The founder was credible enough to sell GM on buying their 40-person startup for somewhere between $500M and $1BN. GM already had the Cadillac/CMU technology self-driving technology, which was better than what Cruise had. But GM bought anyway.
One of the best deals made since Bill Gates sold IBM on adopting DOS.
Meanwhile, Cruise now has multiple Velodyne laser units on a rack on top of the car, like everybody else.
GM knew it needed self-driving technology, and Cruise was in the right place at the right time. Kudos to Cruise for pulling it off. Hopefully GM doesn't repeat themselves and effectively kill the technology for a 3rd time.
When you read Google's crash reports [2], it's almost always "autonomous vehicle was rear-ended by human driver". That's happened twice at Phyllis Av. and Grant Rd. in Mountain View. It's worth a look at that location.[3] Notice the tree in the median strip on Phyllis. That's in just the right place to block Google's car-top LIDAR scanners from seeing cross traffic on Grant Rd. So the autonomous vehicle advanced at 6mph to get a better view, detected cross traffic, stopped, and was rear-ended. The same thing happened a month later, last September. The autonomous vehicle did the right thing (not seeing "hit by cross traffic" accident reports), but it wasn't what the driver behind expected.
That's what the problems look like in the later stages of development. Not reports of hitting parked cars.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/bc21ef62-6e7c-4049... [2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton... [3] https://goo.gl/maps/T1Q33rtB67F2
Even the photos in this article are a bunch of Chevrolet dumps charging.
This is one of the main reasons why "internal startups" at big companies fail. They lack urgency. The same thing often happens at startups that are over-funded too -- they think they can afford to take their time and that leads to compounding slowness.
Look at it this way: would you rather wait for five 9s against getting in a collision of any kind, in a car you won't be able to buy for another 25 years ... or settle for four 9s, and take delivery by christmas?
I don't know enough about the odds or the effect vs speed to comment with any confidence about whether Cruise's autonomous driving system fits this pattern or not, but I too often see a knee-jerk "slower and safer is always better when LIVES are on the line!" reaction, and I think it's worth being careful about whether it actually does make for a safer world.
It going to be interesting to see if a outsider like Hotz can outperform a well funded YC startup.
A person who hacked the PS3, iPhone versus whatever Vogt accomplished.
Please don't break the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) by going on about getting downvoted.
Your assessment was also off base, because unsubstantive dismissals (which your comment unfortunately is) routinely get lots of upvotes, alas.
What objective evidence is your view based on?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567998 and marked it off-topic.
Edit: it turns out you've been posting a lot of stuff like this. Please don't post any more stuff like this. Instead, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
May be GM popped out $1 billion so that they can put their own of version of Tesla's auto pilot in Bolt.
If you mad a billion dollars from your first company then you have a hell of a lot of money to invest in your second, so statistically speaking its actually quite high.
