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Instead of arriving at the Safeway, the Cruise app directed us to a pickup spot a couple blocks away on 19th Avenue. It pulled over on the busy street, leading to a few honks and dirty looks from frustrated drivers as we got situated in the vehicle. It’s one thing for a robotaxi to get through an empty street; it’s another to ask it to navigate construction, pedestrians, bicyclists and Muni trains.
Autonomous vehicles
As such, we might hope to see numbers on how often vehicles are needing to pause to resolve problems or blocking traffic, in particular how often they need remote assistance or worse, a rescue driver. While these events generally are not significant safety problems, and so should be expected and tolerated to a reasonable degree in the early years, companies will soon want to show they are doing well at this. So if you take LA, for example, West Hollywood is a bit like the dense parts of San Francisco, but its paths to the suburbs are very much like Phoenix.
Tesla’s latest update takes aim at cold weather woes
Inrix, the transportation analytics and connected car services, raised $70 million in a financing round from investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Morgan Stanley Tactical Value. Ahead of the merger, Serve raised $30 million in a round led by existing investors Uber, Nvidia and Wavemaker Partners. New investors Mark Tompkins and Republic Deal Room also participated. The startup/soon-to-be-public company has raised a total of $56 million. Sadly, Cruise can’t do the same and had at least 2 injury crashes.
Blocking first responders and other risks
And companies such as ArgoAI, with investment from Ford and the VW Group, and Mobileye, now part of Intel, are looking to carve out businesses in deliveries, consumer applications, data management, and regulatory strategy. Robotaxi companies had an active week, expanding coverage and services while the world waits for Tesla’s promised self-driving taxi in August. On one of my trips, this happened on a particularly tight, winding San Francisco street. As my Waymo and I negotiated with each other, we ended up blocking multiple cars, including a minivan whose driver started honking at us in frustration. While Waymo says it drives tens of thousands of trips a week, even the most tech-savvy people I talk to have yet to ride in one.
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You'd expect these companies to be capitalizing on their early leads by expanding rapidly, but neither seems to be doing that. It’s hard to get statistics on how often human drivers hit things like these with no damage to the car or the object. So it’s not clear if this should be counted as an at-fault crash to compare Waymo with a human, but even if it is, as the only one in a million miles, that’s a better record than the typical human. Much ado has been made of San Francisco’s major autonomous vehicle companies, Google-owned Waymo and General Motors-backed Cruise. But as regulators prepare to vote on the unlimited expansion of robotaxis in San Francisco, only a fairly limited subset of residents can say they’ve actually taken a ride in a self-driving car.
Deal of the week
Cruise Imploded in 2023. Can Robotaxis Recover in 2024? - The San Francisco Standard
Cruise Imploded in 2023. Can Robotaxis Recover in 2024?.
Posted: Fri, 29 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
The CPUC could then authorize the incremental expansion of AV services using that framework and the data collected. In a somewhat surprise twist — given how bitterly the legal battle had become — the two companies have agreed to collaborate, TechCrunch reported. Archer also agreed to make Wisk its exclusive provider of autonomy technology to be integrated into a future autonomous variant of Archer’s Midnight aircraft, in addition to the collaboration, according to a source familiar with the settlement.
And what if, when the data comes in, AVs are indeed safer than human drivers? By framing the conversation exclusively around vehicle safety, we ignore the chance to build a better future through bikes, buses and trains. Companies like Waymo and Cruise are trying to solve car problems by removing the human instead of removing the car. The total miles driven by Waymo and Cruise, 1.39 million, is 70 percent of the total autonomous miles driven in California in 2020. Both companies briefly grounded their vehicles in the early months of the pandemic, but Cruise was back on the road by late April, using deliveries to local food banks as a pretext. Waymo followed suit, resuming limited operations in June delivering packages for two Bay Area nonprofits.
Waymo is full speed ahead as safety incidents and regulators stymie competitor Cruise
Waymo notes with pride that no incidents involved vulnerable road users (though one did involve a minibike whose rider had fallen off, sending the riderless minibike into the path of the Waymo) and none were at intersections, the usual location of problems. On people we share the city with – communities, groups, like first responders, firefighters and so on – we're continuously engaged with them. We have trained more than 5,000 first responders in SF alone, multiple training sessions, and based on that have [brought] new features.
Hitting an orange cone
Autonomous vehicles registered in California traveled approximately 1.99 million miles in autonomous mode on public roads in 2020, a decrease of about 800,000 miles from the previous year, according to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. These mileage figures were reported as part of the state’s annual “disengagement reports,” which all licensed operators are required to submit. In addition to the miles driven, the reports list the frequency at which human safety drivers were forced to take control of their autonomous vehicles (also known as a “disengagement”). But claims of AV safety are simply not backed up by public data, which is itself sparse and disputed. Cruise, which is owned by GM, has said that compared to humans, its AVs get into 73% fewer crashes with a “meaningful risk of injury.” But San Francisco city officials have calculated an injury crash rate for robotaxis 6.3 times the national (human) average.
On the axis of weather, we're now doing rain and fog… and then the next, eventually, will be snow… What we're trying to make sure of is that we don't go to a city just to rubber-stamp it, just to be able to say that we're autonomous there. 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. The fact that Waymo has not yet received the go-ahead from the California PUC suggests the governing bodies that have the most info/data are not yet sold on Waymo's solution. Mostly, I just want to see if my logic seems right -- or if people have other thoughts or ideas on it.
If I'm wrong and Tesla's strategy does succeed, that would be very good news for Comma.ai, a self-driving startup founded by legendary hacker George Hotz. Comma is building an open source self-driving system designed to run on a smartphone. Comma's strategy is to enable early adopters to modify their own cars to take steering inputs from Comma's smartphone-based software—and then use the data harvested from those early customers to further improve the software in much the same way as Tesla. Like Tesla, Comma has eschewed lidar, arguing that it can achieve adequate performance with smartphone-grade cameras. In 2018, Waymo announced deals to purchase "up to" 82,000 vehicles for use in its taxi fleet, suggesting the company thought it was on the verge of large-scale commercial launch. The self-driving technology industry is in a strange state right now.
I dug into Proterra’s day one declaration and while some parallels can be drawn between Proterra and other failing or defunct EV companies, this company faces specific headwinds that took it down a rocky financial path. 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.
While Waymo and Cruise are hot competition with each other, the Bay Area’s ongoing experiment with robotaxis is not a race. 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. 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.
Waymo’s cars feel like they drive faster and along a more direct route, but there appear to be far fewer of them circulating in the city, meaning wait times can stretch well past a half hour. Instead of driving straight through Golden Gate Park, Cruise decided to go east on Lincoln Way before taking a strange southward sojourn on Stanyan Street, turning around in Cole Valley and heading back north. Thirty-four minutes, nearly twice the time it would have taken in a personal vehicle. The Standard’s ride with Cruise involved actually going in the opposite direction for a spell.
A Honda Accord made contact with the rear passenger side bumper of a Cruise AV while the robotaxi was trying to maneuver around a stopped semi truck. There was no passenger in the vehicle at the time, and there were no injuries reported. When a company adds a business unit, I wonder if it’s in trouble and looking for new ways to secure revenue. Xie says that Veo is still operating profitably and sees moving into retail as a good way to expand into new markets. The company is starting with limited sales this year and will grow its capacity in 2024 if all goes well. More fundamentally, it's hard to watch videos of Tesla's software in action and conclude that Tesla is in a leading position—or even that it is catching up to the leaders.
