This reminds me of a Kickstarter campaign I saw a few months ago. The campaign's goal was to build low-cost bouncing balls that cleared mine fields. You could roll the ball into a dangerous, abandoned area and it would cause dormant mines to explode.<p>The problem with that campaign is that it instilled a false sense of confidence. The technology was "an in-between": certainly better than nothing, but not as effective or safe as traditional mine-clearing methods.<p>Cruise is in a similar position. They have a chance to improve people's lives and prevent serious injuries. At the same time, they're toeing a delicate line between improving drivers' safety and causing them to become complacent.
Comments here are fairly negative. Pointing to downsides, insufficient upsides and such. Gimme fully self driving or go home. Here's my perspective:<p>I think that self driving cars are coming and that. Even cars that drive on built-for-human roads are just a bridging technology. Eventually roads will be built for robocars. I think it's a big important technology. All transport revolutions are.<p>To get on that road we need to start getting this tech into consumer land, a beachhead. I don't know if this specific product is it, but it could be. It's got a nice gradual path from cruise control plus to auto-drive for 80% of the ride.<p>There might be other beachheads. Long haul trucking is often mentioned. This seems like a very similar problem. They both need to deal with highway driving only. Maybe robocar friendly road networks will be extended into built up areas.<p>I'm happy to see a company take what's working now and put it in a consumer product. We'll see if people like it. If they do, it seems like a good a place to start developing this stuff outside of research labs.<p>edit: clarity
I understand why this sort of progress is interesting... but I feel like in this form, this is of minimal value. If I have to pay attention anyway (because of the risk of failure or situations it can't understand), then it isn't that helpful. I mean, it isn't like I can just zone out and read a book: I still have to pay just as much information.<p>Actually, to be more concrete, I definitely see the utility of this as an extra line of safety (a fallback if/when the driver does lose focus). But as something that is "between cruise control and self driving cars"... nope, not convinced. I wish it were pitched more conservatively.
This "frightens" me a lot more than the Google car does. I trust that automated cars will be safe "enough." I don't think I would necessarily trust an automated car that can find itself in a situation in which a driver needs to intervene. I barely trust other drivers on the road (maybe its the NYC driver in me...). Trusting those drivers' reaction times in a situation where the car needs to disable automation would require a lot of built up good will/trust.<p>That being said, I think this could be a great idea for more closed environments. Honestly, I'm not really sure where they are. Maybe huge airport parking lots (as "drop offs" at specific locations), or in large corporate parks or something of that nature.
No car on the market offers a driving assist at this level (both lane tracking and distance keeping). I personally drive hundreds of freeway miles a week and would pay much more than 10k to avoid doing that.<p>It has been super impressive to watch the Cruise team of just 4 built a car that can drive down the freeway in just 7 months.
Related technologies that sit somewhere between cruise control and self-driving cars in terms of automation (I only have personal experience with older versions of the BMW and MB systems, and the situation has clearly improved in the last few years):<p>- BMW active cruise control will automatically adjust if you get too close to the car in front of you<p>- Infiniti cars will stop themselves if they detect obstructions in the direction of motion (rear and forward)<p>- Ford cars can perform the motions of parallel parking<p>- Mercedes-Benz cars warn you when you drift into the next lane<p>Other car manufacturers have related technologies.
When I lived in San Diego, my route for my bike commute to work included Interstate 5[0], because bikes can legally take the interstate shoulder in California where there's no practical alternative route. Y'all handling that edge case?<p>[0] Here: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@32.886728,-117.225045,3a,25.3y,309.37h,87.92t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s5mXyWboVy6eWKnGq6mWsvw!2e0" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@32.886728,-117.225045,3a,25.3y,...</a> (note the bottom of the Bike Route sign says 'use I-5 shoulder')
Mad props to the Cruise guys for taking this on. This kind of life and death programming is not something I'm willing to do. Just too freakin scary.
Self-driving cars will not be able to catch on without legislation limiting damages to manufacturers.<p>Proponents of self-driving cars predict ~90% reduction in fatalities. What this means is that over 3000 people per year will be killed by self-driving cars. This is way better than what we have now, but in fatal car crashes, often the driver at fault is killed, and juries tend to assess much lower damages against dead people than against large corporations.<p>Combine that with the fact that there typically aren't any damages at all awarded for single-occupant single-car collisions where the driver is at fault, and it seems entirely possible that the total damages awarded for traffic fatalities could stay at the current level, or even go up, leaving the manufacturers of self-driving cars to foot the bill.<p>Now, I generally think that laws to cap damages are not good policy, as it does make it harder to discourage negligence or even malfeasance.
I wonder what the long term goal is? Getting acquired by some auto manufacturer?<p>I don't see many people that own modern enough cars (having the required electronics/mechanics already installed so all that's needed is a sensor and some data processing to send out control signals) investing into a retrofit device instead of just buying the next model which comes with the same thing out of the box.<p>But I have to say that I'm impressed that they have made it this far, and almost certainly without any support from Audi.
I don't want my car to <i>steer</i> itself, at least not just yet, but I do want to add a radar-based aftermarket active cruise control system to it that can maintain a preset following distance to the car ahead by controlling the accelerator and brakes.<p>This was actually available as a factory option in my car, but I didn't order it because I thought (incorrectly) that it didn't work in stop-and-go traffic. I've been kicking myself for that ever since.<p>Perhaps Cruise could consider developing an ACC system for the benefit of customers who would welcome some automation but who aren't quite ready to surrender the steering wheel yet.
FYI:
<a href="http://reserve.getcruise.com/join-the-driverless-revolution" rel="nofollow">http://reserve.getcruise.com/join-the-driverless-revolution</a><p>The font here is illegible. Some weird anti-aliases very-thin white-on-black. Highlighting doesn't help.
Or, you could just buy the already existing product. Is there anything they want to add beyond these?<p><a href="http://www.mercedes-benz-intelligent-drive.com/com/en/1_driver-assistance-and-safety/2_distronic-plus-with-steering-assist" rel="nofollow">http://www.mercedes-benz-intelligent-drive.com/com/en/1_driv...</a><p>For Mercedes: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSXUApikcOk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSXUApikcOk</a><p>For Audi: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8sJwuZyVAY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8sJwuZyVAY</a><p>Similarly from other high-end car producers.
This is exactly the sort of thing I want to do next. Good luck guys!<p>It's perfect. A real world problem with world changing impact. It's hard. Its orders of magnitude harder than anything else startups are doing around here! The opportunity is almost infinite, and there are potentially billions of dollars to be made. I wish I was working on it!<p>I really hope these guys go all the way – although I'm sure there will be a ton of offers along the road. I wouldn't be surprised if Google X hadn't already made an offer, but if it comes down to it, I hope they go with Tesla over Google X. I got an inside look at their autopilot project a few months ago, and I'm really excited about it!<p>Honestly though, there are probably a lot of other big players who could be interested – Amazon especially. Again though, I really hope they take this all the way to a mass market consumer product, preferably with multiple iterations, while expanding the capabilities toward what Elon described as the 99% Autonomous autopilot.
This feels like an addition to the future self driving cars more than anything else. Sort of like a adaptive cruise control (ACC) or Active Lane Keeping Assist in Mercedes? I see trust & cost being a major hurdle here. Like trusting a self driving car to take you home.<p>I believe we need to totally remove the driver to really stop the number of deaths on the roads. As indicated below by others, there are plenty of bad drives in the day.<p>When I came to the valley few years ago I was shocked to see the number of drivers failing to use indicators (blinkers). As a pedestrian this was alarming. How do you cross the road not knowing intent of so many cars on the road. As a driver it was tough to gauge the intent of drivers around you. The human behind the steering wheel is the problem and that is where most of the disruption should be focused on.<p>Once we replace the human driver from the machine we will see less deaths on the road, faster commutes and more efficient use of resources.
I've been thinking about the applications of auto-driving cars a lot over the last year or so, and I think this kind of consumer use is not likely to be that successful.<p>It seems more likely to me that this kind of highway driving system would be installed and work on tractor-trailers. It's a good compromise; drivers keep their jobs but get less stress, and when these are legalized with less issues, the next stage where driverless trucks are introduced can come into play easier legislatively.<p>Legislation will likely be the biggest issue with these things in the United States. Taxi drivers already oppose Uber and Lyft; what do you think they'd do with an invention that removes their profession entirely? And their legislative pull pales in comparison to the teamsters'.<p>So, this kind of staging is a good idea for introduction to driverless vehicles. It just won't work for an Audi.
I'm very curious about the procedures and paradigms followed to develop the safety critical software inside the system, as well as the engineering pedigree of the developers. I don't mean this in a rude, finger pointing way, just proposing that some background and a slightly deeper technical description of the precautions would make a huge difference in confidence level.<p>For example, are the redundancy systems space and time separated? What kind of methods were used to ensure that? Are there any overall hardware, software, communications development standards used and audited? Does anyone on the team have demonstrated experience in these areas?<p>If this system were to be audited, what organization would be responsible?<p>Thanks guys, great work so far and excellent vision!
What about exterior cameras combined with interior projection to provide an AR experience? Show optimum trailing distance, highlight hazards, display useful information in the field of view. Is that illegal to do, perhaps?
Reading through all the safety concerns reminds me of this:<p><a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-dea...</a>
The problem I see is, if you still have to be fully attentive, supervising the computer and ready to take over, but not actually <i>do</i> anything... driving will be mind-numbingly boring. (That's assuming people are even capable of maintaining that attention, which many other comments address.) I mean, driving is usually already kind of boring, but at least the task keeps some part of your mind occupied. If the computer can take over completely - Google style - then you can do something else entirely. But this sounds like some kind of intermediate purgatory.
Mmmm according to the article Cruise is not a driver replacement. It can steer, brake, and avoid objects. I'm sure it can be quite safe on a highway, but what are its limits? Can can and cannot do?
There's going to be a big business in self driving car retrofits -- convert non-self driving to self driving. But it's going to need to be fully automated for people to bother.
Self driving cars have to deal with a human centric analog world. Why not add a layer of information to help them ? smart paint to help align, smart milestones and road signs broadcasting local driving constraints. Your car will read these and plan accordingly, instead of relying on heavy computer vision to be interpreted ?
tl;dr<p>Q.A.<p>The homepage video play button doesn't work in Firefox (latest stable release)...<p>[imagining RP-1 driving me off a cliff the moment I venture onto an unsupported road]
And....for $1.50 you can put a brick on the gas pedal.<p>Now, this is missing many of the features of autonomous cars like the ones Google is developing and the driver will need to remain at the wheel and ready to take over in case of emergency...<p>(ok, let the down votes commence. I couldn't resist. It's great people are working on things, and I hope something comes of it but this seems like a case of all or nothing to me).