
Cruise's new video showing driverless car navigating very tricky traffic in SF - dmix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJQLEETP98U
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tschwimmer
This is (obviously) edited to highlight the car handling tricky situations,
but I recently had a rather negative interaction with Cruise.

It was around 16th and Rhode Island in Potrero. The road opens up to a very
wide two lane lane road. We came up behind the cruise car at this point, and
the Cruise car slowed way down and basically rolled down the street in the
middle of the road at 5 miles an hour. The driver in my car tailgated the
Cruise car down the block until we got to a stop sign, and then the Cruise car
stopped for way to long, and then we drove around them. We were the only car
on the road and it was fairly dark.

It looked a bit like the car didn't have confidence to decisively move forward
and the resulting action was to limp along. It's definitely tough to get the
response right in this situation but I wasn't impressed with the mitigation
strategy. You'd think the car would at least pull off to the side of the road
if it didn't know what to do.

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Isamu
Highlights:

\- recognizing double-parked vehicles and making progress past them by
carefully proceeding in the oncoming (dashed yellow line) lane,

\- making challenging left turns with oncoming cars, safely recognizing
unpredictable pedestrian activity but still making progress,

\- recognizing traffic cones and obeying a temporary merge right sign.

This is a fun video - it suggests they can assume some more complex and
adaptable strategies.

I would like to see them deal with a flag-person directing traffic. Those
folks are poorly trained in my experience and give ad hoc signals. It may come
down to properly training people to consistently signal self-driving cars.

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delfinom
I want to see it handle double parked cars that aren't using hazards.

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Isamu
Yeah! I wondered that too - humans will make a complex determination is the
guy in front will not be moving anytime soon when it is not the case that
traffic is just stopped. It is nice though that they seem to be recognizing
hazard lights.

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davidhyde
Why do they always speed up videos like this? It’s not real time and it does
make a difference to perception, not just saving peoples time viewing the
video. Tesla used the same trick.

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stephenbez
I wish there was someone at Cruise I could talk to in order to tell them to
make their cars follow CVC 22100.

I frequently see their cars on Folsom street in the Mission. I've seen their
cars make right hand turns without being fully in the right hand lane. There
is a bike lane and a lot of bike traffic on that street. Their behavior puts
cyclists at risk of getting hit with a right hook when they are going straight
through an intersection.

Based on everything I've seen, I'd much rather have a human driver than Cruise
so far.

[https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&sectionNum=22100)

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tettoffensive
From personal experience and from my local Nextdoor, the worst thing is being
stuck behind a Cruise car and they are constantly everywhere. Last week I
heard a FedEx driver yelling "Get the f __k out of the way! " from my window.

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jacknews
Not bad, but still plenty of "what the F are you doing" moments in there I
think, and quite a few false stutters etc that would be quite annoying to
other drivers.

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jacknews
Impressive, but still plenty of "what the F are you doing" moments in there I
think, and quite a few false stops/stutters etc that would be quite annoying
to other drivers if not actually dangerous.

Eg there seems to be a habit of driving right up behind parked vehicles,
stopping, moving out (and then hesitating in the other lane), etc, rather than
just moving over to the other (clear) lane and proceeding.

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delfinom
Let's see.

1\. Fails to yield to a car making a right turn

2\. Decides to jump into the opposing direction "lane" to try and go around a
truck which starts moving and effectively cuts it off.

3\. Makes a ridiculously late left turn

They achieved the opposite of what most people want in a self driving car.
Automated bad driving and assholery.

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rladd
If this is now their typical performance, they've come a long long way in the
last 6 months.

I was stuck behind Cruise cars twice in the same week that went 2/3 of the way
into an intersection and stopped until the light turned red and sat there
until I honked the horn and, presumably, the safety driver took over.

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Eridrus
I assume that if this was typical performance, they'd make a clip with even
better performance from when things line up well.

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xfitm3
Why do you think comments are disabled on the youtube video?

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dmode
If this is a true, undoctored video, future looks promising

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rdm_blackhole
what's with all the double parked cars?

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nmstoker
Guessing it's selective editing, to illustrate cases of the car handling
challenging situations well. Either that, or the drivers are particularly
selfish in San Francisco?!

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johnwheeler
kind of an asshole driver, but very cool

