Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

> bigger truck wins in an accident

And that's why I go by tram. :)

>Oh, and they speed.

3mph variance is perfectly normal even on modern cruise control. And even on most modern cards, what you see on the speedometer is often off by ~1 mph at low speeds, and even more at higher speeds. (This is the reason you will often see people talk about 'GPS verified' speeds when it comes to talking about the top speed they have achieved in a car). Federal law in the US only requires they be accurate within 5% when using a standard tire size on normal pavement with the recommended tire air pressure. If you have over or under-inflated tires or have upgraded your car to larger tires for whatever reason, this 5% might become a very different. Even if the Uber was perfectly maintained, that could be 1.75mph variance on the speedometer @ 35mph.

Keeping to exactly the speed limit also just isn't how anyone drives. It wouldn't be, even if speedometers were perfectly accurate. It's impractical. It's hugely fuel inefficient. Everyday driving, be it by person or cruise control, involves accelerating and then letting off the gas. This means if you are targeting a speed limit of 35, you're swinging a few mph in either direction. Add in things like changing road conditions - every highway I've ever driven on will have random patches of road that are made up of different material or different levels of wear after having had potholes, etc, repaired - changes in road incline, weather conditions (winds), or even the behavior of cars in front of you - a vehicle changing lanes is going to result in different air resistance, especially larger vehicles, and plenty of other variables, makes the idea that any vehicle should be kept at exactly the speed limit is pretty unreasonable.

Speedometers aren't perfect. Cruise control or even excellent human driving will never keep you at exactly the speed limit. While saying going '38 MPH in a 35 MPH Zone is speeding' is technically accurate, it's not particularly useful.

Going the speed limit OFTEN creates a hazard. Technically speeding is not "exceeding the speed limit" but "driving too fast for conditions." In a torrential downpour with slick roads and poor visibility, the legal speed limit may easily be too fast for conditions, and you can be ticketed--to pick one scenario that refutes your "NEVER." And driving the speed limit in the passing lane creates an obstacle to faster traffic trying to get by, a frustration and a hazard. There was a video of some idiot "pranksters" with your exact attitude that created a rolling roadblock on a freeway by coordinating five cars to drive abreast at the exact speed limit, proving ... something. They were ticketed for hazardous driving. cthalupa is correct, though more diplomatic than I. It's more hazardous to be out of step with the surrounding traffic flow than it is to "speed."

You appear to be suggesting that multiple levels of police watched the videos, GPS tracking, lidar scene, all recorded by the on-board systems and have deliberately suppressed what really happened. I can believe an Uber employee being paid to cover this up but whatever your views of the police, I don't believe they would suppress something that could so obviously be a major public health issue.

And it's common in police reports to identify the victim and where they're from. The point about the carrier bags and the homelessness is that they've been unable to verify her sitation; they're explaining why. Nothing strange here.

But I guess there's no convincing you without providing you the snuff film of it all happening.

Yes, so far the statistics we have about the safety of AI cars are mostly meaningless to say anything useful about how they would scale if applied universally.

Another thing that bothers me is how often the argument 'human drivers are terrible, far worse than computers for situations A, B, C, etc' is used to suggest that AI systems will improve road safety. I will be the first to admit that many people are terrible drivers, they make mistakes, don't pay enough attention, don't obey traffic laws, have bad reaction times, etc, no argument there. But so far I have never seen any statistics about how many of the accidents caused by these kinds of human failures actually lead to fatalities. Taking the human out of the equation could in theory improve all kinds of car accidents, but how many would be just fender-benders as opposed to road fatalities? It's not like it is super-easy to accidentally cause a fatal road accident, and everyone knows one or more people who were involved in one. Who can prove that AI cars will not decrease the total number of accidents of any kind, but increase the kinds of accidents with fatalities, like this one with the Uber car? Maybe human drivers, with all their faults, would have avoided this particular accident by driving more defensively or using social cues to be more prepared for this woman crossing the street?

I'm not trying to make an argument about the viability of AI cars that are safer than humans here by the way. I personally don't believe AI cars will ever be safer overall than humans in all possible situations that people drive in, but that's a different discussion. What bugs me is that suddenly it seems as if the whole world is willing to bend over backwards to interpret statistics about the presumed safety of AI cars in the most favorable way possible, and at the same time ignore all these relatively simple things that could actually improve safety right now, at much lower costs than developing fully autonomous cars.