From my discussions with a friend with intimate knowledge of the software side of Cruise, there is wild skepticism within the co that they even have the hardware needed to go L4 or L5. Big promises being made to GM by Kyle which is leading to smoke and mirrors to distract/buy time from more critical problems "under the hood."
I've been speaking to friends working at different companies across the self-driving industry, and almost all of them have their fair share of skepticism of L4 or L5, including those who are actively researching in the field.
The main reason for this is that current self-driving tech has plateaued with most companies going with the redundancy based approach (let's have 3 LIDARs instead of 1, and make that 4 IR sensors on each side instead of 2 etc.) simply because there is no revolutionary new tech that is a panacea to current L1 problems.
Sadly, explaining this to investors is next to impossible, so everyone keeps selling the same idea with a few more whistles as the next big thing while everyone is waiting for the big tech breakthrough that makes actual self-driving cars possible.
Until then, expect many more controlled environment (eg. airports or freeways where traffic is mostly smooth flowing, or roads with perfectly marked stop signs and pavement paint).
I recently read about Luminar (https://www.luminartech.com/) and their focus on making affordable, accurate LIDAR tech. Wonder if there are other components like this that need to be optimized and combined to get to L4 and L5
They say they are putting them on the roads of CA in a matter of weeks. I believe miles driven and disengagements must be reported around the end of 2017. So it should be easy enough to determine is four months or so if they're doing significant autonomous miles.
hmm I thought the bottleneck would be on the software side? I saw at least 2 lidars (possibly 3) on the car in the article. Of course we don't know if that's sufficient for L4, L5 but other companies are running with only 1 lidar.
People can get by with zero LIDARs. There's no reason why autonomous cars couldn't. The real problems are elsewhere (emergency vehicles, ambiguous situations, construction, …). We'll need operators on standby for a looong time still. Good luck driving in areas without decent fast cell networking.
Cruise Automation can produce a good demo. Shortcuts have been taken to produce good-looking results.
Don't be deceived. No car running the current software (or any software derived from it) will ever operate reliably.
Posted below, you will find a deleted comment from one of my fellow Cruise employees. That comment is accurate in its characterization of both Kyle and Cruise's technology.
Here is the deleted post from below, repeated verbatim. I'll put it here so it doesn't get lost.
QUOTE:
"Cruise employee here. throwaway for obvious reasons. It needs to be said that this is entirely marketing smoke and mirrors. The Cruise platform is significantly behind most other players in the market, and is having many many technical problems because of shortsighted leadership on Kyle's part, including high level people quitting (the head of planning and controls left last month because of Kyle, and more are threatening to quit) The reason I'm saying this is that this sort of public "everything is fine, we are the best" posturing leaks inwards. The opposite is very much true. Employees are very upset with Kyle because of things just like this. I make no exaggeration when I say Kyle is a mean-spirited, selfish person in private, and is very quick to publicly take credit for the work of others that he has emotionally and verbally abused. It's truly one of the most toxic environments I've ever been a part of."
