from Hacker News

GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

by reteltech on 1/16/24, 11:34 PM with 92 comments

• by thot_experiment on 1/17/24, 12:02 AM

  I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon, because of technical reasons.

  Don't get me wrong, I'm on team ban cars and replace every stroad with a light rail corridor and bike paths, but I think self driving cars will be fine in some number of years once the haters calm down. Hard for me to believe we can't achieve better than the average shitty driver level of safety.

• by eruleman on 1/16/24, 11:48 PM

  This is not to be confused with Cruise the company.

  Super cruise is a feature in GM cars.

• by yellow_postit on 1/16/24, 11:47 PM

  Self driving is going the way of fusion power. Always just a couple years away.

  I still believe divided highway trucking between major cities with last mile handoff to humans has legs, but I wonder how much the Tesla claims have poisoned the proverbial well of a more constrained system for the foreseeable future.

• by avs733 on 1/17/24, 1:06 AM

  There’s an entirely different way of looking at this that is perfectly in line with why self driving. Cars have failed several times before…

  Who is liable?

  That’s what largely killed prior attempts, especially those using custom built roads. If the car crashes who is liable - the manufacturer, the road builder, or the driver? I think it is telling that the pull back we’re seeing is correlated with early cases in this becoming more salient.

  Why does this have to be a technical limitation/success (im not saying it is or isn’t) only?

• by LightBug1 on 1/16/24, 11:52 PM

  Musk led these manufacturers down the garden path ...

  Do what you do excellently. Learn. Don't follow.

• by ramesh31 on 1/16/24, 11:41 PM

  Once again, George was right. Self driving will be solved with vision alone, or it will never be solved. And solving for vision means solving for AGI.

• by ado__dev on 1/16/24, 11:52 PM

  Not surprising at all. Self driving cars that can operate safely and make good decisions in almost any space has always been a pipe dream.