I think it could have stopped safely. Assuming it has quicker reactions than a human, stopping distance should be around 18 meters. I think it just completely missed her. Edit: critical typo
A driver (I refuse to say "human") would have also swerved.
And an autonomous car that actually worked in theory would be able to swerve safely, since it would have a full knowledge of surrounding obstacles and be able to measure the physics of the car as it was swerving, allowing it to keep in a safe envelope. In my mind, the complete lack of reaction from the car paints this as a total failure on the part of the car.
Two obvious things from the footages: the pedestrian is invisible until the last moment, and the "driver" is focused on something else, probably a smartphone. Given of how little time there was between the hitted woman became visible and the impact, a driver action may not have been able to avoid it, but what will be interesting is how his responsability will be engaged or not. Anyway one advantage of automous car is…
> the pedestrian is invisible until the last moment In this crappy video, yes. Maybe it was scaled down massively before handing to the police or made darker, we don't know. It might have been visible for a normal person.
The Police should ask for the raw footage and at any rate the AD will if there's any doubt. They will probably engage a forensic computer tech expert as well and possibly ASU professors/engineers. But from a black box perspective it's clear that the system didn't not detect anything. Still IANAL but I would probably guess there will be a reckless driving charge for the driver here.. mitigated by the pedestrian failing to yield to the car by not crossing at a cross walk. The human driver was clearly not paying attention and there is video evidence of that. If the driver had kept their eyes on the road and the accident had still happened then it probably would be no charges filed.
I do wonder if perhaps Uber made the video darker before releasing. Or used a camera that is not the main sensing camera. Because I would hope the cars are smart enough to increase ISO to get more detail at night time.
That would be criminal. Nobody at Uber would risk that.
I wish I could agree. Uber is well known for being unafraid of criminal actions to protect their "Bottom line".
I didn't know that new Subaru's can come with driver assist. How does it work? What's your experience with it? I've got a 2013, and am thinking about trading in.
2017 Legacy with "Eye Sight." I have had one or two situations where the car emergency braked on my behalf. It happens when the car in front of me turns off the road and is nearly clear. I don't brake because I know that the car will clear the roadway before I get there but the system doesn't see it that way and brakes. I anticipate that now and avoid anything close enough to cause braking so I don't wind up the fron…
That sounds awful. Driving is hard enough when you have to second-guess what other drivers and pedestrians are going to do. Why add to that by having to second-guess what your own car is going to do?
I've got to side with the people who want no auto-driving until we have always-better-than-human auto-driving. When cars only have back seats, and no driver controls beyond a way to state your destination, auto-driving will be acceptable.
It's clear from the video that a human driver actually would've had more trouble since the pedestrian showed up in the field of view right before the collision, yet that's in the visible spectrum. That's not at all clear to me. I don't know too much about cameras, but it looks to me like the camera is making the scene appear much darker than it actually is. In the video, you can see many street lights projecting down…
I have to agree. Just like a normal camera has issues in low-light, it is clear that this camera is diminishing exactly how light the road ahead was. While I can't say confidently that I would have been able to stop to prevent hitting them, watching the video in full screen does lead me to believe that I would have seen them and been able to apply the brakes at least enough to reduce the impact. Also, watching the vi…
This is pretty much the experience I have with my dash cam, a Yi. In its recorded video, its automatic exposure control make it look like everything outside of the headline cone is pitch black, but it is actually not. I have seen deer and possums by the side of the road, and debris etc, that did not show up when I later checked the video for the same period. There is enough spillover light from modern headlights that a human whose eyes are dilated and adjusted to dark conditions will see a pedestrian standing on the median, stepping off it, crossing the inner lane towards the car's current lane. More than enough time to begin to brake and possibly swerve. I have dodged animals in a situation similar to this.
I think it could have stopped safely. Assuming it has quicker reactions than a human, stopping distance should be around 18 meters. I think it just completely missed her. Edit: critical typo
8m ?! That sounds completely unreasonable to me. The first google hit says it is more like 33m.. http://www.brakingdistances.com/38Mph
A few people have commented along the lines of "I probably couldn't have stopped in time even if I had been driving." I think it's important as a driver to hit the brakes as hard as you can even if you don't think you'll be able to avoid collision, because the energy is reduced greatly even with a small amount of deceleration (F=ma). Probability of death in car/pedestrian collision is reduced from over 80% to under 1…
> I think it's important as a driver to hit the brakes as hard as you can even if you don't think you'll be able to avoid collision It's good to hit the brakes, yes, but the best way to avoid almost all collisions is to steer, not just to brake. Braking combined with steering sharply to the left (since the pedestrian was moving to the right) would have been the best response to this situation. (Note that, before anti…
Depending on your speed, that is very bad advice. Sounds like a recipe for losing traction and fish tailing (potentially into other cars or people or even stationary objects).
There is only so much traction afforded by the contact patch on your tires. You can brake, you can turn, you can speed up but I would not recommend doing more than one at a time.