The National Association of City Transportation Officials doesn’t want fake and poorly performing “driverless” vehicles on city streets, especially Cruise
Reference articles
SF Transit Bosses Slam Cruise Self-Driving Cars For Blocking Streets. Cruise Wants To Deploy More
NACTO Pushes Back as Big Auto Seeks Safety Exemption for Driverless Cars
GM’s Cruise wants to add 5,000 more robotaxis to American streets. This city warns it could backfire
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/30/business/cruise-gm-san-francisco-self-driving
The National Association of City Transportation Officials has figured out the king is naked. And that they are being lied to and used. This more than anything to data shows the hype cycle is peaking and broadening to most of the population. When folks where part of the hype reverse course there’s a problem. Which is not hard to understand when Cruise causes hours long back ups in their cities due to “driverless” systems that are anything but driverless or as good as a human. And they didn’t even mention Cruise stopped trying unprotected lefts. As I posited before, there must be other scenarios the system can’t handle in addition to unprotected lefts. The chances of the root cause, which I think is a clumped objects detection issue, being something that impacts only unprotected lefts is slim. Now they just need to figure out this will never improve enough to get close to L4 if the current development approach doesn’t shift to simulation. That simulation switches to aerospace technology to solve the issues with gaming technology and general learning gets to a point of meaningful inference.
Also notice how cities are now asking for proof of capabilities through a driver’s test. And how foolish and incompetent this make NHTSA look.
Next, they will figure out their citizens are being used as needless Guinea pigs. And that many literally have to be harmed in order for many crash scenarios to be learned and tested.
This will happen to Waymo, Argo, Aurora, Gatik, Motional, Mobileye etc withing the next 6 months.
Some choice quotes
“Two of San Francisco’s top transit bosses ripped into self-driving car company Cruise in a 39-page letter this week. They tore into the firm’s myriad safety hazards and traffic problems that its autonomous vehicles have caused in the city recently, including a June 3 crash that led to a recall of 80 of its cars.
“The pair worry that if new technology doesn’t fix problems with existing Cruise cars, the new cars “could quickly exhaust emergency response resources and could undermine public confidence in all automated driving technology.”
“The feds should deny the petitions until the companies can provide evidence or data their ADS vehicles are “at least equal to the overall safety level of a compliant vehicle driven by a reasonably prudent, licensed driver,” NACTO Executive Director Corinne Kisner wrote to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. The companies “must not only establish that the controls, telltales, and devices aren’t needed for vehicles controlled by an ADS, but also prove that the ADS can successfully respond in a manner at least as safe as a nonexempt vehicle with a human driver would” — and neither company provided any evidence or data to support those assumptions, Kisner wrote. NACTO demanded that NHTSA develop new, appropriate standards for AVs because using the existing Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to regulate the safety of newfangled AVs on urban streets doesn’t work. NACTO’s “Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism,” already in its second edition, sets out standards to do that in ways that won’t lead to more road deaths and the destruction of cities.
“The current federal vehicle safety standards were created under the basic assumption that there’s a difference between the vehicle and the driver,” said Kate Fillin-Yeh, director of strategy for NACTO. “But with AVs, the vehicle and driver are one and the same. That means NHTSA has to update its regulatory framework to ensure that the vehicle — and the software that drives it — work the way they are supposed to do safely and consistently. NHTSA needs to restart its stalled rulemaking in order to define, assess, and manage the safety of ADS performance, and must ensure city leaders with direct experience hosting AV testing on their streets have a seat at the table. This ‘regulation-by-exemption’ approach that has filled the void makes a murky marketplace even harder to understand, and doesn’t make anyone safer.”
More here
Cruise stops testing unprotected lefts in response to a crash, yet is somehow still driverless?
Cruise is remote vs “driverless”, has a whistleblower, is experiencing crashes and is losing huge sums of money — They are the tip of the iceberg
The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now to create this technology
Cruise, like Waymo, now says they are driverless with no proof, nor any comment on Waymo’s CA DMV lawsuit to avoid providing safety data
The EU proposes a driverless driver’s test that is pretty good — Waymo, Cruise, Gatik etc would fail it
Waymo and Cruise should prove their systems are legitimately L4
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 C4ISR 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
