Table Of Content
- Tesla’s latest update takes aim at cold weather woes
- We've heard about self-driving taxis forever, but they're just starting to become a reality
- Cruise wasn’t hiding the pedestrian-dragging video from regulators — it just had bad internet
- A second Stern Grove festival? Brand-new SF summer music series drops
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Companies have a lot of discretion about when to disengage, the testing environments aren’t uniform, and it’s difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison between companies. Media outlets tend to overhype the numbers in service of a false “race” narrative in which certain companies are outpacing others in miles driven and disengagements. Waymo robotaxis reported 35 more crashes in San Francisco than Cruise since the beginning of 2022, according to publicly available reports from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
Tesla’s latest update takes aim at cold weather woes
Cruise reported 2,783 paid passenger rides in its fully driverless vehicles — quadrupling the number of rides from the previous quarter. The company’s ridehailing vehicles traversed a total of 26,838.61 miles during the quarter, which covered September to November 2022. The Standard wanted to know how these two Bay Area-based autonomous vehicle companies fared against each other in a ride from the city’s southern neighborhoods up to the tip of Pacific Heights. From car design to the feel of the ride to the names of the vehicles themselves, the two self-driving rides couldn’t be any more different. In the optimistic scenario, Waymo will maintain and expand its current lead. It will grow its current taxi service from one corner of the Phoenix metro area to all of Greater Phoenix, then steadily expand to other metro areas.
We've heard about self-driving taxis forever, but they're just starting to become a reality
It logged 26 disengagements during the year for a rate of 0.033 per 1,000 miles, improving on its 2019 rate of 0.082. While Tesla wants to drive everywhere, today it can’t drive anywhere. (I know, I own one and have studied many videos.) The other players can actually perform the robotaxi task (which is to be able to operate for tens of thousands of hours without any safety mistakes) but in a limited set of areas. Indeed, they still have massive R&D and logistical costs that make that far away.
Cruise wasn’t hiding the pedestrian-dragging video from regulators — it just had bad internet
That could accelerate plans to expand in other cities like Phoenix, where Waymo has long operated and where Cruise is starting to push into. I want to clarify that the driving is done by the Waymo Driver on the car – there is no remote person driving the car. We were the first company that openly released our safety framework, the mechanism by which we test the performance of our system and how we determine when we're ready to deploy, three years ago. We were also the first to release all of our collision data from the fully autonomous service… Those were all before any regulator asked us for something. Amid the news, Waymo's chief product officer, Saswat Panigrahi, told CNBC that the self-driving car unit hasn't seen a change in tone from regulators or a shift in the company's public perception.
Waymo, for example, generally considered to be the leading autonomous vehicle operator in the world, only drove 628,838 miles, a 56-percent decrease compared to the 1.45 million miles it drove in 2019. That decrease is notable considering Waymo was recently approved to begin accepting passengers in its vehicles in preparation for the inevitable launch of a robotaxi service in California. Back in May, the CPUC had all but granted the expansion permits, then delayed the final vote twice amid mounting opposition from city agencies and residents. Since AVs hit the streets of San Francisco, there have been numerous instances of vehicles malfunctioning and stopping in the middle of the street — referred to as “bricking” — blocking the flow of traffic, public transit and emergency responders. As such, hitting a cone is a possible indicator the vehicle would hit something else it’s also trying to look for and avoid, such as a concrete bollard, which would cause great damage and be harder to see.
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Waymo, a spinoff of Google, had announced details for its service in Los Angeles in January as it sought state regulatory approval and local support. Within the last year, Waymo has offered free "tour" rides in Los Angeles, and last month, it received regulatory approval to expand to a paid service, despite pushback from the Teamsters union and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Most of the city agencies that spoke during Monday’s meeting with the CPUC agree that AV technology has the potential to save lives, improve traffic and reduce greenhouse gas emissions — just not quite yet. Waymo had a slightly better go of it, but that could be because the company has fewer vehicles on San Francisco’s roads. From January 1 to June 30, Waymo recorded 58 retrieval events and said it averages 10 minutes to retrieve bricked vehicles. Waymo’s higher crash numbers may also be because its vehicles drive more miles than those of other robotaxi companies, a Waymo spokesperson said.
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In July, the company shut down its self-driving trucks program to shift all its available resources to ride-hailing. I have worked with pretty high-scale systems before Waymo, at Google and Ericsson, and this is a pretty staggering scale. But the only number I can tell you is 25,000-plus virtual vehicles driving continuously, 24/7, learning from each other, and [tens of] billions of miles in simulations. Think of how much you or I drive in a year – we drive, what, 10,000 miles in any given year…? Now think of billions of miles of experience – close to seven orders of magnitude difference.
SF agencies ask CPUC to halt on 24/7 permit for now
It took Google's level of infrastructure because even to simulate at that scale, as you and I are speaking right now, 25,000 vehicles in our simulator are learning to drive better. To bring that, you need incredible infrastructure capability because even if you had the AI capability, without the infrastructure, it'd be very hard to bring that skill to bear – a decade of investment into AI before AI was cool. Although Waymo recorded more crashes, Cruise had a worse record in terms of injuries.
San Francisco sues over robotaxis Waymo, Cruise operations in the city - The Washington Post
San Francisco sues over robotaxis Waymo, Cruise operations in the city.
Posted: Tue, 23 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
In fact, it’s a slow, laborious, and politically fraught journey with an uncertain conclusion. The companies are convinced they can eventually win over skeptics and prove their vehicles are a relatively safe addition to the transportation infrastructure of any city. It’s not uncommon to see drivers trying to speed past cautious Cruise cars and slow-going Waymos; many will honk at AVs that stall on the roads, and one of our reporters narrowly avoided getting hit by an angry driver during a Cruise ride this week. In January, Cruise unveiled its Origin shuttle, a completely driverless vehicle on which it collaborated with GM and Honda. The Origin should follow a fleet of Cruise vehicles that will use autonomous Chevy Bolt EVs when the ride-hailing service launches. Waymo declined to comment on whether it plans to launch commercially in Atlanta, or any of the other cities in which it has started collecting mapping data.
Hotz hopes that Comma's software will become an industry standard among automakers, much as Android is an industry standard for smartphones not made by Apple. The company's business model—selling cars to end users—puts lidar sensors and high-density maps financially out of reach. Elon Musk has tried to spin this as a positive, calling lidar a "crutch." But the fact remains that almost every other company is using lidar and HD maps because it believes they are helpful.
The companies also shared data on instances in which someone from their team had to go and physically move a bricked AV, which they referred to as a “vehicle retrieval event” or VRE. With regulators, we have a very open dialogue and submitted more data than they ever asked for… So it has been a very positive engagement with them, but no change in tone. Companies must report everything from a minor fender bender—such as one that causes no damage to either car and normally would not be reported to the police—to incidents like deflating a tire in a pothole. Waymo recorded just two incidents in which injuries were reported in the same period. BrightDrop, GM’s commercial EV delivery business unit, plans to expand sales of its flagship electric vans to Mexico.
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation said the Waymo expansion was happening too soon, without enough local oversight of autonomous vehicle operations, but in an order last month state officials said that those concerns were unfounded. Waymo said Tuesday that more than 50,000 people were on its waitlist to use the service. The company did not say how many users it would allow to fully use the app starting Wednesday. Last month, the company said it was starting with a Los Angeles fleet of fewer than 50 cars covering a 63-square-mile area from Santa Monica to downtown L.A.
With no safety driver, that something bad always happens in that situation, and as such, the bar to operating without one is higher, and doing so for a million miles shows the confidence and internal numbers the teams have on their safety performance. In July, a group of driverless Cruise vehicles blocked traffic for hours after the cars inexplicably stopped working. Meanwhile, a driverless Waymo vehicle created a traffic jam in San Francisco after it stopped in the middle of an intersection earlier this month. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Cruise last December over concerns about the vehicles blocking traffic and causing rear-end collisions with hard braking. The bullish case for Tesla is that it has access to a vast trove of real-world driving data harvested from customers' vehicles. If you think limited training data is a major bottleneck for improving self-driving algorithms, then this might be a significant advantage.
Two-wheeler battery-swapping company Gogoro reported revenue of $87.2 million in Q2, down 3.8% YoY and up 0.2% on a constant currency basis. Of that revenue, $33.3 million came from its battery-swapping service, predominantly active in Taiwan, which is up 9.5% YoY. Archer Aviation raised $215 million in new capital from its manufacturing partner Stellantis, Boeing, United Airlines, Ark Investment Management LLC and others, to accelerate its path to commercialization. Boeing’s portion of that new investment is going to support the collaboration between Wisk and Archer on autonomy, a source told TechCrunch. Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot startup that spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates, is going public via a reverse merger with a blank-check company. In Phoenix, where Waymo first launched consumer access, it has about the same number of cars but no waiting list.
