The crosswalk incident
On my first robotaxi ride, the Cruise car almost hit a young couple in a crosswalk at 15th & Mission, SF, trying to beat oncoming traffic on a left turn. The pedestrians were crossing from west to east shortly after 9 pm last night.
The car braked hard at the last second. The walkers made angry gestures, the guy may have slapped the hood. The car stopped in the crosswalk.
A remote operator had to intervene, and told the car to continue within 30 secs.
It probably has low dynamic range cams, no infrared? Standard radar is low res, and filters out walkers because of false positives.
Lidar should’ve seen the walkers, but maybe they were within its minimum distance, or the lidar isn’t wide angle.
This stuff isn’t fully baked, and will never be able to handle long-tail cases at current ML state of art. But this was a bog-standard left turn across oncoming traffic and a crosswalk.
It dallied in the crosswalk intersection, then made a sudden sharp left to beat traffic. Human HDR eyes would’ve seen the walkers, and human drivers would’ve turned more cautiously, nosing in for possible walkers.
A common-sense world model, or even hand-coded rules, could tell it to check the view left and right, and move into the crosswalk slowly.
The rest of the ride
The ride before the incident felt magical, a preview of the near future with streams of bot traffic. Didn’t feel completely safe since I’m unused to it, and then saw a demo of where it fails. Felt jerkier and not quite human in driving style.
The car seemed to handle the ragged right lane edge (parked cars) on Dolores ok, but came to an abrupt stop on a red light.
Otherwise an uneventful and impressive short ride: 0.8 mi from 21st / Dolores to 16th / Mission. I got early access, and the ride was free, both much appreciated.
Cruise UX
You order the ride from an Uber-like app and watch the robocab approach on a map. Tap in the app to unlock the doors. Friendly, clear voice prompts outside and inside the car.
You can change screen brightness, heat / AC, radio, play trivia games.
No driver. Plexiglass partition.
Some Bolt UI mods: 2 rear seat screens, 2 overhead End Ride buttons, rider monitoring camera. Whole Mars got a warning email for drinking a beer in the back.
Possible violet lidar stripe showing up in the pic, invisible to the eye. Not sure if it’s in the right spot, might be something else.
