I was reading California suspends Cruise’s autonomous vehicle deployment, which is about a self-driving car company’s (Cruise) failures, and how regulators banned them because they were deemed unsafe. The triggering incident:

In the Order of Suspension, the California DMV said that the Cruise vehicle initially came to a hard stop and ran over the pedestrian. After coming to a complete stop, it then attempted to do a “pullover maneuver while the pedestrian was underneath the vehicle.” The car crawled along at 7 mph for about 20 feet, then came to a final stop. The pedestrian remained under the car the whole time.

The day after the incident, DMV representatives met with Cruise to “discuss the incident.” During that meeting, Cruise only showed footage up to the first complete stop, according to the Order of Suspension. No one at Cruise told the officers or showed any footage of the subsequent pullover maneuver and dragging. The DMV only learned of that from “another government agency.” When DMV asked for footage of that part of the incident, Cruise provided it.

It’s difficult to read this in any other way than “Cruise fucked up, they knew it but tried to cover it up”, and that’s why the DMV pulled the plug. This is bad, but not all in all very surprising or interesting, unlike the experiences of some of the commenters in the above Hacker News thread. For example, this comment:

Cruise cars do not perform acceptably.

They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far below the level of most Human drives.

They don’t work in the rain, they can’t handle construction, they block garages and driveways.

Unfortunately, this makes sense to me: self-driving is hard. In fact, it is so hard to solve in the general case (i.e. to be able to handle all scenarios) that I am low-key convinced that solving it would be equivalent to creating a true artificial intelligence. We are so, so far from that that I’m not even really sure that this whole self-driving business makes sense, even though the cost of human-operated cars is measured in deaths in the ten-thousands worldwide each year.

What does surprise me is that the same commenter continues:

Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down.

Huh. Waymo is Google’s self-driving project, and looks like they have a fan. Another comment concurs:

From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I’ve seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do. […]

Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn’t get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic. There was zero chance a human would pull that off. Not enough time for a head check or mirror check. There wouldn’t have been an accident but the Waymo clearly has insane reaction time and vision advantages - and uses them.

Yet another comment:

I saw a Waymo come to a screeching halt in a split second as a… less than intelligent individual… skateboarded in front of a bus, into the extremely busy road.

If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question.

Sometimes I’m riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I’m like “dang, why did I doubt you, robotic overload?”

The best part is that it works the same way in the day time vs the night time.

Magic.

Of course, one has to wonder if these are just “fanboys”, but wow, sounds way impressive! Waymo’s website does have a very impressive Safety page, making all the right sounds. I’m cautiously optimistic, but let’s see if they manage to roll it out anywhere else.