General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise has found itself in hot water as of late. Notably, the NHTSA launched an investigation into the company’s handling of pedestrian safety in October 2023, which was then quickly followed by the California DMV’s suspension of Cruise’s driverless operations license. Now, it appears as though the autonomous driving technology may have trouble differentiating children from “normal’ pedestrians.
According to a report from The Intercept, an internal and previously unreported safety assessment found that in certain situations, Cruise AV robotaxi units may be unable to effectively detect children and proceed with extra caution. More specifically, the concern stemmed from the lack of data surrounding the unpredictability of a child, such as suddenly breaking away from their protector and running out into the street.
It’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean that Cruise AVs can’t identify children. It’s more a matter of exercising an abundant amount of caution in situations where children may be involved.
In response, Cruise claimed that it treats children as a special class of pedestrian – such as vulnerable road users (VRU) – to help ensure that no children are endangered during robotaxi operation.
“Our driverless operations have always performed higher than a human benchmark, and we constantly evaluate and mitigate new risks to continuously improve,” Cruise Communications Director Erik Moser claimed in a prepared statement. “We have the lowest risk tolerance for contact with children and treat them with the highest safety priority. No vehicle – human operated or autonomous – will have zero risk of collision.”
“Based on our latest assessment this summer, we determined from observed performance on-road, the risk of the potential collision with a child could occur once every 300 million miles at fleet driving, which we have since improved upon,” Moser continued. “There have been no on-road collisions with children.”
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Comments
Ban these menaces!
How many 100s of Millions of $$$ are they going to throw down a storm sewer to enable Americans too lazy and/or too stupid to drive themselves. And if you don’t have or want a car, call Uber, Lyft or get on an effing BUS!
G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000.
Toyota are going down the “affordability” route are looking at $10,000 bare bones Toyota IMV O small pick up truck with no expensive tech inside to go wrong, just a simple nothing to go wrong reliable solid no frills small truck wonder which type of vehicle cash strapped customers might go for in the future? Hoping it will be GM but it won’t be cheap to buy just something expensive extra to go wrong, but hopefully will end up saving lives but we don’t know when, promised it might be on the roads for customers next year back in 2018, and it has just been banned off the roads in 2023, one day?
Still personally enjoy the driving experience of driving a car manually myself, over a level 5 car without a steering wheel or any pedals, will wait at least a decade of shakedown in service by large numbers of mainstream customers, and proven extreme low accident rates before l would use one, still like prefer the hands on experience more engaging fun way of driving cars personally sat navs have driven stupid people with no common sense that follow them regardless over the top of cliffs.
Nice!
And they don’t respond well to whistles and hand signals from traffic cops. Forget about temporary detours for road construction or an accident. Ban them. Re-home them to amusement parks, airports, and county fairs.
Ultimate goal for Government is to own all the cars that you rent in the future if you CBDC geo/political green carbon score is OK, if you don’t follow all the latest geo-polital views, don’t think to many people would like driving a car with all that AI information programmed into it, could be a few robo cars accdently hit brick walls if they don’t fit the AI narrative? Good side level 5 autonomous cars crooks cars could be programmed to be disabled by police end dangerous police chases multiple pile up of Crown Vic chasing the Blues Brothers. Government owned rented robo taxi’s & company rented vans, trucks to hire won’t employ to many human drivers, but will cut employee costs for business not sure if that will be good thing?
Every single day that passes it seems like my prediction of Legacy Auto paying Tesla to license FSD is becoming more and more likely!!!
What makes you think FSD works? Ever hear of the teddy bear experiment for tesla drivers? Mows down the kid most of the time. Or maybe it works so well lonnie had cal trans repaint the stripes on the 405 where his FSD couldn’t stay in the lane while he’d drive to work. he was even going to have one of his crews do it in the middle of the night but his buddy newsom took care of it. FSD is a total misnomer. It should be 2/5 SD. It is level 2 out of 5.
@mkAtx
Tesla has never tried to start a Robotaxi service thus far and failed have they?
What makes me think it will happen is two things.
One.
Nobody can come close to the Data that Tesla has and keeps collecting.
Without said Data Autonomy will never be solved.
Two.
An automaker allegedly is already in Talks with Tesla about licensing FSD.
Once Tesla locks in one contract what do you think happens next?
How did the NACS Charging Port and Network work out?
Once Ford agreed to use NACS then pretty much the entire Industry had to do the same.
It will happen with FSD as well.
I predicted this years ago. Data is King and NOBODY can compete with Tesla in that department.
It will be Game, Set, Match shortly in my opinion.
Geofenced Autonomy will not work in Scale. But I could be wrong.
three, tesla is camera only. Won’t work. See teddy bear test. Sorry your just too enamored with musk to see reality. I’m out. Oh, and the plug was mandated by the gov to get the pork for tesla and the other automakers. Follow the money.
Most Large automakers have mastered their technologies for level 2 autonomy. At the start of 2023, L2 driver support systems include Tesla’s Autopilot with “Full Self-Driving”, Audi’s Traffic Jam Assist, GM’s Super Cruise, BMW’s Extended Traffic Jam Assistant, Ford’s Blue Cruise, Hyundai’s autonomous driving package to name just a few, lots of others as well, l think Honda were the first in Japan to sell a level 3 car to a customer.
Tesla & GM are both sell autonomous cars at level 2 out of 5 sold to customers in the US, first US level 3 Mercedes Benz Drive Pilot sold to customers is the only autonomous car at level 3 out of 5 that you can use it in California & Nevada that can be purchased used by a manufacturers customers in the US.
Still a long time way to go till anybody gets to buy a level 5 from GM is still testing level 4 beta taxi’s spending nearly $2 billion a year on Cruise.Mary Barra reiterated a forecast that Cruise could generate $50 billion a year in annual revenue by 2030, customers will have to do a fair bit of overtime to produce that much revenue on Cruise?