend with intimate knowledge of the software side
of Cruise, there is wild skepticism within the co that they even have the
hardware needed to go L4 or L5. Big promises being made to GM by Kyle which is
leading to smoke and mirrors to distract/buy time from more critical problems
"under the hood."

~~~
adewinter
What does "go L4 or L5" mean?

~~~
robotresearcher
They are Lagrange Points. The cars don't have the hardware to reach them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point)

Or maybe there's some notation collision...

~~~
manmal
It's about level 1-5 autonomy.

~~~
khazhoux
I think he was joking :-)

------
antirez
I don't know what to believe. A few days ago I spent some time checking
publicly available data and the result is that the current state of art is
extremely far from an autonomous car that, could like used to drive a taxi in
a busy city like Rome. Not far as "still some effort needed" but potentially
"not clear when this could be available" far. Now there are those claims made
by multiple companies... Go figure.

~~~
gervase
Based on my own observations, there's probably a big difference between
operating as a taxi in Berlin and Rome, and another between operating in Rome
and Mumbai. This only factors in other human drivers and infrastructure
design/signage, not weather conditions (a different can of worms).

I suspect that we'll see a progression like:

1) Well-regulated urban and highway environments

2) Well-regulated rural environments

3) Moderately regulated urban and rural environments

4) Poorly regulated rural environments

5) Poorly regulated urban environments

And I think we'll probably be stuck on #1 for a while. I would also venture
that most companies claiming to "be there" or "almost there" are referring to
#1 as well.

I also think that it's possible that politicians may try to legislate a
transition up that list as that first case starts taking off (greater traffic
enforcement, better signage/infrastructure, more rigorous driver training,
etc).

~~~
antirez
My feeling is that under special situations 1 degradates to 5, so to have good
security anyway you have to solve problem 5.

~~~
mulmen
What are the special situations where 1 gives way to 5? The well-regulated
part would imply to me that the possibility of slipping to another situation
are eliminated or not allowed.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Blizzard. Heavy rainfall or wind. Sudden crowd / riot / chaotic event.

Pretty sure you can't legislate those out of existence. And sadly I think the
fact that these vehicles are being developed and tested in Silicon Valley is
either a cause or an symptom of their probably inability to deal with those
kinds of conditions.

~~~
guelo
Also, accidents, road spills, random obstacles, construction, animals.

~~~
mulmen
Road spills, random obstacles and animals all have to be dealt with for any of
this to work at all. Construction can be considered in the regulations and
self-driving cars can just be restricted from auto-drive mode in construction
areas.

------
rwmj
There are a lot of big claims in this article. As someone who hasn't been
paying much attention, is it credible that they have a near-ready-to-go self-
driving car right now?

~~~
Fricken
Yep, they're pretty close. Late this year or 2018 they'll have cars driving
around empty. GM has consistently been underestimated by the public, but
they've played their cards very well. It's in no small part due to the drive
and leadership of Kyle Vogt, who is on his way to the big leagues to join the
ranks of Musk, Bezos, and Jobs and those guys.

~~~
eco
Is there anywhere that allows autonomous cars to be tested on real roads
without a fallback human driver?

~~~
Fricken
Arizona. Their weather and regulatory climate has Waymo, Cruise, and Uber all
testing there. I believe Michigan and Florida are also willing to permit fully
autonomous cars on their roads, but most of the action is in and around
Phoenix.

~~~
aetherson
Last I saw, the tests in Phoenix had human back-up drivers. Has something
changed recently?

~~~
Fricken
Nobody is driving without backup drivers yet yet. It's not because they aren't
allowed.

------
soared
Wow. FYI - This is how you mess up content marketing. If the author genuinely
wanted me to read the article and get to know the brand, he shouldn't have
used such a scummy title. Yes, the article is /technically/ true. But they are
only talking about the hardware, and acknowledge in the second paragraph that
they don't have the software. So while the title implies self-driving cars are
a solved problem, they are really only making claims about hardware. Cool I
guess? But tesla probably already beat you to it?

Titles like these are what happen when marketers optimize everything towards
clicks, and don't care about actual impact on the brand itself.

~~~
byset
I didn't get that impression. Paragraph two says they have "the most advanced
self-driving software ever demonstrated," which has been in use driving cars
around in real city traffic on their prototypes or whatever (according to
their youtube videos), but the article seems to be saying that they now have
designed and built mass-producible cars that can run the software. (If I'm
wrong, then yeah, not only the title but the whole article is misleading.)

~~~
tim333
Paragraph 2: "today, we’re unveiling the world’s first mass-producible car
designed to operate without a driver"

Implies L5

Paragraph 3: "The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation
self-driving car"

ie L3, you need a driver paying attention like in a Tesla(?)

~~~
jccooper
No, paragraph 3 means it's the third iteration of their hardware. That's
unrelated to the self-driving "levels".

------
Animats
So GM engineering got the hardware integrated with the vehicle and engineered
it for assembly line production. That's what GM engineering does. Whether the
Cruise software is good enough for self-driving without driver attention
remains to be seen.

Volvo is doing well with their self-driving car, but admits the hardware cost
is over $100K per car at present.

~~~
tigershark
I don't really believe it is possible. Lidars were the most expensive part and
are much, much cheaper now, I can't really imagine how can they spend more
than 100k$ of self driving hardware per car.

~~~
Animats
There still are not cheap, good, 3D, automotive-grade LIDAR units. 2-3 years
out, though, there should be lots of them.

~~~
tigershark
Waymo lidar is around 7.5k$, I would say that it qualifies as a good
automotive-grade lidar.

~~~
Animats
If you need four to six of them, as the little Google/Waymo car did, that's
still too expensive.

------
skywhopper
This article is filled with very carefully crafted language to leave the
impression that this car 1) is being mass-produced, and is 2) capable of
driving itself. But if you read it closely enough, it's clear that neither of
these things is true.

I'm sure there's political pressure within GM for Cruise to announce these
sorts of "wins" to keep management satisfied their money is being well-spent.
But the breathless tone of this write-up conveys a sense of accomplishment
that doesn't actually exist, and the failure to set reasonable expectations
will just make the disillusionment that much stronger when it happens.

------
ardillamorris
I lot of comments about building a self driving car and zero showing the
"real" self-driving car. Show and then tell!

------
aerovistae
While I'm almost always bullish on new tech, self-driving cars are one where I
frankly have a pretty hard time buying into the hype. I think when they really
start to hit the streets, some issues are going to show up.

Here's what I mean. Imagine this situation:

You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your
kids left a lawn gnome there, blocking it. The car won't go forward because
there's an obstacle.

Simultaneously, a driver looking at their phone and not paying attention comes
careening down the road. They're clearly going to rear-end you, hard. You
COULD just pull forward and out of the way.....but the car won't, because of
the lawn gnome. It can't know the lawn gnome doesn't matter in comparison to
the damage your car is about to suffer.

Imagine this flip scenario:

You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your
kids, a toddler, is in your way. The car won't go forward because there's an
obstacle. Otherwise, same situation as above. Now, you ABSOLUTELY do NOT want
to pull forward, because you'd rather get rear-ended than run over your child.

Even if you want to nitpick this exact scenario, surely you can think of a
hundred similar contexts yourself, where driving involves _understanding the
value of different pieces of the car 's immediate environment._ A car cannot
know the value of a child versus a lawn gnome, nor can it reliably detect the
difference.

Even if such a situation only arises once in a thousand days of driving, with
hundreds of millions of people on the road everyday, that's thousands of times
per day. That's really bad.

Is it statistically _better_ than the amount of harm done by human drivers?
Possibly. But we all still get in cars believing we'll be better than other
drivers. Who's going to get in a car when any given car has an equivalent
chance of making a bad decision all on its own? It's just like getting in a
car with a drunk driver.

Who's going to sign up for that? Not me, that's for sure.

~~~
bjtitus
I always question whether humans are really any better at this calculation. In
the gnome example, many people will probably stop to avoid damaging their
property, not see the car behind them careening forward, and end up getting
rear ended anyway. In an ideal world, ethical issues like the one you
presented would be major hurdles but humans aren't going to be perfectly
rational in the moment of many accidents, especially the most dangerous high-
speed ones when there is physically not enough time to do ethical math.

> we all still get in cars believing we'll be better than other drivers. Who's
> going to get in a car when any given car has an equivalent chance of making
> a bad decision all on its own?

Given the fact that plenty of people take taxis, rely on Uber and Lyft drivers
they've never met, and take public transportation like aircraft and trains
with little knowledge of the operator, this seems like a non-issue to me.

~~~
oaktowner
The other thing to bear in mind: I would guess that the vast majority of
accidents are caused by people not paying attention -- distracted by a phone,
person, great view, or even just because they're looking the wrong direction.
Cars don't do any of those things. They will always be paying attention,
looking in all directions at once.

So if they eliminate all of the accidents that are caused that way, but
increase the number of garden-gnome related accidents...wouldn't that be
worthwhile?

Another, less flippant way to say it: yes, we can imagine scenarios in which
the number of accidents will increase. But what is the relative frequency of
those types of accidents compared to run-of-the-mill rear-end, red-light run,
lane change due to inattentiveness?

~~~
otakucode
If given a choice between changing from what you are used to which has
drawbacks, to something new that has drawbacks, even if those drawbacks are
markedly milder, almost everyone will choose to stick with where they already
are. Consciously choosing a position which has drawbacks that you know about
makes you feel personally responsible for those when they occur. That is
infinitely worse than suffering the drawbacks of the "default" you stay with
which you can give yourself a moral pass on because it wasn't a situation you
chose to begin with.

There's also the issue of what a self-driving car could do... and what they
WILL do. Much technology COULD be amazing... if companies did not function in
the ways that they actually do. Because of that, technology often fails to
meet any of the promises made. Development is supposed to be cheap and fast,
and safety and security get left at the door. No company is held liable for
such things, and it would be expensive and bothersome to fix, so they're not
about to bother.

------
pkulak
Nope, I don't believe it for a second. There's no way these can run in the
rain, or maybe even after dusk, and absolutely not off of extremely well
researched and hand-picked routes. I'm so sick of companies trying to pretend
like they've figured out level-5 self driving.

------
madengr
The last photo:

"Cruise 3rd generation self-driving car assembled in Lake Orion, Michigan.

It shows a steering wheel, though the info graphic shows no steering wheel.
Maybe the caption should read "2nd generation".

------
mabbo
Call me when it's for sale, when I can put down money and drive away (or
rather, be driven away by) a self diving car.

Seriously though. Please call me when that happens. I really, really want to
not have to drive anymore. I don't care what the price tag is.

~~~
aianus
What's stopping you from taking an Uber everywhere?

~~~
mabbo
Sometimes I drive outside of the city. I go visit my parents a few hours away.
Sometimes I want to pick up a huge load of groceries, or go to Ikea.

~~~
ghaff
If you literally don't care what the price tag is, hire a personal driver.
People do. But you actually do care about the price tag.

------
S_A_P
I feel like what they mean, is the first "factory" built car that has some
self driving capability.

------
alkonaut
How much will people be willing to pay for self driving cars? I mean it's nice
feature but won't this always be very expensive tech also in the future? How
expensive will it be to make this reliable in various regions (road signs,
traffic laws)?

Imagine how much money is spent by car manufacturers _now_ just validating the
functionality of "simple" tech like locks and wipers at the testing grounds in
northern Sweden and similar. All components of these systems will have to go
through the same kinds of tests.

My dash display gets funny whenever it's below -20 in the car - I can only
imagine what happens to all these sensors.

How cheap do you think this could be made? What price do you think people
(consumers, not taxi operators) are ready to pay for decent autonomy in a car?

------
olivermarks
'self driving' really means the vehicle is being controlled by outside
entities who have created technology that enables navigation.

This article is very opaque on how mature this is. The vehicles are the 'last
mile' and from everything I've read we are a long way from Level 5 mass market
maturity. everything else seems to require you to be able to reflexively grab
the wheel and use the pedals at any moment if something goes wrong...

Useful article about Toyota's Gill Pratt on realities
[https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sel...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/.WIa5-73Jp-g.hackernews)

------
kelvin0
Once there is an 'Nordic' edition able to navigate winters, I'll be even more
impressed. Snow, Ice and low visibility are not yet tackled as it seems.

Or we could all move to SF ... and live inside our cars?

------
RivieraKid
I noticed that that the sentiment about self-driving cars become much more
pessimistic (or more realistic) in the last few months compared to the
previous hype.

~~~
jakelarkin
thought leaders are inflecting to the Trough of Disillusionment
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

~~~
bobsil1
More like the Winter of Artificial General Intelligence

------
rndmwlk
Reads like a GM PR press piece.

------
mholt
At this point, I'm not really going to be impressed until just ONE self-
driving car company even _talks_ about being able to handle snow and fog,
preferably their cars knowing when they can't drive safely in the conditions.

(It's not just about seeing through moisture: it's also about traction,
something you can't really use sensors to enhance.)

~~~
maxerickson
Computers are so much better at detecting traction problems that electronic
stability control is mandatory in most new vehicles:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#Regulation)

~~~
mholt
Cool. But sometimes the road is just plain impassable. And having grown up in
many Iowa winter blizzards, I still don't trust even electronic systems. They
help, but sometimes there's nothing you can do when there's basically no
friction.

~~~
Nagyman
The safest thing might be for the car to pull over, put on hazard lights, and
tell you to wait or call for assistance.

Humans deciding to go continue driving in such conditions is a mistake,
leading to more collisions. Perhaps there will be a manual override, like
"Unsafe conditions, voice password and waiver required to continue in manual
mode; you might die or kill someone else."

~~~
ghaff
Once you get into bad snow conditions pulling over is a really bad option.
That said, this is a corner case I care less about than crossing Manhattan in
rain at rush hour. Or really lots of tricky busy off-highway situations.

~~~
bitL
Self-driving car can go slower in those cases. It depends entirely on how
beefy its CPU/GPU is to process a lot of sensor data realtime. The more messy
situation is, the more time it needs, the slower it needs to drive.

------
cr0sh
I don't know if this is allowed - if not, mods delete this.

To the poster who had a throwaway and identified themselves as an employee of
Cruise, if the environment you work in is as toxic as you claim, your best
bet, right now, is to leave.

Don't stay a minute longer, as this kind of thing has a way of biting those
who stay in the rear sooner rather than later.

~~~
cycrutchfield
The person likely has golden handcuffs that make it financially inadvisable to
depart early.

~~~
bobsil1
LUWTV, lube up and wait to vest

------
dmode
I read the whole blog post, but not sure what's the difference between this
car and the Tesla with 2.5 Autopilot hardware. Isn't that a production ready
car that will give you autonomous L4/L5 "some day" ? Or is there some
fundamental difference that I am missing out on ?

~~~
inverse_pi
AFAIK, tesla doesn't use lidars. This one has at least 2 lidars, so there's
that.

------
icc97
Whether or not this car drives itself it's still damn ugly.

Tesla is going about making electric cars sexy.

So you won't find me interested even if it sings too.

Never-the-less, for all the folks the that don't mind ugly cars it's good to
have competition to gather all the data to prove that driverless cars are
safer.

~~~
bryananderson
This is more important than one might think.

At the end of the day, the mass market does not really care whether a car is
gas or electric.

The average Joe/Jane just has X dollars budgeted for a car and a mental model
of what kind of amenities they ought to be able to get for X dollars.

Most of the "mass-market" electric cars I've seen in the $35,000 range (i3,
Leaf, Bolt) look like $18,000 subcompacts. They just have electric motors
inside.

You fundamentally cannot take an $18,000 car, slap an electric motor inside,
and call it a $35,000 car.

If the car is going to cost $35,000, make it a $35,000 car.

~~~
grmarcil
Not that anyone believes that this car is really going to production anytime
soon, but as an additional datapoint: the car in the first image is sporting
$40,000 worth of lidar on the roof (5 x Velodyne VLP-16).

I'm sure GM is getting a healthy discount off retail from Velodyne, but
production-ready lidar is still eye-wateringly expensive by OEM standards.
Some solid-state lidar units (Quanergy) out there in the hundreds of dollars
(and one from Velodyne in the works for 2018 release), but the fact that
Cruise is still using spinning Velodyne units suggests to me that solid-state
lidar needs a few more generations to come up to par.

------
Severian
That sensor assembly on the roof is ridiculous. What if I want to strap down
anything to the roof, like a kayak, bike, luggage, or maybe a mattress? Good
grief.

~~~
adewinter
The number of times I've strapped anything to the roof of my vehicle (in 13
years of driving) is exactly zero. This particular vehicle might just not be
suitable for your needs. Maybe eventually auto cars without roof sensors will
come out, or strapping stuff to your roof will become as ridiculous as
strapping something to the side of your vehicle.

------
taytus
I am the only one who was expecting _at least_ one video?

~~~
sp332
Videos are linked in the second paragraph.

------
andys627
>Electric self-driving cars will save millions of lives and significantly
accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, but only when they’re
deployed in large numbers.

Just like cars that we drive, self driving cars enable sprawl. Sprawl will
never be environmentally sustainable. We need cities that you move through by
foot, bike, and public transit.

~~~
bryananderson
Why do people believe that public transportation does not enable sprawl?

A great commuter rail system is what allows people who work in the world's
premiere cities to live in strip-mall exurbs and take the train to work.

I live in Washington, DC. Metro is what allows huge numbers of people to live
in sprawling suburbs instead of in the city. Yes, some drive, but traffic is
rough and would be unbearable without Metro. Fewer people would be able to
live outside the dense city center.

~~~
ricardobeat
Urban sprawl involves low-density areas. Metropolitan areas are going to
spread out regardless. What cars enable is sprawl even when there is not
enough density/economic output to make mass public transport viable.

~~~
bryananderson
Mass transit enables people to live in low-density areas who otherwise could
not.

A massive proportion of the DC area population lives in the burbs, drives to a
cheap/nearby parking garage at a transit center, and then takes mass transit
into the city to work.

This lifestyle would be impossible without mass transit.

What makes you think that density/economic output are the main factors in how
much public transit actually gets built?

EDIT: I actually love public transit, but I just don't see any evidence that
it does anything but encourage sprawl just like cars do. Also, public mass
transit's environmental advantage over cars will vanish with electrification.
What public transit does do extremely well is get people from A to B with high
throughput. That by itself is highly valuable in any major city.

------
otakucode
Hop into our self-driving car! It was designed by a team of inexperienced
developers working under a manager who foreshortened deadlines and delivered
ahead of schedule and under budget! The software guys asked for crazy things
like 'bug trackers' and 'static analysis tools', but we kept their nose to the
grindstone. Some of them said the software required more testing, but you know
software guys, always such nervous ninnies. Luckily we maintained the standard
business practice of keeping every employee replacable so that there were no
worries when we booted those guys.

Don't forget to read the fine print about the driver actually needing to keep
their hands on the wheel and ready to correct the car should it do anything
improper. You bear full responsibility for anything the car does. And have
fun!

~~~
HeroOfAges
Haha! Love it! This is precisely how enterprise software is developed and if
you look at the way our industry has trained its managers, I can't think of
any reason why the people that make decisions about these things can be
convinced to do anything differently. I mean, if you can build buggy software
for a Point of Service system this way, surely you can do the same thing with
self driving cars! It's just software! How hard can it be?

~~~
otakucode
One would like to think it would be handled by auto manufacturers. But one
would be DEAD (literally) wrong. We found this out a few years ago when Toyota
killed a couple people with their cars and their "unintended acceleration".
The degree to which they were egregiously negligent was astonishing. They were
doing development around 2010... and didn't have a bug tracker. Just, nope, no
way for developers to keep track of and tell one another about bugs. Who would
need such a luxury? Just don't make bugs! The auto industry has a big list of
90+ required standard practices in coding firmware, and 30+ 'recommended'
practices. Toyota claimed to adopt 9 of the required ones, but repeatedly
violated 3 in the code, nailing 6. The CPU didn't even have error-checking RAM
despite Toyotas claims that it did. It was patently absurd how bad - and how
utterly standard - their practices were.

And the court looked at it and said "yep, no negligence here. Software has no
standards. There are no licensed engineers to hire. Go ahead and do whatever
the hell you want, even if it kills people you're fine." No company is going
to take the millions of dollars worth of precautions necessary to prevent
things like that.

------
cruiseemployee
deleted

~~~
QAPereo
_deleted_

Hm. [http://archive.is/VhWor](http://archive.is/VhWor)

~~~
smnscu
> Cruise employee here. throwaway for obvious reasons. It needs to be said
> that this is entirely marketing smoke and mirrors. The Cruise platform is
> significantly behind most other players in the market, and is having many
> many technical problems because of shortsighted leadership on Kyle's part,
> including high level people quitting (the head of planning and controls left
> last month because of Kyle, and more are threatening to quit) The reason I'm
> saying this is that this sort of public "everything is fine, we are the
> best" posturing leaks inwards. The opposite is very much true. Employees are
> very upset with Kyle because of things just like this. I make no
> exaggeration when I say Kyle is a mean-spirited, selfish person in private,
> and is very quick to publicly take credit for the work of others that he has
> emotionally and verbally abused. It's truly one of the most toxic
> environments I've ever been a part of.

~~~
tmpnam7280557
This is accurate.

------
peterwwillis
tl;dr we have built a car that does not self-drive, but like, some day, it
will, we're pretty sure

Funniest thing is they still use wiring harnesses. If you're _manufacturing
the car from scratch_ just build a digital bus into the frame.

~~~
swsieber
"For now, there will still be a human behind the wheel."

Yup. Total click bait.

~~~
infecto
What is not clear is if this is due to the legal limitations or limitation of
automation?

~~~
mikeyouse
It's harder to assess the state of the technology from the outside, but this
is due at very least to legal limitations -- It's currently illegal to have a
car on the road without a human.

------
kome
Yeah, no.

Autonomous vehicles exist since quite a while now...

An Italian university tested an autonomous vehicle from Italy to China in
2010: the car was independent the 90% of the time, and semi-autonomous in case
of lack of maps or other special conditions:
[https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-
softwa...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-
software/autonomous-vehicle-driving-from-italy-to-china)

~~~
web007
They're talking about mass-production-ready vehicles, not one-off testbed
vehicles.

