[kvogt]

Cruise CEO here.

Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win.

In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensing lands in these vehicles and our service area will be large enough that you forget there is even a geofence. If OEMs have still not managed to get the necessary performance gains to go fully driverless, we'll know what move was the right one.

We shared several details on how our system works and our future plans here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkK2JX1iHuzz7W8z3roCZ...

[bloodyplonker22]

It's good to hear a CEO say "we don't know the answer, but we're making a bet" rather than the typical Elizabeth Holmes style "We are absolutely correct and first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you get convicted of three counts of wire fraud and go to prison".

[gooseus]

"This is a solved problem.", "We're light-years ahead of the competition", or "We expect everyone with existing hardware to be able to monetize their cars as robo-taxis by the end of next year" are other great examples.

[ksec]

Indeed. It is very rare ( if not the only few I remember ) to see Silicon Valley or any VC funded Tech companies that is unsure of his / her tech or themselves. Their absolute optimistic nature ( If you could call it that ). People who are unsure of things, especially with leading edge tech, unproven tech and extreme difficulties tends to get my vote. I will now be keeping an eye on Cruise. Although I still think driverless cars in mainstream use is at least another 5 - 10 years away. There are just too many edge cases, but I hope people continue to work on it, as it will be part of the solution to solve housing and property market issues.

[drzaiusapelord]

Game theory and personality dynamics strategy applies to C-levels too! For some industries, companies, etc you want to be a Holmes type of total confidence. It depends who your market is, and by that I mean the VC's you want to attract. If they go for the "arrogant boy/girl genius" schtick then that's what you do. If they want a humble intellectual, then that's what you do instead. Conversely, you may alternate between the two depending on your audience. Maybe you're humble in HN comments, but maybe a monster in VC meetings. Look at Elon's larger than life "boy genius" PR persona. It works really well. He may not be a total fraud like Holmes, but his shoddy car AI has killed at least a couple people in cases where if the car had a lidar-like system, that truck or whatever would have been identified instead of seen as part of the sky.

Also Cruise wants to license to automakers, not make their own car, so they have to act like trustworthy partners in their PR. Elon has his own car company and instead is antagonistic and belittling to automakers because he thinks there's a competitive advantage to it. Any positive sentiment towards his competitors is potentially lost sales for Tesla. Capitalism encourages zero-sum thinking and rewards zero-sum strategies.

CEOs are marketers and salespeople primarily and as such know how to play different roles for different situations. They code switch just like everyone else. The role isn't for everyone in tech because a lot of tech people don't have the people, political, and acting skills for it.

tldr; capitalism doesn't work well with honesty, in fact it works best with dishonesty. You don't have a personal relationship with a CEO or company, you're just absorbing marketing delivered via executive personalities. Personalities are perfectly valid marketing tools in capitalism. Take that as you will.

[dannylandau]

Good one!

[GeorgeTirebiter]

An extremely wise set of decisions. I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions; nor to accept that only passive sensing (cameras) can be used, when Active Sensing (probing, if you will) that Radar and LiDAR use is clearly giving the control computers more information about Reality (tm).

By using all (or almost all) available Active and Passive sensing technologies, fused with geofencing and operating at 'low-ish' speeds -- surely must be the fastest way to achieve 100% accident-proof self-driving vehicles that operate on ordinary city streets. Congratulations, Cruise. Keep up the Good Work.

[XorNot]

One argument would be that once you have many vehicles operating with LIDAR, it's unclear which systems are sufficiently robust against being disrupted by interference from other systems. Same with RADAR - while this is not new technology, we've never really had a regime with potentially dozens of systems operating in close proximity.

For all Tesla's problems, the automation-via-cameras solution is the one I find myself having the least problems with: using a single, obvious input (to humans), you don't wind up in a situation where you can have multiple differently-capable systems disagreeing on what they're seeing.

[wutbrodo]

> I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions

The reason is simple: cost. The goal isn't to build a proof-of-concept safe AV, it's to build one that meets the safety bar _and_ is as cost-effective as possible, in a reasonable timeframe.

I happen to agree with the target-then-scale approach, but I also agree with Kyle that it's not a given that this is approach is definitely superior to the one that launches everywhere and tries to improve functionality.

[femto]

What’s your view on whether self-driving cars should automatically be 100% liable for any accidents?

I ask this in the context of machines being governed by classical deterministic physics, so there is an argument that there is no such thing as an accident involving a self-driving car: only a design flaw.

This is a genuine question, as I can see that companies with self-driving systems that work, and who do serious fault analysis and rectification, might be in favour of 100% liability. 100% liability would stop cowboys from entering/surviving in the industry and sullying the reputation of self-driving. A company’s system would have to perform well enough that any residual risk of injury could be covered by an affordable insurance policy.

[Sebguer]

If you listen closely, you can hear Cruise's legal team shouting, "No you can't make a public comment on what level of liability you think we should accept" no matter where you are in the world!

[babyshake]

Of course, knowing that self-driving cars are 100% liable would incentivize some people to attempt to be hit by one of these vehicles for a payout. A more realistic level of liability would be for 100% liability for accidents resulting from an "unforced error".

[abandonliberty]

The most common cause of motorcycle injuries that make it to the hospital (and statistics) is someone turning left in front of them in an intersection where they have right of way.

Not quite this, but you get the idea:

https://nypost.com/2021/05/20/motorcyclist-rider-survive-hor...

I couldn't find the clip of a motorcyclist patiently stopped at an intersection get taken out by an out of control left turner. Lots of fully legally stopped vehicles get hit.

[JaimeThompson]

How does one take into account lack of maintenance by the end user in a strict 100% liability situation?

[BurningFrog]

I've given it some thought, and I think the SDC manufacturer must be liable for any accidents the SDC causes. Who else is there? The passengers certainly can't be responsible for any programming or manufacturing errors.

There are corner cases and exceptions, but that has to be the rule.

Which should mean that as and SDC owner, you don't have to pay car insurance.

[darepublic]

When you say accidents you mean where the robo car erred? Asking because ofc it's possible to get into an accident where you are not at fault and I think this would also be true of robocar

[user3939382]

My conclusion from years of self-driving, LIDAR, etc. research is that managing medium to heavy precipitation reliably might be impossible.

Visual algorithms run into the same problem as human brains, and the size of e.g. rain drops interferes with the frequencies employed by radio techniques.

Is anyone aware of any strategies that give us hope in solving this problem?

[abeppu]

Though ... how good a job are humans actually doing in heavy precipitation? I know that under normal circumstances our brains constantly do a bunch of work to create the illusion of a comprehensive high res visual field even though we really only have detail at the fovea. When it's raining heavily, and we think we can see "enough" to drive ... are we right? Or are we just lucky and pedestrians and cyclists are more likely to be off the road at those moments and so accidents increase but not to the point of disaster?

[walrus01]

I know next to nothing about lidar engineering but 60GHz band radars can still function out to several hundred meters in rain. It is significantly attenuated as the rain rate (in mm/hour) increases, but it takes a lot of rain to make it completely useless.

[hammock]

Airplanes couldn't fly in inclement weather for decades. Took a while but we solved it.

"Oops it's pouring, can't get a Cruise, gotta fall back to an Uber" doesn't sound that terrible to me, for now.

Cruise could even offer a product that compensates/insures you for that eventuality, if for example Cruise was your primary vehicle.

[somethoughts]

In addition to going into highly dense cities and inserting autonomous cars into existing driver regulation; an interesting auxiliary strategy could be to partner with a master planned community that was designed from the ground up (physically and regulation wise) to be an autonomous first town where the majority of vehicles were autonomous and the majority of home owners were pro-autonomous cars.

The roads and pedestrian crossings could be much clearly marked with RF transceivers, etc. and the inclement weather could be pre-considered. HOA agreement could have a "I agree to co-exist with autonomous cars" TOS clause and perhaps a built in monthly subscription.

I think a ton of home builders (Lennar, etc.) and senior community developers (Ventas) would be interested if only as a PR concept. I also think a lot of remote Techies/senior citizens would be interested [1]. Sort of like this but replace golf carts with autonomous cars.[2]

[1] https://news.voyage.auto/why-retirement-communities-are-perf...

[2] Tom Scott - City of Golf Carts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM

[AlotOfReading]

Cruise acqui-hired voyage, which was basically working towards this. I don't think they've done anything with it since though.

[petilon]

Congrats on your incredible accomplishment! Thanks for doing this the responsible way. Tesla's approach does not inspire confidence. Starting at the high end, with expensive, reliable tech and slowly bringing the costs (and bulkiness of the equipment) down is the right approach!

[mensetmanusman]

In my experience, expensive doesn’t necessarily mean more reliable, it could just mean higher fidelity, higher resolution (and possibly less reliable due to the utilization of parts ‘less’ produced on the global supply chain), etc.

This improved resolution don’t necessarily help an AI grok the situation in real time with >20 Hz response time though.

[martythemaniak]

"Today it's unclear what strategy will win"

Thank you for saying the honest, obvious answer. I am tired of people claiming to know what the implementation details of a technology that does not exist. As a nobody retail investor, I have long positions on autonomy (Tesla, Nvidia, GM/cruise, Google), not specific takes on it.

I'm fact, I think the radar/vision debate is not going to matter long term, as there can be multiple winners and the tech will likely converge.

https://www.greennewdealio.com/transportation/teslavswaymo/

[phkahler]

The challenge I like to bring up is construction zones. How will cars cope when a road is unexpectedly under repair? Traffic is taking turns sharing the left shoulder with a flag man directing you?

Some people I've talked to insist that an up to date map is "all that's needed" and that all such projects will need to be put in the system. Haha, a water main broke and they think people are going to update a database for them?

A traffic light is out and the police are DC directing traffic at an intersection. This will happen inside any given geo-fence eventually.

The list goes on... forever. Tell me how self driving cars don't need full AGI.

[XorNot]

A decent chunk of this list can be handled by the car coming to a safe stop and signalling that it is unable to proceed and you need to navigate the situation.

I suspect a lot of these could also be handled by that being a remote connection where a human is given the camera input and can indicate how the car should proceed (i.e. broken water main is a road obstruction that won't clear, and the obvious answer is a manual override to mark the road as unusable so the nav system reroutes).

[kgin]

Been so impressed with the Cruise approach. No hype, no promises, just keeping quiet, working hard on a very hard problem until it’s ready to launch. Congrats to everybody who’s been a part of this.

[pm90]

Well to be fair they did get acquired and get access to a bunch of resources allowing them to fully execute. A lot of the hype machine is a result of the necessity of getting access to those resources. It’s just a difficult situation.

[schrep]

Congrats on this huge milestone!

So refreshing to see a leader in this field say “we are not sure which one will work out” rather than just hyping their stuff.

Can I get a test ride soon!

[silverlake]

Tesla limited themselves to cameras because Musk said “humans can do it with two eyes”. He also didn’t like the look of LiDAR on cars. Such an idiotic decision. Good to see Cruise is not lead by a mega-maniacal CEO.

[ironrabbit]

As of a few years ago, lidar added at least $7500 to the cost of a car. That's a huge price difference for a consumer.

[sam_goody]

A more accurate summary of Tesla's position is that they beleive that the incoming data from different systems (lidar, radar, visual, etc) must be merged and very often there is contradictory data.

Resolving that correctly takes time (in ms), adds complexity and will sometimes be incorrectly judged.

Since the visual data is the more accurate the vast majority of the time, it will anyways take precedence over the other input. As humans have proven that visual is technically enough, they decided it makes more sense to squeeze the most out of the visual, rather than collecting other data, crunching it, then (in most cases) discarding it.

I am not sure they are right, and am pretty sure that even if so - they need better cameras.

But misquoting them doesn't really help your argument.

[gerash]

I believe those arguments are simply justifications for the fact that most people won't be able to afford Teslas with Lidars

[mocmoc]

Amazing I’ve been following cruise long time z, those videos were so funny. Keep on going and conquer the world!

[thomastu]

Will Cruise eventually be available on existing TNCs and other MaaS platforms? Or is the play here to create a new vertically integrated taxi service?

If you've read Dan Sperling's Three Revolutions, any thoughts on what kind of [transportation future](https://www.planningreport.com/2018/03/21/dan-sperling-three...) you foresee Cruise contributing to building ?

[ayewo]

You didn’t need to, but you decided to show up on HN to clearly articulate your strategy, so I applaud you for this.

> Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down.

There are broadly two ways to achieve your desired outcome of aggressively lower costs:

1. use money raised from VCs to subsidize the final cost of the product, or;

2. use money earned from customers as a natural consequence of growing demand for your product, in spite of strong competition from established OEMs, to fund your expansion.

Historically, the former has a lower likelihood of success relative to the latter and that’s because the former is really just a cash transfer from VCs to consumers. The latter is how Apple and Tesla have been able to grow into what they are today.

The reason the 2nd kind is so effective is that, when executed correctly, it often leads to a vicious cycle: your growth will lead to steadily increasing order volumes with your suppliers. This will in turn lead to sourcing for more suppliers to keep up with your growth. At a certain point, a supplier will feel confident that you are here for the long haul, causing them to take on more risk by pouring additional capital into their business to expand capacity. This will improve their ability to accommodate your current and future needs quickly, cheaply or both.

In other words, reality is multidimensional. It is rare for an individual company to aggressively drive down the costs of its product single-handedly, unless that company is ready to assume an enormous amount of risk currently being borne by its ecosystem of partners and suppliers.

[bendbro]

I expect the media led zeitgeist to slime you on a few fronts:

1. AI/automation/tech bros undercutting the working class.

2. The mortal danger of self driving cars to pedestrians and the public- perhaps with an AI bias/racism zest.

3. The price, location-availability, or otherwise explicit exclusion of people that damage the cars or are otherwise unprofitable being harmful.

4. The proliferation of self driving cars reducing public transit use, thus reducing public transit investment, reducing transit access for poor, increasing pollution, and clogging roads.

5. Something something self driving taxis are subsidized by the government via public investment in roads.

All of these arguments are bullshit and I am not excited to hear people recite them to me in 5 years.

[babyshake]

All-electric fleets of safe, non-honking AVs that are fine with whatever routes are required of them and go to designated areas to park and charge are going to make our downtown areas so much better.

[mvhvv]

Just because you don't want to think about externalities doesn't mean they don't exist. There are a lot of strong ideological assumptions you have to make to handwave all these away as "bullshit".

[starioIC]

From personal experiences I do not see how they are ready. They actively avoid the rules of the road and engage in dangerous driving actions because the car “sees” and obstacle or warning.for example when a car is double parked the self driving vehicles will swerve into the opposite lane, and in some cases almost hit another car, bike rider, or person.

When at stop signs they will sit back and wait even thought it is their turn. At times they will slam on brakes causing rear end accidents because the car saw a bird or reacted to steam from the ground.

Please talk with your legal team about embellishments made in insurance claims against other drivers.

[glbeaty]

How long ago did you see Cruise cars doing these things?

[gibsonf1]

Unless you have a conceptual AI with causal systems understanding reacting in real-time to a spacetime model of the world based on current and recent events, people are going to get injured and or killed by unusual real-world events riding in these autonomous cars. Although cats and dogs have great perception, we don't let them drive our cars for a reason.

[wutbrodo]

> people are going to get injured and or killed by unusual real-world events riding in these autonomous cars

I don't think anyone inside or outside of the AV industry is expecting that there will be zero injuries or fatalities involving AVs. Why would that be the bar, when AV rides displace human drives that already injure and kill tens of thousands?

[afropack]

Does Cruise plan to try compete with Uber, Lift, etc.?

If feel like this tech could have a massive social impact if you sell it to local goverments so they could offer a highly efficient subsidized robotaxi service to their residents. It would democratize access to transportation and enable so many classes of underserved people to gain access to reliable transportation.

[nerdwaller]

I'm no where near as experienced as you and your team, but that is what I was thinking as I read this. Tesla rather quickly went from the expensive sensors to the camera based setup they have now and it'll be interesting to watch how all this unfolds, safely from my 2006 vehicle with nearly no computers.

[loceng]

There's absolutely nothing stopping Tesla from adding back lidar/other sensors if the technology becomes cheaper or it turns out visual-only isn't accurate enough; Elon has other advantages that no other company is anywhere near competing with though too, and he clearly understands this, he understands his position well - and it's strong. He's also a very agile entrepreneur/engineer and not afraid to pull the trigger on whatever ideas come to his attention as being the best decision. He's also already succeeded in Tesla's mission - which was to get other vehicle manufacturers to transition to EV, so anything else after that is really just icing on the cake; Tesla stock holders however still believe strongly in him - and I'd argue rightfully so.

For now by using the cheapest technology he's arguably selling more EVs and/or making more profit per vehicle. If the market's competition requires a course change, then I don't see why he wouldn't take it - I don't think he'd fall pray to sunk cost fallacy; the reason for decisions may not be obvious to the public either, as we likely don't know details of his nuanced master plan.

[callalex]

What does the word “aggressively” accomplish here? You’re talking about a future hypothetical, so why bother?

[backtoyoujim]

Does your car stop at stop signs ?

Because at least one of y'all have to for this to work.

[mensetmanusman]

I’m assuming well equipped means more capable data processing and bandwidth needs, is this the case?

If so, do you have a sense for how many orders of magnitude more bits of data your sensors are acquiring versus Tesla?

[panabee]

thanks for pushing the frontier of self-driving cars and articulating this strategy.

historically, the pattern in tech is to succeed with strategy 2 -- that is, ride moore's law and achieve exceptional performance by combining commodities into super systems. google server farms are the canonical example.

obviously, this is only a pattern and not a law.

tesla's pathway represents strategy 1: start with super machines then drive costs down.

for non-SDC experts like me, could you share why it felt more compelling to start with super machines then drive costs down?

excited to see cruise help lead society into the future!

thanks again.

[TheArcane]

Sounds exciting! Are you hiring? I had a recruiter from Cruise drop out on me because I wanted to stay and work from Canada and wasnt in a position to relocate to the US.

[KKKKkkkk1]

Hey Kyle,

Why did your previous CEO Dan Ammann quit just before this launch?

[bheights321]

I see a few neighborhoods missing on the signup sheet. Are the crazy Bernal Heights streets a bit too much for this stage? :)

Looking forward to ride from my home there!

[konschubert]

As a bike rider, father, and sometimes inattentive human, I would like to say thank you for the safety you are bringing to our cities.

[pulse7]

Thank you for sharing! Sharing details on how your system works brings confidence to customers...

[belter]

Did you watch the videos?

Based on the reply to the question: What sets Cruise technology apart from others like Waymo, Tesla...In other words, how was this difficult technical problem, solved in a way others were unable to do so far... And whose reply you can hear here (video at the correct time):

https://youtu.be/ABto5nqWgc0?list=PLkK2JX1iHuzz7W8z3roCZEqML...

Thank you, but wont be volunteering to ride one of these.

[zppln]

Will you share your systems safety work? How many fatalities per drive hour do you expect?

[spywaregorilla]

You guys ever think about selling your LIDAR data?

[soaxre]

No, the different strategies are that Tesla has a vehicle actually being used by hundreds of thousands of people and is slowly incrementally improving their self driving with massive amounts of feedback and data, while these demo companies are doing if statements around the block.

[justapassenger]

> vehicle actually being used by hundreds of thousands of people and is slowly incrementally improving their self driving with massive amounts of feedback and data

Throwing data at the problem isn't going to solve it. Only people without expertise in AI think that's how it works.

[ra7]

> while these demo companies are doing if statements around the block.

[citation needed]

I only ever see Tesla fanbase making outrageous claims like this without any supporting evidence.

[Fricken]

The coca cola company sells even more units of non-self driving products than Tesla, and for a fraction of the cost!