We can argue all day about whether Cruise was in the wrong here, but the fact is, with autonomous cars becoming more common, this kind of situation is going to happen - an autonomous car blocking a vehicle in an emergency - and protocols/regulations need to be in place for handling these situations.
SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
41–50 of 166 posts
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#42I don't understand all the debate. The _law_ is that when an emergency vehicle is behind you, you pull over to the side and make as much room as you can in the center of the road. The vehicle did not move out of the way, the company should be penalized heavily, as would a human driver.
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The term FUD makes sense in low-risk applications where the benefit of the doubt ought to be given. In safety-critical contexts it should be completely reversed, and confidence, certainty and trust should be looked at extremely critically.
Human drivers kill 30,000+ per year in the US alone. Development of an automated driving option is a safety-critical context, and that requires real-world deployment experience. The precautionary principle is not what is called for here.
> Development of an automated driving option is a safety-critical context, and that requires real-world deployment experience.
All the more reason not to fuck things up at this stage. Precautionary principl is very appropriate with new tech in a safety-critical context.
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not a linguist but this use of after seems to at least imply a link. Strictly speaking it’s only the temporal relation of two facts but I’d reckon that a lot of people will read this after in the sense of because.
Yeah when was this, Augh 14th? > 160k People Die in USA After Cruise Robotaxi...
Someone died. Stop and think about that for a bit and tone down the stupid "but logic!" BS. Recognize that we don't know exactly what happened and it's worth digging into. This is a great time to practice empathy instead of stroking your ego.
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#45I think SFFD is rightfully worried about robotaxis but this doesn’t seem to be the case. When cameras are recording everything, you can’t just make up facts. “The video captured by Cruise showed that the ambulance parked behind the Cruise and did not attempt to pass the robotaxi in the rightmost unblocked lane. Instead, responders moved a firetruck to allow the ambulance to pass on the left. The video, which Cruise d…
Ok so the guys and gals who we pay to save your life are saying they're getting in the way. But MLRoboCorporation(TM)(c)(r) says fuck those guys, they can go around? I think I'll side with the humans on this one, let them take control of the vehicle. I don't care how much money Kyle Vogt loses to car theft, that's not my problem. Clearly this industry needs to get regulated hard.
oh no dont speak ill of Ycombinator's startup bros. You will get downvoted!
Loved Justin.TV and how they helped shake up the media industrty up ... all the start-up bro ethos followed there successfully helped kill and bring new media business models (all the Frasier, Seinfeld, etc 24/7 channels on Justin.TV). Awesome!
Applying that same killing it here theory (Cruise trying to rapidly .. rapidly expand in many, many cities while Waymo with its WAY better track record as of late August is expanding to only one city .. Austin) is just down right deadly as we seen with Travis Kalanick's version of trying to kill it and in turn killing a pedestrian. Who cares if you kill business and in turn new business come from that .. that's awesome but killing people to kill it and win this race. Irresponsible and disgusting and again they're expanding to 5 to ten more cities (Nashville, DC, Austin, etc, etc) yet causing chaos in San Fran (Waymo is not & they have been working on this tech since 2007).
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#46We can argue all day about whether Cruise was in the wrong here, but the fact is, with autonomous cars becoming more common, this kind of situation is going to happen - an autonomous car blocking a vehicle in an emergency - and protocols/regulations need to be in place for handling these situations.
It is not a fact we have to allow these corporate experiments on the roads with our sons and daughters.
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#47I think SFFD is rightfully worried about robotaxis but this doesn’t seem to be the case. When cameras are recording everything, you can’t just make up facts. “The video captured by Cruise showed that the ambulance parked behind the Cruise and did not attempt to pass the robotaxi in the rightmost unblocked lane. Instead, responders moved a firetruck to allow the ambulance to pass on the left. The video, which Cruise d…
90 seconds is fast. It’s often longer than that. Besides safety straps, there’s leads, transfer from scoop/backboard to the full stretcher, bags, goo, more secondary vitals to take..
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#48"Throughout the entire duration the AV is stopped, traffic remains unblocked and flowing to the right of the AV," a Cruise spokesperson said in a statement. "The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do." Cruise seems to be ignorant of the law here. the law is: YOU GET OUT OF THE WAY of emergency vehicles, period. unless you are "landlocke…
I do think Cruise's responses to stuck cars needs work but problems with emergency vehicles and drivers happens all the time.
I remember an ambulance was right behind me at an intersection. The right turning lane was free but it was right behind me. I got really uncomfortable because I had 0 idea what to do, if I was supposed to basically break the law and go into the intersection on red so that it could get by. After a few seconds, I decide to pull into the right lane but I guess the ambulance driver had the same exact idea at the same exact time and almost read-ended me. So then I get back into the other lane and he goes through the right lane just fine, like he could have the whole time. I'm not blaming anyone btw, maybe he thought the light would change soon or something.
I wanted to get out of the way, but I had no idea what way the ambulance wanted to go. In my mind, if it wanted to go forwards, it just had to get into the right lane and run the red light (which ofc they can do). I think everyone was equally confused because everyone else just sorta froze to let it go by in the right lane.
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#49Honestly amazing that the city, and the people are fine being beta testers.
Arguably the family here should be allowed to sue the city for forcing them to be beta testers tbh.
Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
#50Maybe I'm naive but is there a reason why in an emergency situation where the car is stuck, control can't be given over to a remote driver? It seems like in 99% of these situations, the car just has to go forward a few feet or change lanes.