Driving home the other night an empty Cruise car with no driver was stopped in the center lane on Fell street. A little off center in the lane with no hazard lights on.<p>Does Cruise have remote operators that are watching for weird stuff and can take some manual intervention from afar?<p>Like someone to remotely turn on the hazards and to dispatch a person to go move it if it’s malfunctioning.<p>I’m very pro self driving cars but obviously there are some “bugs” to work out still.
The self-driving car almost running over hoses thing? That's a problem. The obvious answer to me is an emergency stop button mounted on the hood behind glass like fire alarms have.<p>I took a ride in a Cruise self-driving car. I used the Cruise app, told it where to pick me up and where to drop me off, and then a car showed up. I used the app to unlock the doors and then got in, and then got to my destination, in awe. There are ton of nits I could pick about the trip, and it was a bit contrived because I'm not in the service area, but holy shit I got from point A to point B without a driver in the car and it wasn't a ride at Disneyland.<p>I'm sure there will continue to be growing pains. Uber killing the bicyclist is simply terrible. My un-expert opinion is it'll take years longer to arrive, but the self-driving car future is coming, ever so slowly.
As someone who commuted by motorcycle in SF for several years, I have a hard time imagining any barely-competent self-driving car being worse than those maniacs in the Yellow Cabs.
All the examples of bad interactions are from Cruise, not Waymo.<p>So maybe restrict Cruise? Or allow expansion only for companies that show excellency? In my opinion that would be a shame to prevent good implementations from being used because of the existence of bad implementations from competitors.
Does the local government have any leverage over a firm that's causing issues on the road? Beyond individual ticketing I mean. Like if Uber is causing issues, what legal standing does SF have to prevent them from doing so?<p>Doing drive testing of self-driving cars on public roads is always a risk, but lots of other entities cause road issues.
Similar article: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34567186" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34567186</a>
There is only one set of stats that matters here: crashes, fatalities, incidents etc per km compared to similar journeys. Everything else is bullshit and emotion and politics.
Bring them to Austin, TX, we aren't afraid of technology. I would take a bet anytime that on average these are far more safe and less apt to wreck than the average driver here; drivers here are awful.