Autonomous Vehicles News & Discussions

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Cruise expands Pheonix service area by 20x

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Cruise and Waymo Robotaxi Expansion Plans Despite Many Recorded Problems
August 9, 2023 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/08/c ... blems.html
Cruise is expanding its self-driving car operation to Los Angeles.

CNBC reports Cruise has 400 robotaxi’s and most are in San Francisco. There are over 2000 robotaxi vehicles in California.

Cruise is increasing autonomous rides by 49% per month and are doing more than 10,000 rides per week.

Cruise CEO said they were operating tens of autonomous vehicles in 2022. 400 in 2023 and they plan thousands in 2024.

Cruise and Waymo are requesting expanded operations in San Francisco despite block traffic and emergency vehicles many dozens of times.

The local NBC reporter has a recording of his second Cruise ride resulted in blocking traffic for twenty minutes.

Robotaxis on public streets are causing dozens of problems each month for firetrucks, ambulances and police cars and city traffic. California state agencies have set up the rules where city leaders cannot block autonomous vehicle regulation. San Francisco and Los Angeles are fighting the expansion of robotaxi operations.

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One day after receiving approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand driverless vehicles’ presence in San Francisco, Cruise experienced issues that halted traffic in the city.

Viewer video (above) sent to KRON4 shows at least five Cruise cars blocking traffic Friday night in the North Beach neighborhood. The driverless cars stopped in the middle of the road and prevented travelers from driving around the traffic.

At least six Cruise vehicles were seen causing traffic near Grant Avenue and Vallejo Street. One person in the video is heard saying there were approximately 10 stationary Cruise cars.

The Cruise cars stopped because of “wireless connectivity issues,” a Cruise spokesperson said in a statement to KRON4. The autonomous vehicle company confirmed connectivity issues were linked to Outside Lands, which held its first day of the three-day music festival.

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/vid ... -festival/

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Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

A Cruise vehicle got stuck in wet concrete driving around San Francisco’s Western Addition Tuesday afternoon.

Paul Harvey, a San Francisco resident who lives in the area, told SFGATE in an interview that he saw the car stuck at a construction site on Golden Gate Avenue between Fillmore and Steiner Streets. The car had no passengers inside.

“I can see five different scenarios where bad things happen and this is one of them,” Harvey told SFGATE. “It thinks it’s a road and it ain’t because it ain’t got a brain and it can’t tell that it’s freshly poured concrete.”

He later saw people pulling the vehicle out and onto the road. A Cruise spokesperson confirmed to SFGATE that Cruise workers removed the vehicle from the concrete, and the vehicle has since been recovered by the company.

Read more here: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/cru ... 297946.php

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One day after receiving approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand driverless vehicles’ presence in San Francisco, Cruise experienced issues that halted traffic in the city.

Viewer video (above) sent to KRON4 shows at least five Cruise cars blocking traffic Friday night in the North Beach neighborhood. The driverless cars stopped in the middle of the road and prevented travelers from driving around the traffic.

At least six Cruise vehicles were seen causing traffic near Grant Avenue and Vallejo Street. One person in the video is heard saying there were approximately 10 stationary Cruise cars.

The Cruise cars stopped because of “wireless connectivity issues,” a Cruise spokesperson said in a statement to KRON4. The autonomous vehicle company confirmed connectivity issues were linked to Outside Lands, which held its first day of the three-day music festival.

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/vid ... -festival/

Cruise: Pedestrian caused North Beach traffic jam, not Outside Lands
Source: San Francisco Examiner

Despite widespread reports, the crowds at Outside Lands had nothing to do with the Cruise vehicles that stalled causing a blocks-long traffic backup in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood last week.

Instead, the logjam was created by a pedestrian who intentionally interfered with a robotaxi, Cruise confirmed to The Examiner on Wednesday.

Still, the tens of thousands of Outside Lands concert-goers did worsen cell tower issues for the autonomous vehicle-company.

On Friday night, Cruise, which was servicing Outside Lands for all three days of the festival, needed to remotely assist several of its self-driving cars to help them navigate the massive congestion of people in and around the concert, the company said.

But bandwidth issues on the local cell network, exacerbated by the enormous concentration of people on their phones in Golden Gate Park, slowed down Cruise workers’ ability to access the vehicles. Those remote connection problems prompted Cruise to move and shut down several vehicles near the park.

Cruise maintained that at no point did the company lose connection to the network.

"Last weekend, Cruise successfully transported thousands of concert-goers, amidst widespread reports of traffic congestion, contributing to a very small portion of traffic blockages overall on Friday night,” Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow told The Examiner. “We addressed these issues and did not see any recurrence throughout the Saturday or Sunday concert days.”

But things didn't go as smoothly along Grant Avenue in The City’s North Beach neighborhood Friday, when a pedestrian intentionally interfered with a driverless vehicle, causing it to stop.

As the car idled waiting for a remote worker to clear it, other Cruise cars picking up and dropping off riders in the area stopped behind the lead car, causing a chain reaction of stalled vehicles and snarling traffic.

Cruise didn’t specify how the person forced the vehicle to stop but said that the company resolved the backup after 15 minutes.

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Cruise is cutting its robotaxi fleet by 50% after two crashes in San Francisco
Source: Quartz

Robotaxi company Cruise, owned by GM, has agreed to comply with California regulator demands and slash its San Francisco fleet in half after two of its driverless cars were involved in collisions last week. The order comes just over a week after Cruise gained approval from California’s public utilities authority to operate at all hours in the city.

One of the company’s driverless taxis was involved in a crash with an emergency vehicle on Aug. 17, Cruise stated on X (formerly Twitter). A passenger within the vehicle sustained “non-severe injuries,” according to Cruise. Another robotaxi with no passengers was involved in a separate incident the same day, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) ordered Cruise to “immediately reduce its active fleet of operating vehicles by 50%” as it investigates the crashes, according to an email statement quoted in Bloomberg on Aug. 19. The DMV also said the reduction must remain in place until Cruise “takes appropriate corrective actions to improve road safety.”

“We are investigating to better understand our AVs performance, and will be in touch with the City of San Francisco about the event,” Cruise tweeted on Aug. 18. It is now permitted to operate 50 driverless cars during the day in San Francisco, and 150 at night. Quartz contacted Cruise for comment.

The San Francisco Fire Department has opposed robotaxi expansion in the city

One of the crashes last week involved a fire truck, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) confirmed with Reuters. The vehicle, according to its report, had its lights and sirens on and was driving through an intersection in the city’s Tenderloin district when it struck a Cruise robotaxi that was moving forward on a green light.

When asked what happened, one firefighter said to the SFPD that the Cruise car appeared to have “lurched,” ABC7 news reported.

Cruise published an update of their own analysis of the incident on Aug. 18 in a blog post. “The AV’s ability to successfully chart the emergency vehicle’s path was complicated by the fact that the emergency vehicle was in the oncoming lane of traffic, which it had moved into to bypass the red light.”

San Francisco fire chief Jeanine Nicholson has cautioned California authorities against expanding the use of driverless vehicles in the city for months. In a hearing on Aug. 7, she cited 55 instances (pdf) in which robotaxis impeded the fire department’s operations.

“The biggest concern is that someone is going to get really severely injured or killed because we cannot properly respond to an incident,” Nicholson said to ABC7 news in June. “We need them [robotaxi companies] to come to the table with their engineering people and their policy people and work with us so something catastrophic doesn’t happen.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation (pdf) into Cruise in December following multiple reports of driving malfunctions, including sudden braking and becoming “immobilized” while driving.

California authorities just approved Cruise for wider operations in San Francisco

The two crashes occurred one week after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) gave Cruise and its competitor Waymo the greenlight to operate at all hours in San Francisco. It was a contentious decision—vocally opposed by some public officials and San Franciscans—that followed a seven-hour-long public hearing.

Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier in August that multiple local agencies are planning to challenge the CPUC’s decision. “This is just the beginning,” he said, and later added, “It is time for Governor Newsom to weigh in for public safety before somebody gets killed.”

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Tesla FSD 12 Changes the World With Robotaxi Level FSD and World Changing Teslabots Within 24 Months
August 30, 2023 by Brian Wang
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/08/t ... onths.html

Video only learning from end to end neural networks in Tesla FSD 12 is like the large language model Chatgpt. Adding more video data and compute will make Tesla FSD vastly better in months. Tesla FSD is also the basis for the real world AI for Teslabot.

Tesla FSD, robotaxi level FSD and factory and real world usable Teslabots should all arrive within 24 months.

Tesla increased their available compute by seven times this week by enabling 10,000 Nvidia H100 chips. Tesla now has over 100,000 Nvidia A100 chips worth of AI compute.

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Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than human-driven ones, says new research led by Swiss Re

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California governor vetoes bill banning robotrucks without safety drivers

Source: Reuters

California Governor Gavin Newsom late on Friday vetoed a bill to prevent heavy-duty driverless trucks from operating in the state, in a relief for companies developing autonomous technology to haul goods across the U.S.

The labor-backed Assembly Bill 316, which requires a trained human driver to be present in autonomous vehicles weighing over 10,001 pounds, was passed by a heavy majority in both houses of the state legislature.

"Considering... the existing regulatory framework that presently and sufficiently governs this particular technology, this bill is not needed at this time," Newsom said in a veto message on Friday.

A veto by the governor can still be overturned if the legislature chooses to vote in favor of the bill with a two-thirds majority in each house. This, however, is rare and has not happened in California since 1979.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos- ... erm=092323

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Two is better than one.

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Cruise opens robotaxi service in Houston
Source: TechCrunch

GM’s self-driving car subsidiary Cruise has opened its robotaxi service to users in Houston — an expansion that comes amid increasing criticism of the company’s operations in San Francisco, it’s first launch city.

Cruise said it will operate seven days a week from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. in about 11 square miles of sprawling Houston, including Downtown, Midtown, East Downtown, Montrose, Hyde Park and River Oaks neighborhoods. Cruise has about 400 vehicles spread across Austin, Houston, Phoenix and San Francisco. While the company doesn’t break down how many vehicles are in each city, it typically launches in a new city with a small fleet — around a dozen — and scales from there.

Cruise, which is headquartered in San Francisco, expanded into Texas late last year. The company started testing its self-driving Chevy Bolts in Austin, where it added its purpose-built Origin vehicles in spring 2023. In May, Cruise began testing its robotaxis — with a human safety driver behind the wheel — in Houston and Dallas. Cruise then expanded to so-called driverless testing, which means the human safety operator was no longer behind the wheel. The company said that in August it began offering driverless rides to Cruise employees and “select friends and family.”

Cruise said it has driven about 1 million miles in Texas. The announcement Thursday now gives customers the ability to order a driverless robotaxi via the Cruise app. In a bid to boost demand, Cruise is offering $5 flat fares for all trips for a limited time.

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Cruise suspends driverless robotaxi operations nationwide
Source: CBS News

Cruise has halted operations of its driverless cars across the country, the autonomous vehicle company announced Thursday evening.

The move comes after the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday suspended Cruise LLC's deployment of driverless cars in San Francisco.

The DMV said the vehicles were deemed "not safe for the public's operation" and that the manufacturer "misrepresented" information related to their safety.

In an announcement Thursday posted on X (formerly Twitter), the company said it wanted to rebuild public trust.

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Comma AI Self Driving Close Behind Tesla FSD
October 31, 2023 by Brian Wang

The comma 3X is custom hardware designed to live in your car, and purpose built to run openpilot. The comma 3X has three beautiful HDR cameras, two cameras to watch the road and one night-vision camera to see inside the car. Besides cameras, the comma 3X has a suite of connectivity and sensors including cellular LTE, Wi-Fi, an IMU, high-precision GPS, and microphones.

Comma 3X gives a comfortable highway self driving experience based upon early reviews.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/10/c ... um=twitter

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