Here's an interesting "lidar gem" from Hacker News a few years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679
Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor
This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years.
The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements.
The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing.
This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.
Waymo needs competition. Who else is even close to being able to provide it? I'd hate to think Tesla is next in line because they haven't even started a commercial pilot program yet.
Further proof that General Motors is run the finance types, not car guys.
Wonder if they'd sell Cruise back to the founders for say a buck? Sure Cruise could then cut a deal with another auto maker. Maybe even get financing from one?
GM is hemorrhaging money on several fronts:
Dec 4th, 2024
GM braces for a $5 billion hit as it fights to keep up in China’s intensifying EV price war
SAIC-GM revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday (via The New York Times) that it expects to write down between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The automaker is also expecting another $2.7 billion in restructuring expenses.
https://electrek.co/2024/12/04/gm-faces-5-billion-hit-ev-bat...
GM believed Kyle Vogt when he was hyping up their tech by having small, meaningless deployments in a dozen cities and promising $1B revenue by 2025. Then they had that incident and GM found out exactly how far behind Waymo they are. Waymo is now giving 175k rides every week and expanding to new markets every year. No other robotaxi company in the entire country giving rides to the public.
Now they've gone back to what I think GM's original plan was for acquiring Cruise — using their tech for passenger cars. Selling cars is GM's bread and butter. This wasn't going to end any other way.
Pretty bad news for the space as a whole. A decade and a half ago there were a dozen+ companies and tens of billions of VC dollars in the space. People were proudly proclaiming the end of driving. Now all but one of them have folded.
My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other.
Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.
Peacetime CEO doing peacetime things when war is about to hit them while they’re asleep.
That being said it’s usual in US for CEOs to be rewarded in short time with stock raises when they cut costs.
Innovation is not a game for the light hearted.
Google is playing that game with Waymo and ploughing billions every year. GM doesn’t have the same risk bearing culture.
Ford did the same thing a few years ago when they shut down Argo and brought it in house as Latitude to work on ADAS tech instead of actual self-driving cars. Does anyone know if Latitude has shipped anything?
> After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service.
Where is the money? I don't mean to be as snarky as Cruise founder, but how can you burn that amount of money and not show results?
GM stock up 2.5% since the announcement, so it doesn't look like investors attributed that much of GM's future value to Cruise (or that shutting down the robotaxi development was already assumed)
Archive https://archive.is/20241210211353/https://www.bloomberg.com/...
QUOTE: Cruise and GM’s technical teams will be combined into a single effort focused on developing autonomous technology to offer in future models sold by GM, according to a statement Tuesday. GM said it will no longer fund robotaxi development work “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”
It’s a big retrench for GM and Cruise, which survived a shakeout among autonomous-driving companies and restarted operations after one of its cars dragged a pedestrian last year. ...
The move has significant implications for GM. Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra wanted to transform the automaker into a transportation technology company and double GM’s revenue by 2030 in part by generating $50 billion from Cruise. Without a robotaxi business to bring in fares, that goal looks remote. /QUOTE
The business of robotaxis has always been a bit suspect, given the unit economics of running 1000s of taxis, each with ~$100K of equipment (even as the COGS were coming down each generation).
My 2c: the only reason Waymo is succeeding (so far) is that its parent Alphabet has deeep pockets, it has a a 6th gen (?) technology of its AV driver, and they already exited the other AV trucking segment... implying they need to succeed in robotaxis, so it's all hands on deck. It also helps that they have, so far, NOT blundered their way (=> a significant pedestrian collision) the way Uber ATG did or Cruise did.
This is a loong game to win, far longer than anything the tech bros have promised their their investors... We are still in the initial innings
Which cities in which countries and climates have robotaxis (or have had robotaxis) now?
It felt like there was a lot of buzz around it a while back but then it only happened in a couple of cities which were just US cities with favorable climate. Did it ever move beyond that? You'd think that if the market is really competitive, then operators would bring it to cities where it doesn't exist, rather than just all competing in the same small handful of cities?
About time. Cruise was an absolute joke. The number of close calls I have had with Cruise vehicles either has a pedestrian or automobile is way too high.
GM is a finance company, not an engineering company. Even buying the engineering doesn’t work.
Their last great innovation was Saturn, and they killed that too.
Cruise was garbage when I rode them. Sat in the car for ten minutes waiting for it to go. Someone over the car speakers said they were doing something to get my ride ready. I could have walked to my next destination but wanted to give them a chance.
Waymo has been a little less expensive than Uber/Lyft for me. I just saw a Zoox autonomous vehicle today. That weird looking box with no drivers seat.
How much did recent UAW negotiations contribute to this?
GM cars and Cruise autopilot - two wrongs never made a right.
Frankly, I think Tesla is going to win this. The new self-driving is remarkably good. Based on this alone, I estimate (actual) level 5 self driving in 2-3 years. I'm convinced that the lidar sensors are essentially unnecessary and the vision-only strategy is basically going to work and be much cheaper in the process.
Going to leave this here
https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
Sad news IMO. "We're not cut out for the future. We're all in on the dying business." Dunder Mifflin level stuff.
Cruise cars were way more numerous around SF, although the service was worse than Waymo's. That stupid October 2023 accident really snowballed, and it wasn't even their (primary) fault.
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wait so are cruise employee RSU's 0 now? XD
where is YC's top tech success now?
Shows that most yc companies are clownshoes who pale in comparison to the tech chops of actual tech companies
Yeah the robotaxi is a pipe dream grift. Humans are gross and nasty, I think some of these people need to do a ride along in a cab sometime in the winter in a busy poorly marked city on a Friday or Saturday night. Pray tell how the robot kicks passengers out or navigates the inevitable unexpected weather/human activity.
The market will narrow down to 2 companies, Tesla and Comma AI, just as George Hotz has been predicting for close to a decade. Waymo will not survive
Tesla Driver assistance as it exists today makings driving far easier. You can relax and once you learn where it needs help very rarely take over. It only needs to continue the rate of improvement for another 9 months and you have robot taxi.
Lots of people are ignoring this because of politics.
I'm not sure I want autonomous vehicles to work.
It would, inevitably, lead to more cars in cities. Probably faster cars. Both are the opposite of what we need; it isn't just about safety.
Waymo is just a guy in India driving your car
> GM said in a statement that “... an increasingly competitive robotaxi market” were the reasons for the change.
Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow out.
Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy.
Ford just lowered the cost of its BlueCruise subscription by 1/3rd. In an earnings call eight months prior they remarked they made a 70% margin on the service. It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.