Cruise’s mirage is wearing away — Many more to follow
In the past few weeks, we have seen quite a few inadvertent disclosures from Cruise. I say inadvertent because they, like every other driverless vehicle maker in the US, avoids providing any significant performance data beyond that which is massages. They, like the rest, benefit from the lawsuit Waymo won against the DMV in California and the federal government’s wait for tragedies approach. (Waymo was able to convince a poorly informed judge that providing this data risks exposing IP. Which is nonsense since IP is about the how, not the what.) If all these companies were in the EU or Singapore they would be outed by their standards/regulations. (More on that below). Of course, Cruise and the rest could voluntarily meet those criteria or at least go beyond what Waymo provides. They don’t because that would be eroding the hype mirage they use to mislead the public and maintain funding. No fear though, each will crumble like Cruise is. It’s inevitable.
Recent Cruise Disclosures
60 plus vehicles stalled in the street. Due to a network issue. Which means these systems are remote controlled not “driverless”. Cruise has been lying to the public about the capabilities of their systems, especially regarding their being “driverless”. This is reckless and provides the public and government with false confidence. (How is this not gross negligence?)
· https://www.wired.com/story/cruises-robot-car-outages/
An anonymous employee sent information to the CA DMV explaining these systems were not road ready. This includes collisions that were not reported ang vehicles jamming the streets. The insider also says his POV is shared among others in the company. But they are afraid to come forward. “
An anonymous employee posted their POV on Reddit. (I assume this is the same person?)
“I subjectively find Cruise to be a highly chaotic environment where safety related discussion is routinely discouraged because it contradicts the leadership’s narrative, “is a distraction”, and “lowers morale”, the second two being direct quotes I have heard spoken by management and leadership at the company.”
· https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/voq9qv/a_note_from_an_anonymous_cruise_employee/
How much clearer does it need to be that we cannot let this industry self-certify as well as determine what that criteria is and not provide any proof of capability? This pattern happens over and over in the US. Go back to the aircraft makers in the 50s. The same overly trusting lack of due diligence and ethics environment led to a progression of tragedies, press coverage and hearings until the FAA was created. The same things happen in the automobile industry. Do we really need this to happen again? While Tesla is the most egregious for several reasons, demonstrated by all the crashes and deaths it has to date, the rest use the same basic untenable development, test, simulation and nascent lack of inference machine and deep learning approach. They have less deaths because they develop in much smaller areas, have a much better sensor system, fewer vehicles and can control data Tesla cannot. At some point they will have mounting crashes and deaths. (Mostly unavoidable since machine learning requires experiencing many crashes to learn them.)
Oh . . .and if the right simulation technology was used the right way the real-world wouldn’t be required here.
More on my POV here
The EU proposes a driverless driver’s test that is pretty good — Waymo, Cruise, Gatik etc would fail it
The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now to create this technology
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering magazine editor calling me “prescient” regarding my position on Tesla and the overall driverless vehicle industry’s untenable development and testing approach — (Page 2) https://assets.techbriefs.com/EML/2021/digital_editions/ave/AVE-202109.pdf
Tesla “autopilot” development effort needs to be stopped and people held accountable
How the failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980 can save the Autonomous Vehicle industry
My name is Michael DeKort — I am Navy veteran (ASW C4ISR) and a former system engineer, engineering, and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD, a software project manager on an Aegis Weapon System baseline, and a C5ISR systems engineer for DoD/DHS and the US State Department (counterterrorism). And a Senior Advisory Technical Project Manager for FTI to the Army AI Task Force at CMU NREC (National Robotics Engineering Center)
Autonomous Industry Participation — Air and Ground
- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force
- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force
- Member UNECE WP.29 SG2 Virtual Testing
- Stakeholder USDOT VOICES (Virtual Open Innovation Collaborative Environment for Safety)
- Member SAE G-35, Modeling, Simulation, Training for Emerging AV Tech
- Member SAE G-34 / EUROCAE WG-114 Artificial Intelligence in Aviation
- Member Teleoperation Consortium
- Member CIVATAglobal — Civic Air Transport Association
- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines
- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering magazine editor calling me “prescient” regarding my position on Tesla and the overall driverless vehicle industry’s untenable development and testing approach — (Page 2) https://assets.techbriefs.com/EML/2021/digital_editions/ave/AVE-202109.pdf
Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 DoD/DHS Whistleblowing Efforts
