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by jacquesm 946 days ago
> And then it was reported they had 1.5 employees per car in operations, requiring support every 2-5 miles. Very surprising given that they've reported a disengagement every 95,000 miles last year.

If true that alone should have disqualified them from being street legal.
1 comments
SR2Z 946 days ago
"Support every 2-5 miles" = having a human on standby to deal with a situation that might soon require human intervention. According to Kyle, speaking as himself on HN, most of these support events don't result in the remote operator doing _anything_.
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oldgradstudent 946 days ago
> most of these support events don't result in the remote operator doing _anything_

That's a utterly ridiculous statistic. If you need a human to monitor to prevent a bad result, it doesn't matter how often the human has to intervene.

For example: With Tesla Autopilot, the driver doesn't have to do anything the vast majority of the time. Still, your life expectancy will be measured in days if you don't monitor it.

Even if the vehicle makes completely random decisions when faced with a binary code, you could still say that 50% of the support events don't result in the remote operator doing anything.

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SR2Z 946 days ago
This is not "human monitor or the car crashes." This is "human monitor or the car might do a safe stop and block traffic."

A human driver can easily get away with the latter, and often do. A self-driving car can't, because people hold them to higher standards.

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oldgradstudent 945 days ago
> This is "human monitor or the car might do a safe stop and block traffic."

And they need all those people because their software cannot reliably handle it itself.

Otherwise they would not used so many people.

> A human driver can easily get away with the latter, and often do. A self-driving car can't, because people hold them to higher standards.

LOL. They've been blocking streets all over the place.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/30/cruise-robotaxis-blocked-t...

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SR2Z 945 days ago
Yeah, and unlike humans who double park, people lose their minds at an AV, hence why the company increased the number of operators.

They're also overstaffed to deal with surges - I recommend you go read the (ex) CEO's response to these claims. As the number of cars on the road goes up, the number of employees required to deal with surges increases more slowly. At some point the ratio increases from 1:20, which is where it's already at.

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oldgradstudent 944 days ago
> Yeah, and unlike humans who double park, people lose their minds at an AV, hence why the company increased the number of operators.

Looks like they haven't increased the number of operators enough.

> They're also overstaffed to deal with surges

Are they? How are they going to handle the next bay area earthquake? Will they have enough operators for that, or are they going to block first responders all over the city?

Fortunately, this is a moot point, because it is doubtful whether they are going to survive.

> I recommend you go read the (ex) CEO's response to these claims. As the number of cars on the road goes up, the number of employees required to deal with surges increases more slowly. At some point the ratio increases from 1:20, which is where it's already at.

Nice theory. Note that the number of remote operators shocked everyone that was following Cruise. They were constantly asked about number of cars per operator, what exactly the duties of a remote operators were, etc. They always avoided these quetions, and for a good reason. It turns out this was far worse than anyone outside Cruise could have imagined.

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jacquesm 946 days ago
The level of trust in the product on display is astounding. And that got shipped?
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