I work in the AV space, so I guess you’ll just have to trust me. I assume Cruise internals look very similar to the internals at other AV companies, which I think is a safe assumption.
>The sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's where the hard parts are.
Sensors will be very different. LIDAR prices are coming down but we’re still a while off from incorporating it into consumer vehicles - and we’re way, way off from incorporating multiple high resolution, long range LIDAR pucks, plus short range LIDAR to cover blind spots, plus imaging radar, plus thermal cameras, etc. into commercial cars the way they’re integrated into Cruise cars right now.
Automotive decision making will also be extremely different. Modern robotaxis rely on very high detail HD maps that are continuously updated. It’s impossible to scale that nationwide in a way that would work in a consumer car. Fundamental parts of the stack assume these maps are present and accurate - remove that assumption and a ton of things have to be rethought from first principles.
Remote support is also a key part of AV stacks - that is, asking a human to clarify an ambiguous situation. There’s a video where Kyle says that Cruise cars request remote support approximately every 5 minutes. Again, fundamental parts of the stack rely on the availability of remote support and have to be rethought from first principles if it’s removed.
This isn’t even getting into the differences in compute on a Crusie car and a consumer car.
>Or alternatively: a less charitable way of making the point work would be to say that Cruise's stack was a bunch of special-case hacks for specific regions and vehicles and wasn't scalable to arbitrary environments nor regular passenger cars.
I mean you’re not wrong, but you can’t create a robotaxi without this. ML models just aren’t capable enough to handle edge cases in a safe way without tons of hacks in place.