[phkahler]

>> Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations.

Funny, since I thought full autonomy was the goal of the company. 2 percent human intervention isn't scalable.

[amluto]

Huh? 100% is scalable, and it’s the common case today. 2% scales just as linearly as 100% does.

[michaelt]

That very much depends on the implementation.

For example - does the vehicle have to come to a full stop, as it can't safely proceed without an operator intervention? At busy periods, do they also have to wait for an operator to become available?

A busy junction could easily have 100 cars through it per minute. If two cars every minute stopped unexpectedly, that would hardly be scalable.

[tcoff91]

That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.

[joshjob42]

They could spend $75/hr on employees and the cost per car-hour would be just $1.50. That's nothing.

3.5M people work as truck drivers in the US, enough, in principle, to drive ~175M cars at the same time assuming 2% of cars need help at any given moment, ie ~60% of all the cars and trucks in the entire country being driven simultaneously.

Presumably though they'd be able to shave that down a few fold between where they are and dominating transportation nationwide (should they ever do so). So, it's pretty scalable in practical terms.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps....

[silisili]

This is true, but the numbers inflated even. There's no way they'll pay these people more than $15 or $20 an hour once it scales, which probably further helps your point.

[HPsquared]

It does have a much better work/life balance than most driving jobs, though.

[silisili]

True, but depending on how it ends up, it could be about 6000x more stressful. Like every 10 seconds being flipped into a new near crash scenario.

[polishTar]

Other ridehail products like uber or lyft have 100% human intervention all the time. I think that's what the parent comment is referring to.

[sroussey]

That 2% is much cheaper than going for five nines immediately. Nice bridge until then.

[amluto]

The real long term issue IMO is that this type of system fails pretty badly if the wireless network fails over a largish area.

[Rebelgecko]

They'll just do what the robo-food delivery startups are doing and outsource the driving to people in other countries who make $5/day

[dventimi]

> it [does not scale] in terms of people owning the vehicles

Can you clarify what you mean here?

[tcoff91]

If you sell a ton of these cars, having employees controlling 2% of the time means your costs become enormous rather quickly. You would have to have a subscription business model for this to make any sense where the person buys the car and then has to keep paying monthly for self driving.

[nrclark]

Cruise is aiming for a robotaxi market, not for consumer vehicles. In their business plan, they own and operate fleets. In that kind of model, it’s possible that they can get away with 4% human control. Another way to put that is that they would have one operator on duty for every 25 cars.

[rcxdude]

No-one credible is talking about selling self-driving cars to consumers for a long time. Taxi services make much more economic sense and are all-around more comfortable from a liability perspective as well.

[dventimi]

Cruise is a subscription model.