[kvogt]

Cruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows.

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.

The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode.

In terms of staffing, we are intentionally over staffed given our small fleet size in order to handle localized bursts of RA demand. With a larger fleet we expect to handle bursts with a smaller ratio of RA operators to AVs. Lastly, I believe the staffing numbers quoted by nyt include several other functions involved in operating fleets of AVs beyond remote assistance (people who clean, charge, maintain, etc.) which are also something that improve significantly with scale and over time.

[sroussey]

The relevant staffing section:

> Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles

The NYT is definitely implying 1.5 workers per vehicle intervene to assist driving at first read. Only after reading the above comment do I notice that they shoved the statements together using different meanings for “workers” as they didn’t have the actual statistic on hand.

[vowelless]

Where are these remote assistant human drivers located (country), and how have they been screened for temporarily “driving” vehicles in those cities (do these humans have American licenses? ). How is all this regulated?

Basically, I am curious if these remote assistant drivers are located in foreign nations without American licenses. And if so, how did you get them cleared to be able to “drive” cars on Americas roads?

Thanks

Ps: I took a cruise once in Austin and it needed remote assistance.

[pj_mukh]

"The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help."

Hoo boy, sure wish the NYT had clarified that. That changes things significantly.

[patrick451]

It's telling that you declined a request for an interview, yet still feel the need to clarify on HN. You'd be doing a lot better with transparency and public trust by just taking the interview.

[gruez]

Is there something that's covered by an interview that a list of questions or email exchange wouldn't? Interviews take up a valuable chunk of the CEOs time, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to them declining it.

[simonebrunozzi]

Hi Kyle (hello again), thanks for being so transparent with this.

I suspect this is a moment where news are looking for a scapegoat / villain from the AV sector, and your team is an easy target given what has happened recently.

I believe that transparency is the right way to address issues and concerns. Please keep doing that.

[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.

[throwaway1104]

Keep it up, Kyle! All new tech will have hiccups and opposition. Really enjoyed my ride experience when I visited SF.

[ra7]

Thanks for the clarifying! This makes a lot of sense. I think NYT did a really poor job of explaining the remote assistance bit.

[tameware]

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

[momento_uno]

2-4% is very high. It essentially means none of your trips can be completed without remote intervention.

This puts your cars and the safety of the whole city at the mercy of reliability of mobile networks. This is a fundamental architectural change in the design of the city. Do the telecom operators take liability if they can't meet their designed SLOs for availability? What are the worse case scenarios that you have considered?

[vlovich123]

Did NYT not reach out to you for comment? Curious why your reply is here instead of within the article itself.

[DANmode]

If I was in a position to choose, I think I'd speak directly to engineers, too.

Word of mouth via tech influencers is far more important than you're giving credit.

[gctwnl]

I would consider this realistic service design, just as Meta’s Cicero (plays blitz Diplomacy) is smart design. It might work as a service.

What the answer glances over is that even with just 3% of the time requiring human assistance (2 minutes out of every hour) the term ‘autonomous vehicle’ is not really applicable anymore in the sense everybody is using/understanding that term. The idea behind that term assumed ‘full’ autonomy. Self driving cars. And there is no reason to assume that this is still in sight. The answer puts that ‘self-driving car’ on the shelf.

PS. Human assistent seems to me a difficult job, given the constant speed and concentration requirements.

[altfredd]

By this logic Tesla does not have "autonomous vehicles" either. They just do adjustments after the car crashes and kills someone instead of doing it online.

[MagicMoonlight]

Your plan is to make someone in india remote control my car? What if the signal goes down? What if it lags and they accidentally give the wrong instructions?

This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard

[southerntofu]

Hello Cruise CEO, there's a huge market for durable and profitable "dumb" cars. Why don't you get on that market? In a time when electronics represents over 30% of car costs and ~50% of car failures, people like me would be happy to buy a car that doesn't suck (low-tech) and can be maintained for decades for a reasonable price. In the meantime, i'll keep buying old Renault/Peugeot cars from the fifties/sixties i guess :(

[protocolture]

I actually concur, my DPF is a nagging beast and I hate it.

But I am betting that quite a lot of the electronic components of cars these days are tied to things, my DPF is a great example, that come from safety and environmental regulation. If you pull the ECU out and tricked the motor into running anyway, I am betting your emissions profile will suck massively. Ditto transmission. The rest of my car seems to involve safety features, sensors and cameras mostly.

By the time you reinvent the car to exclude all these things, then make it roadworthy again I reckon you would end up with almost exactly the standard modern car again. Car makers arent putting computers in for funsies.

[panick21_]

The things you say are just factually wrong on many levels.

> durable and profitable "dumb" cars

Both of these are pretty much wrong.

First of all, just based on regulation and safety, the car is gone have a huge amount of electronics. Second, regulation about emissions also require a huge amount of electronics. You can't get away from that no matter how dumb you want to make a car. Maybe you don't like it, but society prefers less people to die even if it is not inconvenient for you.

Granted, in many way an old inefficient smaller car is still saver and better for the environment then a modern huge car. But that i a failure of the regulation.

Next the idea is that such cars would be profitable. This is simply inaccurate. Car companies can barley make money on cars as it is, in fact, without parts supply they don't really make money on those cars.

Additionally most consumers simply prefer to buy cars with lots of multimedia options and things like that. Having the ability to warm up your car before you get in is useful for example. Having phone conversations in your car is useful. Having GPS in your car is useful. People like having heated seats. People like having good sound in the car.

People simply aren't buying the cars you seem to be demanding and doing such cars simply wouldn't be profitable. In fact, generally if you look at China you will see an increase in the types of features you don't like.

To suggest an autonomous car company gets into that business makes no sense at all.

And I say this as somebody that doesn't own a car and generally thinks cars should be replaced as much as possible and band in many places.

There are many ways repeatability could be improved without going back to 1960s cars. Many of those should be embraced but you will simply not get around some inherent complexity of the modern world.

[tw04]

They do? Nobody is forcing you to buy a decked out Cadillac. If you want to buy a base model Malibu for $25k, I'm sure you can find a dealer that will gladly sell it to you.

If you want a brand new car for $10k you’re going to need a time machine, or move to a country without modern safety standards.

[dventimi]

Why don't YOU get on that market if you think it's so worthwhile?

[code_runner]

Sounds like the market works and you can easily find the cars you’re looking for that last “forever”

[cheeselip420]

remote operation of vehicles often makes a lot of sense economically, since you can effectively decouple drivers from vehicles/riders. As you pointed out, this means you can shift to deal with peak loads and all of that - great.

Given everything you know now, was it wise to push for expansion over improvements to safety and reliability of the vehicles? On one hand, there is certainly value in expanding a bit to uncover edge-cases sooner. On the other hand, I'm not convinced it was worth expanding before getting the business sorted out.

My guess is that given the relatively large fixed costs involve in operating an AV fleet, that it makes some sense to expand at least up to that sort of 'break even' point. Do we know what that point is? Put differently, is there some natural "stopping point" of expansion where Cruise could hit break-even on its fixed costs and then shift focus towards reliability?

[_boffin_]

The first thing that came to my mind after reading, “… makes a lot sense” was the latency overhead that’s incurred when RA is activated and associating it with drunk driving due to the increased response time.

Maybe the article answers the following, but don’t know since I haven’t read it yet.

- median, p95, p99 latencies for remote assistance

- max speed vehicle can go when RA is activated.

[flandish]

So when low wage mechanical turk costs turn out cheaper than engineering to improve driverless vehs… this will just be another exploitative gig job for folks in remote locations?

I don’t trust proper attention will be given to improvements in tech once profit and roi is considered compared to human labor costs especially in lower wage nations.

[dventimi]

Well, low wage mechanical turk costs have not yet turned out to be cheaper and there's no reason to expect that to happen, so this is one channel for exploitation that I'm not going to worry about.

[getwiththeprog]

Where are your remote operators located?

[jdjdjdhhd]

Can spying be disabled on your cars?

[dventimi]

Wut

[MichaelTWorley]

Best wishes to you!

[monero-xmr]

Huge cojones on the CEO to risk public statements given the enormous legal and regulatory pressure being applied. I certainly wouldn’t recommend this tactic!

[averageRoyalty]

I would. This is the correct step forward to building public trust, which is incredibly essential to this industry and onboarding a critical mass.