Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 240 posts

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#11

Post by tpmx »

quesera wrote: post #9
tpmx wrote: post #2

Seems like a short-term solution would be for e.g. Cruise to give the SFFD a blanket permission to push their cars out of the way? And long-term work on avoiding this situation in software.

I don't think SFFD needs extra permission to destroy private property in a measured response to an emergency. They do it all the time. They might not have had the correct equipment or vehicle to move a car out of the way though.

They could give SFFD a blanket permission to destroy their cars in an unmeasured response to an emergency...

> They might not have had the correct equipment or vehicle to move a car out of the way though.

Or they they didn't feel it was "a measured response". Who knows.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#13

Post by boomboomsubban »

progfix wrote: post #8
fortran77 wrote: post #4

The article (which I bother to read before commenting) indicated that the only way to clear the way would have been to drive in reverse. I don’t know if a human driver could have been expected to do any better. The real problem was the double parked sanitation vehicle. I’m not a fan of tech companies doing their beta testing on public streets, but this doesn’t seem like a egregious incident despite the delay it cause…

> I don’t know if a human driver could have been expected to do any better. The problem is you can't communicate with an autonomous car. Even if the human driver doesn't know what to do you can indicate them to move in the right direction.

I feel like indicating to a human driver would take about as long as the 25 seconds the autonomous car took.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#14

Post by flutas »

gkop wrote: post #12

Um so WHY was the Cruise car stopped in a travel lane to begin with? I skimmed 2x but don’t see this explained..

From the article.

> a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. a traveling autonomous vehicle (...) was blocking its path. While a human might have reversed to clear the lane, the Cruise car stayed put (......) Tiffany Testo, a spokesperson for Cruise, confirmed the incident. She said the driverless car had correctly yielded to the oncoming fire truck in the opposing lane and contacted the company’s remote assistance workers,

So it sounds like the car was driving perfectly fine, but stopped when a car was coming at it head on and it didn't reverse.

I think the real issue here is a double parked garbage truck forcing the fire truck to go into oncoming traffic in the first place. Maybe there's a need for a loading only zone there so that the garbage truck doesn't have to block the travel lane.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#16

Post by saulpw »

flutas wrote: post #14
gkop wrote: post #12

Um so WHY was the Cruise car stopped in a travel lane to begin with? I skimmed 2x but don’t see this explained..

From the article. > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. a traveling autonomous vehicle (...) was blocking its path. While a human might have reversed to clear the lane, the Cruise car stayed put (......) Tiffany Testo, a spokesperson for Cruise, confirmed the incident. She said the driverless car had correctly yielded to t…

The real issue is that not every situation can be perfectly modeled, real human systems aren't (and can't be!) perfect, so sometimes you need to think outside of the box and with human priorities.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#18

Post by flutas »

gojomo wrote: post #6

Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? I don't see the article, or quoted sources, even trying to make that comparison - so this is really only a half-story, compared to what's relevant. Further, given the remote-guidance possibilities with autonomous cars, i…

> Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars?

Honestly the article is pure tech-scare bait. It blames a car that stopped (while it was driving) when a truck was driving at it head on, but tries to glance over the fact that a (human driven) garbage truck is the reason the fire truck had to go into oncoming traffic in the first place.

> a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#19

Post by cozzyd »

flutas wrote: post #14
gkop wrote: post #12

Um so WHY was the Cruise car stopped in a travel lane to begin with? I skimmed 2x but don’t see this explained..

From the article. > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. a traveling autonomous vehicle (...) was blocking its path. While a human might have reversed to clear the lane, the Cruise car stayed put (......) Tiffany Testo, a spokesperson for Cruise, confirmed the incident. She said the driverless car had correctly yielded to t…

the garbage truck might be double parked because another car was illegally parked, even if there's a loading zone...

In practice, double parking is extremely common in all cities...

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#20

Post by tyrfing »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #13
progfix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know if a human driver could have been expected to do any better. The problem is you can't communicate with an autonomous car. Even if the human driver doesn't know what to do you can indicate them to move in the right direction.

I feel like indicating to a human driver would take about as long as the 25 seconds the autonomous car took.

According to the article, the autonomous car didn't move, the garbage truck did.
Post reply on HN