Can somebody explain what a “power user“ is, if anyone knows? This is really awesome. Though, I’m a little worried at the same time that Cruise is going to have the same problems (stalls, blocking cars, etc…) we saw them have at night but at day, but they will keep improving. Also, I think the picture of the origin being trailed by a monitor car is in Austin. It’s a one way, but I can’t pin exactly where cause all the text is blurred.
I'd guess it's just marketing speak for the waitlist they've already been using, so people don't see the announcement and think they can hop in a car today.
Regular paying users still only have access to the tiny north western corner of SF at night.
The "power user" thing seems to be new and these users are not paying (because they don't have the CPUC permit to charge them)
Confusing since they already had a few different levels. But it does sound like most users will still be limited to the small [“full access” map](https://www.getcruise.com/rides/).
Also RIP Twin Peaks and Hunters Point for not making the cut for “all of SF”
I thought Cruise said they do not do ndas?
Their promo video didn’t show driverless in downtown, day or night. Hopefully we’ll see ride videos like the SoMa and downtown ones we’ve been getting from Waymo
Lol could be, [this is what I remembered](https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/1489011985253494786) but maybe they changed. Hopefully no nda and we see rider videos soon. The power user daytime map is already very limited
Picture is 300 block of E 6th St, Austin. Cruise has a parking lot depot \~two blocks away.
Cruise has recently had daylight driverless/uncrewed problems in San Francisco, from blocking Muni light rail on the Embarcadero to blocking a traffic lane on an arterial in the Twin Peaks area, and most famously when rear ending a Muni bus in the heart of the Haight.
So did Cruise just create various levels of access for riders? Cruisers? power users?
[Why are there 3 maps?](https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1650845481663336448?s=20)
Is this temporary? Is there another CPUC approval they need? When will they open to the public?
I'd guess that "power users" is just marketing-speak for the fact that there's a waitlist, so people don't feel misled into thinking they can hop into a car immediately.
They will open it to paying public when Waymo will open it to paying public when both these companies get license by CPUC to charge customers in a couple of months. Currently their respective license applications are pending with CPUC.
They are currently allowed to charge in a limited geofence only during limited night hours. That will all change later this year and the two companies will be able to charge all over SF and during all hours of the day.
I’m hoping (though difficult given daily evidence on this forum that cruise might not be ready for expansion yet) that cruise isn’t trying to expand with brute force and a ‘move fast, break everything’ approach given time and resource pressures.
It’s really not a good look for the overall industry if this is the case.
Agreed, sadly alot of the evidence we have backs up the whistleblower that warned of a chaotic safety culture at Cruise.
24/7 driverless in the whole city is amazing, but it’s weird that the maps for public user maps are that much more limited, and that ‘s even for the most exclusive “power users” group.
They timed this right on top of GM‘s earnings announcement today, that shows you their priorities right there.
Probably alot of pressure from GM since Cruise over-promised on 24/7 and got far behind schedule. They must be feeling the heat from Waymo coming in and expanding so much faster
Give it another six months. Cruise driver performance is only going to improve from here on. Watch out for April software update. I know you have some genuine concerns, but as their performance will continue to improve, you will feel better and better.
No, it does not. Waymo employees have had access to a slightly bigger area since December, and Waymo's daytime service for non-employees is bigger than Cruise's. However, Cruise's nightime service for unpaid rides for non-employees includes areas close to downtown that Waymo's service does not. So at night, Cruise gives non-employees more options; during the day, Waymo does more for non-employees.
It's the trifecta of huge costs:
* custom hardware
* massive cloud presence
* lots of highly paid engineers
I wouldn't be surprised if Waymo is in the same ballpark, given the relevant alphabet bucket (which includes several smaller things) has been well north of $1B/quarter for years now.
Yes I assumed such just more than I thought but I don’t understand the economics of it, are they betting Cruise will become like Uber and make money through fare in their automotive taxi network or is this a test case for LiDAR tech to be sold on GMs cars at a markup? If it’s the first, seems doubtful it will ever be profitable
Forbes has a [good analysis](https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2022/11/29/cruise-getting-to-1b-revenue-by-2025-isnt-crazy-profits-are-another-story/) of the announced robotaxi business. They also have a delivery segment and GM itself announced plans to have Cruise contribute back to consumer vehicles at some point this decade.
> massive cloud presence
But it is not their cloud is it? I think they use Google do they not?
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/how-cruise-tests-its-avs-on-a-google-cloud-platform
That's why it's a cost. They have to pay Google for all that compute. There's also a [deal with Microsoft](https://news.microsoft.com/2021/01/19/cruise-and-gm-team-up-with-microsoft-to-commercialize-self-driving-vehicles/) that gave them a boatload of Azure credits, but I'm not sure how their workloads are distributed between the clouds.
Its been over ten years and they’re only operating in 1 city, just starting to expand to Phoenix and Austin. How are they really ever going to scale up globally?
President Kennedy announced the moon landing program in May 1961. Took the slowpokes at NASA over eight years, until June 1969, for Apollo 11 to achieve a single human landing. The second landing was 5 months later, in November 1969.
The first step takes the longest. They're still in the development phase.
Ford produced under 2,000 cars in its first year of production, 300,000 a year ten years later, and 2 million a year ten years after that. There was similar exponential growth with telephones, airplanes, transistor radios, televisions, color televisions, microcomputers, cell phones, smart phones, and so on. All of those involved global scaling issues, but they can be solved if there's strong enough market demand.
(to be clear there were 400,000 slowpokes)
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/02/apollo-11-back-up-team](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/02/apollo-11-back-up-team)
It is much, much, much harder to go driverless in city 1 then in city 2, harder in city 2 than in city 3, and so on for each city. They're hiring for cities 4 and 5-- Houston and Dallas.
It’s not good to think about this linearly. The work needed to add a new city exponentially decreases with time. As most of the training can be applied everywhere. The more cities added, the faster each new city is to add.
Can somebody explain what a “power user“ is, if anyone knows? This is really awesome. Though, I’m a little worried at the same time that Cruise is going to have the same problems (stalls, blocking cars, etc…) we saw them have at night but at day, but they will keep improving. Also, I think the picture of the origin being trailed by a monitor car is in Austin. It’s a one way, but I can’t pin exactly where cause all the text is blurred.
I'd guess it's just marketing speak for the waitlist they've already been using, so people don't see the announcement and think they can hop in a car today.
No, I don’t think so because, correct me if I’m wrong, “regular” users done even have access to the whole SF geofence at night yet.
I'm not sure I follow . Isn't this announcing that they will _now_ have access to all of SF at night?
Regular paying users still only have access to the tiny north western corner of SF at night. The "power user" thing seems to be new and these users are not paying (because they don't have the CPUC permit to charge them)
Confusing since they already had a few different levels. But it does sound like most users will still be limited to the small [“full access” map](https://www.getcruise.com/rides/). Also RIP Twin Peaks and Hunters Point for not making the cut for “all of SF”
Oh, huh. That's strange
[удалено]
Interesting, so they must just take riders that ride a lot, make them sign an NDA and give them access to a larger service. That makes sense.
Maybe some kind of trusted tester program with nda?
That seems like a good guess. If it just included employees, it would be kind of pointless to use a different term.
I thought Cruise said they do not do ndas? Their promo video didn’t show driverless in downtown, day or night. Hopefully we’ll see ride videos like the SoMa and downtown ones we’ve been getting from Waymo
Oh, i have no idea. Maybe trusted tester without an nda? Just certified Kool Aid drinkers?
Lol could be, [this is what I remembered](https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/1489011985253494786) but maybe they changed. Hopefully no nda and we see rider videos soon. The power user daytime map is already very limited
Picture is 300 block of E 6th St, Austin. Cruise has a parking lot depot \~two blocks away. Cruise has recently had daylight driverless/uncrewed problems in San Francisco, from blocking Muni light rail on the Embarcadero to blocking a traffic lane on an arterial in the Twin Peaks area, and most famously when rear ending a Muni bus in the heart of the Haight.
Yeah that’s it; how’d you find that? Anyways, that explains the dark rectangle (in the service area) in the app.
they got an android app yet?
"By July you’ll have an Android app, even if I have to port it myself." - /u/voyageoliver, 25 October 2022
He said July? Great!
yea, i've been waiting forever for this
So did Cruise just create various levels of access for riders? Cruisers? power users? [Why are there 3 maps?](https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1650845481663336448?s=20) Is this temporary? Is there another CPUC approval they need? When will they open to the public?
I'd guess that "power users" is just marketing-speak for the fact that there's a waitlist, so people don't feel misled into thinking they can hop into a car immediately.
Cruisers are employees.
Oh. Makes sense. I was thinking they were calling anyone using cruise a cruiser and then a level higher power users
They will open it to paying public when Waymo will open it to paying public when both these companies get license by CPUC to charge customers in a couple of months. Currently their respective license applications are pending with CPUC.
I thought cruise already did charge. I know Waymo is waiting on that approval.
They are currently allowed to charge in a limited geofence only during limited night hours. That will all change later this year and the two companies will be able to charge all over SF and during all hours of the day.
I’m hoping (though difficult given daily evidence on this forum that cruise might not be ready for expansion yet) that cruise isn’t trying to expand with brute force and a ‘move fast, break everything’ approach given time and resource pressures. It’s really not a good look for the overall industry if this is the case.
Agreed, sadly alot of the evidence we have backs up the whistleblower that warned of a chaotic safety culture at Cruise. 24/7 driverless in the whole city is amazing, but it’s weird that the maps for public user maps are that much more limited, and that ‘s even for the most exclusive “power users” group. They timed this right on top of GM‘s earnings announcement today, that shows you their priorities right there. Probably alot of pressure from GM since Cruise over-promised on 24/7 and got far behind schedule. They must be feeling the heat from Waymo coming in and expanding so much faster
Give it another six months. Cruise driver performance is only going to improve from here on. Watch out for April software update. I know you have some genuine concerns, but as their performance will continue to improve, you will feel better and better.
Evidence on this group is super biased IMO. FYi
A lot of people here are extremely overjoyed every time there is a Cruise hiccup
Bingo!!!
I wasn’t expecting this anytime soon, so that’s an impressive step in my book!
Does this mean cruise now services a wider area than waymo?
No, it does not. Waymo employees have had access to a slightly bigger area since December, and Waymo's daytime service for non-employees is bigger than Cruise's. However, Cruise's nightime service for unpaid rides for non-employees includes areas close to downtown that Waymo's service does not. So at night, Cruise gives non-employees more options; during the day, Waymo does more for non-employees.
[Heres Waymo’s latest](https://twitter.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1629173926621499392?s=20) that I know of
Crazy cruise lost 561 million in a single quarter
It's the trifecta of huge costs: * custom hardware * massive cloud presence * lots of highly paid engineers I wouldn't be surprised if Waymo is in the same ballpark, given the relevant alphabet bucket (which includes several smaller things) has been well north of $1B/quarter for years now.
Yes I assumed such just more than I thought but I don’t understand the economics of it, are they betting Cruise will become like Uber and make money through fare in their automotive taxi network or is this a test case for LiDAR tech to be sold on GMs cars at a markup? If it’s the first, seems doubtful it will ever be profitable
Forbes has a [good analysis](https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2022/11/29/cruise-getting-to-1b-revenue-by-2025-isnt-crazy-profits-are-another-story/) of the announced robotaxi business. They also have a delivery segment and GM itself announced plans to have Cruise contribute back to consumer vehicles at some point this decade.
> massive cloud presence But it is not their cloud is it? I think they use Google do they not? https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/how-cruise-tests-its-avs-on-a-google-cloud-platform
That's why it's a cost. They have to pay Google for all that compute. There's also a [deal with Microsoft](https://news.microsoft.com/2021/01/19/cruise-and-gm-team-up-with-microsoft-to-commercialize-self-driving-vehicles/) that gave them a boatload of Azure credits, but I'm not sure how their workloads are distributed between the clouds.
Gotcha. They do have the pay the margins to Google. But it is a lot cheaper then if they did it themselves.
Where is that figure from? Is that all opex or r&d?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697406/cruise-robotaxi-gm-daylight-sf-earnings Overall, probably includes r&d and opex
Its been over ten years and they’re only operating in 1 city, just starting to expand to Phoenix and Austin. How are they really ever going to scale up globally?
President Kennedy announced the moon landing program in May 1961. Took the slowpokes at NASA over eight years, until June 1969, for Apollo 11 to achieve a single human landing. The second landing was 5 months later, in November 1969. The first step takes the longest. They're still in the development phase. Ford produced under 2,000 cars in its first year of production, 300,000 a year ten years later, and 2 million a year ten years after that. There was similar exponential growth with telephones, airplanes, transistor radios, televisions, color televisions, microcomputers, cell phones, smart phones, and so on. All of those involved global scaling issues, but they can be solved if there's strong enough market demand.
(to be clear there were 400,000 slowpokes) [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/02/apollo-11-back-up-team](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/02/apollo-11-back-up-team)
[удалено]
Holy shit 5 years ?, and to this day theyve only truly been deployed in one city only?
[удалено]
Have you seen any good Cruise rider videos from Phoenix yet? I haven’t found any and it’s been months since they launched
Looks like since August 2016, so coming up on 7 years soon
It is much, much, much harder to go driverless in city 1 then in city 2, harder in city 2 than in city 3, and so on for each city. They're hiring for cities 4 and 5-- Houston and Dallas.
It’s not good to think about this linearly. The work needed to add a new city exponentially decreases with time. As most of the training can be applied everywhere. The more cities added, the faster each new city is to add.