Cruise goes under the hood and talks about their technology

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Two big milestones for Cruise this week, with two stories:

First, they started unmanned operations at night in San Francisco, and give their first taxi ride with no safety driver to founder Kyle Vogt. GM employees are now using Cruise vehicles as taxis.

See Cruise takes robotaxi "Ride #1"

On Thursday, they did a 2.5 hour long "under the hood" session to talk about various elements of their technology. It was pretty information dense.

See Cruise Under the Hood

Comments

First, the article has several typos (didn’t have anybody read the draft?) and the overall tone is substantially more critical than what you use for your Waymo articles. As a former Waymo employee, you should disclose your holdings future and past to readers. There’s clear bias here— what you’re doing here is not journalism.

Second, you conclude that you advocate seeing Waymo and Cruise disclose safety metrics. Looking at how NHTSA and Tesla have fought over Level 2, the issue of reporting and regulating Level 5 will clearly be strictly more controversial. A good journalist might provide a concrete ask for what metrics to report, or even interview some experts who aren’t just shooting from their armchairs. Otherwise you’re just inciting a pissing contest, perhaps one that will increase the value of your stake in Waymo.

I have some Alphabet (purchased long before Waymo existed.) It is less than 2% of my net worth, and Waymo is just a small part of Alphabet. As such I think an increase in the value of Waymo would be an insignificant fraction of my assets. I have no interest in promoting Waymo to make the stock go up, and am pretty sure I couldn't.

I do make a semi-concrete ask -- do as much as Waymo did some time ago, where they detailed every different real and simulated contact they had had in 6 million miles of driving over several years.

I did remove a few typos, and will get out more over time. E-mail them to me.

Why don’t you ask Waymo to release the video of Levandowski inciting an accident on the 101? That would bring Waymo to parity with what other AV companies do for reporting in California. I’d also like to see the report of the Waymo that nearly hit me in SF while I was out jogging. The car had me in sight for 5-7 seconds before pushing me off the road.

You didn’t disclose your Waymo options.

The key problem with the “reporting” here is that it’s so one sided. But this is Forbes after all- it’s not about journalism or even progressive discussion but rather keeping score in dollars.

If they pushed you off the road that is an incident that should be reported for sure. I am not sure what you mean about Waymo options. I left long before it was Waymo, never had any options. Why do you say I had some? Real questions are fine, but invented insinuations don't do you credit.

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