Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

Can't tell if the camera has poor contrast resolution or if it was indeed that dark. With the dynamic range available on digital sensors, it seems to me that even without some form of FLIR it still should be more possiblle to capture this for sensors than eyes at any rate. Do self driving vehicles use any of this, especially at night?

I knew the woman was coming up in the video and I didn't see her until it would have been too late.

The driver definitely seemed distracted by a device of some kind.

The dynamic range in the video is probably misleading compared to the sensor capabilities or what adjusted eyes would see.

If the car can't see things in time to stop, it's probably moving too fast for the conditions.

> That’s only because there’s no light on her until the end.

Yes, quiet true.

> The car hardware should have seen her. If it doesn’t work in the dark it shouldn’t be on the road imho.

I tend to agree. I think unfortunately this video indicates that the car did not perform worse than a human. It's still valuable to have cars that perform better than humans, even if they aren't perfect.

When I cross-reference the lane lines at 0:03 with google maps[1], I get an estimate of the car being about 60ft-70ft away from the victim when I was first able to spot her shoe in the video. Some googling[2] says human reaction at 40mph would've taken 59ft, with an additional 80ft of actual stopping time.

This seems in line with the police report that "it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven)"

Maybe a SDV with superhuman reaction time should've been able to stop some 10ft after hitting her, and maybe if it had night vision-like sensors, it should've been able to see her from farther away, but my impression is that it would've been impossible for a regular human driver to avoid this accident.

Given that the SDV didn't attempt to reduce speed before she was visible under regular light, I'm forced to assume the sensors do require light in order to detect obstacles and that there wasn't enough light to activate the sensor before the headlights illuminated her.

[1](https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4369852,-111.9436199,113m/da...)

[2]https://www.google.com/search?q=stopping+distance+40mph&rlz=...