Cruise self-driving taxi gets wheels stuck in wet cement Just days after Cruise won the right to operate completely computer-controlled taxi rides in San Francisco at all hours, one of its units has got stuck in wet cement. Reports coming from both local media and social media on Tuesday show the front tires of a Cruise car sunk deeply into a drying part of fresh-patched road at a …
"Just as stupid as a human driver" is not the pitch for self-driving vehicles, though. They're supposed to be safer. If they're actually, as seems to be the case, much worse at actually navigating city traffic (and with the bonus of converting cell network congestion into traffic jams), what's the point? Just to remove more jobs from the market?
The description of the concrete incident reminds of the principle of fail-safe, on perhaps the lack of it. Instead of assuming a road is a road until you see specific signs like a red "STOP" one, you assume that nothing is a road until proven otherwise. Is it flat but wet? Either not a road or a dangerously slippy road. Is it wet and raining? Then probably acceptable to ignore the previous condition but slow down anyway.
The "10 car pile up" was actually "backed up" because this was fail-safe. There wasn't enough bandwidth and so the cars chose to not risk it. Although I am confused what they need all that bandwidth for. Are they streaming video to a dark room full of preteens trying to score 1000 points for hitting a pedestrian? (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105629/)
Yeah I would have presumed that the majority of the operations of the self-driving features would be done on-board, and therefore any bandwidth issues would merely stop real-time reporting back to the mothership, or the ability to cope with more advanced driving (and still leave it with the capability to drive around at least).
> I am pretty sure that human drivers have done, do and will do this all the time... but it doesn't get reported
There are no "local papers" anymore; Google sees all. Top of the hits for "car in concrete" minus this event:
Car drives into Fort Dodge construction zone, gets stuck in ...
Oops! Woman cited for driving rental car into freshly poured ... — The driver reportedly misconstrued the freshly poured concrete for a turn lane, and she drove directly into wet concrete.
Car stuck in wet concrete in construction zone in Clark County
{premeditation} Can you drive cars over newly poured concrete right away?
Vehicle drives onto freshly poured concrete - Aug 6, 2021 — A driver's vehicle got stuck in wet concrete on Southbound I-275 near Eureka Road. Car gets stuck in wet concrete in downtown Cleveland ...
2018 — The car was submerged in wet concrete; workers dug around the vehicle for minutes before pulling the driver to safety.
Washington woman gets stolen car stuck in fresh concrete ...
2022 — A driver caused a major setback in Lakewood, Washington, on Monday after driving a stolen car into fresh concrete that crews had poured at a ...
Driver in stolen car stopped by wet concrete in Lakewood
2022 — — Lakewood City Inspector Chris Phippen said he watched a woman drive through nearly 100 feet of wet concrete, get stuck in the freshly poured ...
Car gets stuck in freshly-poured concrete in Grand Forks 2021 — GRAND FORKS, N.D. - A car had to be removed by a construction tractor Tuesday morning after getting stuck in wet concrete ...
Woman gets allegedly stolen car stuck in fresh concrete 2022 — Fresh concrete snares stolen Mini Cooper, WA cops say. A kid and whiskey were inside car ... The allegedly intoxicated ...
PHOTOS: Car drives into wet concrete in Springfield 2023 — DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – A driver found himself in a sticky situation after driving through a ...
Car drives into fresh concrete at site of water main break
2020 — — Drivers who take Lahser will have to deal with road construction for a little while longer, after a car drove into fresh concrete.
That's an awful lot of people driving through fenced off areas, barriers and/or lines of cones. Or are the rules different in the US (or at least some parts), where road repairs/construction is managed very differently such that it's possible to mistakenly drive into the fresh concrete/tarmac/asphalt?
At least a few of those appear to be stolen cars, at least one by a drunk thief, so probably not the sharpest knives in the drawer were driving them, but still, after 30 years on the road in my current job averaging around 50-60,000 miles per year, I can't say i've ever come across roadworks so badly signed, marked out and coned/barriered off that someone would accidentally drive into wet concrete. Not saying it's never happed here mind, I just can't see how it might happen :-)
Agreed, but the paucity of cones visible in the photos sort of indicates they didn't use all that many. In that situation, I'd expect there to be cones no more than a few feet apart down the length of the works. That photo implies the cones are something like two car lengths apart, at least. I'd also like to see the approach to the works too, just to confirm my suspicions :-)
"... a 10 car pile up following the Outside Lands music festival. Cruise explained that the festival created wireless bandwidth constraints that delayed connectivity for its vehicles."
Err, the basic safety of the vehicle depends on having a good wifi signal (or even a good radio signal of some undefined kind)? That sounds like dangerous engineering to me! There's no chance they could guarantee it where I live in the UK, for example.
That's not what I understand when I read "wireless bandwidth constraints that delayed connectivity".
To me, that means that, if the vehicle cannot connect to the mothership in a timely fashion, it's ability to continue is heavily impacted.
That, in my mind, eliminates any possibility of using that kind of vehicle outside of a well-covered city.
No trips to the countryside are possible.
Maybe someone could suggest plugging in an 8GB SD cars with a street map on it? That's the storage on my SatNav, which includes all of the UK and Western Europe roads in detail and much of the rest of the worlds main roads. I'm sure the system could cope with "knowing" where it is by matching the GPS co-ordinates with the street map and all those other "location awareness" sensors bristling around the bumpers, windscreen and on the roof for a short while.
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In what way am i troll ?
Im a troll for pointing out how much of your life is wasted sitting in a car ?
Am i troll because bosses wastes hours every week to come to offices when people could be working from home ?
Is there a special reward for wasting hundreds of hours in a car every year for no money and achieving nothing ?
Hey if driving is so wonderful why dont. you drive double the time tomorrow for the rest of the year ?
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