Driverless car startup Cruise's no good, terrible year

www.npr.org /2023/12/30/1222083720/driverless-cars-gm-cruise-waymo-san-francisco-accidents

Driverless car startup Cruise's no good, terrible year::undefined

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I'm not sure why I feel the need to preface this comment, but, I work in software, I get how hard a problem autonomous driving is, how genuine safety improvements over human drivers are highly valuable, and how perfect need not be the enemy of good.

However, the level of sheer blind optimism from the AV crowd is the same as the AI "leaders" and the crypto bros before them. How their statements are not straight up fraud is beyond me.

The reality of them needing to have a remote team of drivers intervening every 2 to 5 miles of driving, within an urban setting very much designed for cars, is so far away from the picture they paint.

No wonder the tech industry has a dog shit reputation.
- People have been saying since the 1950 that this time they really cracked the code of AI and soon it will (enter lofty claim here). I mean some serious steps have been made but in the end it never lived up to the promises made. I've got no reason to believe that this time will be different.
  
  I mean, I think it’s a little different in that there’s tangible AI products that millions of people are already using?
  
  I have my own doubts about how the current architectures scale towards “general intelligence”, but seems like a very real breakthrough that is already producing at a significant level.
The Cruise propaganda video that Derek from Veritasium put out on YouTube is what finally got me to unsubscribe/block his channel. Cruise was using shady tactics way before these safety incidents.

Relevant Vid: https://youtu.be/CM0aohBfUTc
- I was with it until the SurfShark promo bit, which, painfully ironically, has almost-lies and 'yes but actually no' bits all throughout it. Dude shoots himself in the foot.
  
  I had no idea. I use SponsorBlock to avoid seeing sponsored segments like that one. Thanks for the heads-up.
This is the best summary I could come up with:

As 2022 wrapped up, CEO Kyle Vogt took to Twitter to post about the company's autonomous vehicles rolling onto the streets of San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix.

Local reports showed footage of confused vehicles clogging a residential cul-de-sac, driving into wet cement at a construction site and regularly running red lights.

They tallied nearly 75 incidents where self-driving cars got in the way of rescue operations, including driving through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways, running over fire hoses and refusing to move for first responders.

"Our folks cannot be paying attention to an autonomous vehicle when we've got ladders to throw," San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson said in an August hearing.

Based on police reports and initial video footage from Cruise, the woman was first struck by a hit-and-run human driver whose vehicle threw her into the path of the driverless car.

The new video footage showed the Cruise car striking the pedestrian, running her over, and then dragging her an additional 20 feet at 7 miles per hour as it pulls to the curb and stops on top of her.

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