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Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

reuters.com

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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#371

Post by asift »

objclxt wrote: post #202
Jagat wrote: post #168

Can we please not overreact and send the whole self-driving research down the drain? What does the statistics say? How many miles have the self-driving cars driven, and how many deaths were they responsible for? How does it compare to a human driver? When a million humans drive a car for a mile, and 1 of them results in a death, it's easy to pinpoint the blame on a "random drunk/distracted driver". How'bout start thi…

> What does the statistics say? How many miles have the self-driving cars driven, and how many deaths were they responsible for? How does it compare to a human driver? As of December 2017 Uber had driven 2 million autonomous miles[1]. Let's be generous and double that, so 4 million. The NHTSA reports a fatality rate (including pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers) of 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles[2], twenty five ti…

1.25 per 100 million miles is almost certainly a bad benchmark since the majority of those miles are interstate miles. Fatality rate per mile of urban driving would be much better, although I'm not really sure whether I would expect that number to be higher or lower.

Edit: Actually, maybe I'm wrong in assuming (a) the majority of miles driven are interstate miles, or (b) that the majority of existing miles logged by self-driving cars have not been on the interstate. Would love to see some data if anyone has it, although I suspect Google, Uber, et al. are reluctant to share data at this point.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#372

Post by davesque »

abalone wrote: post #236

It's likely this was actually a bicyclist, not a pedestrian. The police are saying pedestrian walking outside the crosswalk but here's a picture of the crumpled bicycle: https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/975767445859287042 You can see it's next to a sign. That sign lets us determine exactly where it happened on Google street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4370667,-111.9430321,3a,75y,... It's exactly where the…

Isn't it reaching to see a picture of a bicycle near a sign and then conclude that the accident must have happened exactly next to or near the sign? Maybe the police/witnesses dragged the bicycle to that location?

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#373

Post by untog »

openasocket wrote: post #323
untog wrote: post #311

This opens up an interesting question going forward. We can't rely on Uber themselves to analyse the telemetry data and come to a conclusion, they're biased. So really, we need self driving car companies to turn over accident telemetry data to the police. But the police are ill equipped to process that data. We need law enforcement to be able to keep pace with advances in technology and let's face it, they're not goi…

Aren't you basically just proposing that the NTSB analyze automobile telemetry, the same way they analyze aircraft telemetry data? Doesn't seem wildly outside the realm of possibility.

The NTSB could certainly do it. But they'd need to expand a lot in a world where self driving cars are an everyday reality, which again comes back to the question of funding.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#375

Post by jeiting »

dmoy wrote: post #318
untog wrote: post #311

This opens up an interesting question going forward. We can't rely on Uber themselves to analyse the telemetry data and come to a conclusion, they're biased. So really, we need self driving car companies to turn over accident telemetry data to the police. But the police are ill equipped to process that data. We need law enforcement to be able to keep pace with advances in technology and let's face it, they're not goi…

On the one hand I'd say give it to the NTSB, because historically they are really good at this sort of thing. On the other hand, I'd wonder if increasing NTSB scope this much would drastically decrease the average quality of NTSB's work. Scaling ain't easy.

Yeah, pilot here. NTSB is the right organization to handle this. The investigators over there do an amazing job of determining root cause from forensic evidence. I assume that will be the process here.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#376

Post by [deleted] »

abalone wrote: post #292

This may not have been an unexpected circumstance. The "pedestrian outside of the crosswalk" report is likely wrong. There is visual evidence that strongly supports that this was a case of the Uber hitting a bicyclist while merging into the right turn lane. Here's a picture of the crumpled bicycle (note dent on the front right of the car): https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/975767445859287042 The sign it is lying nex…

[deleted]

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#377

Post by JepZ »

Why am I not surprised that this happend with an Uber self driving car?

In fact, their culture of ignoring rules and common sense might be okay for business development, but with respect to human safety it is just irresponsible and inhuman when it comes to self driving cars.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#378

Post by stevenwoo »

kaibones wrote: post #261

I see the Waymo cars while I walk to lunch (AZ) quite often. One time while walking through the crosswalk a Waymo turning right cut me off as I started into the crosswalk despite my having the walk indicator. This seems to be a very difficult scenario for a self-driving car as there are often people at the corner that are either crossing the other direction or just waiting on the corner. I sent them a note via their…

This is a non trivial situation for human drivers, too, when I am on a bicycle or driving a car I have to wait and look at the pedestrian until I am sure of their intention. That seems like a very difficult problem in that a lot of times people are on their phone or watching a child or dog, I often have to slow to a standstill and speak to people to ask them what they are planning on doing.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#379

Post by WhompingWindows »

austinhutch wrote: post #217

There may be no company I trust less to be open and honest about this than Uber. The arms race between companies will likely keep the most important lessons from this event proprietary. I'm very much not looking forward to hearing execs answer for this as I'm sure it will have the same amount of humanity as the rest of their comms.

This is my thought as well. Compared with Waymo, Cruise/GM, Tesla, Lyft, and the many other start-ups in this space, I think Uber is the least ethically scrupulous. I also doubt their self driving tech is as advanced as many of the other players, and I wonder if those other companies would have been able to handle this situation.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#380

Post by ebcode »

Someone1234 wrote: post #247
pishpash wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about not testing it on the unpaid public in incremental patches like this age of software "engineering" has decided it was a good idea to do?

You ultimately have to at some stage, since any test track is a biased test by its nature. It is more an issue of how sophisticated these vehicles should be before they're let loose on public roads. At some stage they have to be allowed onto public roads or they'd literally never make it into production.

"Never making it into production" sounds like the perfect outcome for this technology.
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