FWIW, Cruise CEO takes to the orange site to dispel myths and rumors
the cruise CEO doing damage control (and lying their ass off) on the orange site makes sense, because all the former remote safety drivers I’ve talked to (admittedly none at Cruise) have been in agreement that self driving is absolutely fucked and the cars are essentially being remote controlled a majority of the time. some of the companies are also having what we engineers call fucking obvious problems like the high end GPUs they’ve packed into the cars overheating constantly, or the self driving software crashing due to bugs, both of which are situations that require immediate safety driver intervention
also, have the self driving crowd at the orange site never driven near one of these things? my area is known for aggressive drivers, but everyone gives the shitty robot cars a very wide berth (plus every exterior surface on these things is covered in extremely expensive sensors, and even the smallest operational self driving company has more than enough funding to bury you in lawyers before they ever admit fault in an accident)
it would be entirely consistent with what he is saying for the car to ask “should I run over this child” every few minutes, as long as it only takes the operator say six seconds to click NO
more generally, it would be consistent with his claims for someone to be almost constantly watching the video and inputting instructions, as long as the instructions are discrete and do not constitute taking sustained control of the vehicle. if you had a vehicle that had to be manually informed every time a light was to be stopped at or a lane was to be changed into, as long as you don’t take over the wheel that would be completely hidden in his stats. he’s 100% bullshitting
from my current understanding, this is extremely likely to be the case. it’s an incredibly unsafe system that doesn’t scale beyond small-scale testing, but this is most likely the only practical way to divide the attention of a relatively small number of safety drivers between multiple cars that need constant correction
