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- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
Slashdot Summary
Cruise stopped its driverless operations nationwide last week. But the New York Times reports on the company’s moves since then…
- Cruise hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate its response to a San Francisco incident involving a pedestrian, “including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media.”
- A separate review of the incident is being doncuted by Exponent, a consulting firm that evaluates complex software systems.
- The company’s rivals “fear Cruise’s issues could lead to tougher driverless car rules for all of them.”
- “Cruise employees worry that there is no easy way to fix the company’s problems, said five former and current employees and business partners.”
Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture — led by 38-year-old [Chief Executive Kyle] Vogt — that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. In the competition between Cruise and its top driverless car rival, Waymo, Mr. Vogt wanted to dominate in the same way Uber dominated its smaller ride-hailing competitor, Lyft. “Kyle is a guy who is willing to take risks, and he is willing to move quickly. He is very Silicon Valley,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “That both explains the success of Cruise and its mistakes.”
When Mr. Vogt spoke to the company about its suspended operations on Monday, he said that he did not know when they could start again and that layoffs could be coming, according to two employees who attended the companywide meeting. He acknowledged that Cruise had lost the public’s trust, the employees said, and outlined a plan to win it back by being more transparent and putting more emphasis on safety. He named Louise Zhang, vice president of safety, as the company’s interim chief safety officer and said she would report directly to him…
With its business frozen, there are concerns that Cruise is becoming too much of a financial burden on G.M. and is hurting the auto giant’s reputation… The shutdown complicates Cruise’s ambition of hitting its goal of $1 billion of revenue in 2025. G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.
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It’s articles like this that make me glad there are numerous horses in the race.
Autonomous driving is an incredibly complex problem. We have people like Musk who thought they could throw money at the problem and have it solved in a few years, with disastrous results.
We’ve lost Uber, and Cruise is flagging. Both had been touted as examples to follow. Both have had some serious safety problems from moving too quickly and lacking caution.
Behind all of this is Waymo. Plodding along, gathering vast amounts of data and experience and iterating slowly.
I think they, out of all these players, understand the stakes at hand, and the potential profit on the other end. But you have to get it right. It has to be nearly perfect, because people need to trust it, and our emotions are fickle.
Yeah but Google bad
It’s anybody’s guess what Google is collecting all that data for.
Google is not a software company, it’s a data collection and data mining company with two strategic interests, ads and existing on as many platforms as possible.
Any software product that Google puts out is an experiment in data acquisition first and a product only incidentally. Think of it like a maze to study rats — you have to add some cheese to keep the rats interested but your goal is not to make good cheese.
Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture — led by 38-year-old [Chief Executive Kyle] Vogt — that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. … “Kyle is a guy who is willing to take risks, and he is willing to move quickly. He is very Silicon Valley,”
The whole “move fast and break things” tech industry mindset should never be within 100 meters of the auto industry.
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Two months ago, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, choked up as he recounted how a driver had killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at a San Francisco intersection.
Now Mr. Vogt’s driverless car company faces its own safety concerns as he contends with angry regulators, anxious employees, and skepticism about his management and the viability of a business that he has often said will save lives while generating billions of dollars.
Exponent, a consulting firm that evaluates complex software systems, is conducting a separate review of the crash, said two people who attended a companywide meeting at Cruise on Monday.
Mary T. Barra, G.M.’s chief executive, began including Mr. Vogt on earnings calls and presentations, where he hyped the self-driving market and predicted that Cruise would have one million cars by 2030.
They also called on Cruise to provide more data about collisions, including documentation of unplanned stops, traffic violations and vehicle performance, said Aaron Peskin, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.
In San Francisco, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Austin, Texas, hundreds of Cruise’s white and orange Chevrolet Bolts sit stagnant.
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