181–190 of 245 posts
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It's only cheaper because it's operating at a loss. Taxis do not operate at a loss.
But why does it need to be? I would still take a Lyft/Uber because the service is better, even at the same price.
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This is simply not true. The dashcam footage released by Tempe police does not depict the driving conditions at the site of the accident accurately at all. Check out [1] for the actual driving conditions at night. I'm not usually the one to talk about conspiracy, but Tempe police had no legal responsibility to release the footage since the investigation is still ongoing. Couple this with the statement released by the…
I know this is going to sound uncharitable and I acknowledge that any death is tragic but... This person carelessly crossed a busy road at night! The victim practically did commit suicide. She could have just as easily been killed by a human-driving car, just like thousands of pedestrians do every year. Why are we so quick to try to blame the car? At least the car was in the right place.
Edited to add: We don't know anything about her physical or mental condition that might have made it difficult for her to perceive the car or the distance when she was crossing, so to assume that she had perfect perception and chose to cross in front anyway assumes facts not in evidence.
My takeaway opinion: Sad to see that Khosrowshahi did not end the self driving program at Uber. Yes, I know hindsight is 20/20, but that's exactly why an incoming CEO is brought in. Everyone was saying autonomous vehicles was Uber's only possible future... he saw the internal reports, he knew his (or should have) talent (was it "techbros" or computer scientists?). I feel this is the real inflection point for Uber.
I think Uber's essential mistake is to go from "autonomous vehicles are the only way our business model makes sense" to "we should be building autonomous vehicles". Their expertise is in UI, routing algorithms, and business development. There is nothing in their background that indicates they should have any competitive advantage in building autonomous vehicles over Google/Waymo, the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of e…
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Is that how speed limits work in the US? It’s my understanding (elsewhere) that the limit is in enforcement after you past the sign, not at some unspecified distance before it, or when you see it. The sign itself is the only transition point between limits.
Yes that is the way it works in the US, but as a practical matter most people start speeding up as soon as the higher speed limit sign comes into view. And of course conversely they don't start slowing down until they pass the sign posting the slower limit.
What are “reasonable” rules for autonomous vehicles? Should they stick to the limit literally, so only start accelerating after the increased limit sign? (There will need to be warning signs when a speed limit reduction is ahead to give the vehicle time to comply.)
Would a vehicle speeding up before the sign indicate a failure or error in the system?
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Not necessarily. There are a lot of reasons for a car manufacturer not to enter the transportation market: They have no history of operating in that market. It's a major undertaking to compete across the globe. The other transportation companies will now be their competitor, and will refuse to buy their cars. They may not be successful because of marketing, positioning, etc. If they refrain from that.. they can sell…
Both BMW and Mercedes run self service car rentals (ReachNow and Car2Go).
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They could always buy from someone else ... but uber seems to have extreme competitor paranoia when it comes to buying any services. I think they also spent $500M to make their own maps when you could use any of the popular mapping APIs out there.
Yes, they COULD licence the tech from someone else, but the price would be too high to make it worth doing. My feeling is that if someone else has self driving technology, Uber has no way of adding value. Tesla, Waymo, whoever - will simply run a taxi service themselves and reap more profits. It's possible that a smaller self driving company might not have the capital to start an actual fleet, but I feel like investo…
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Early reports said the police stated the AV was going 38 in a 35mph zone
It is right in a transition period between 35mph and 45mph. The Mill ave bridge is 35mph and Mill ave is slow (25mph) because it is an urban area and by ASU and Tempe Town Lake with lots of pedestrians. After the bridge it changes to 45mph so it could be the Uber was also in a 10mph speed up phase in the hundreds of feet from the bridge right where the pedestrian was.
On the northbound side it changes from 35 mph to 45 mph right after the bridge just before the freeway. Southbound, it changes from 45 mph to 35 mph about 140 feet after Washington St, well before the freeway and bridge, and about 150 ft north of where the accident occurred.
If someone near the scene wanted to find the speed limit, and failed to consider that the two directions might have different speeds, I'd expect them to be more likely to find the southbound speed. That's because it is common to place speed limit signs shortly after intersections so that people turning onto the road won't have to go long to find out the correct speed limit. So I'd expect them to head toward the Washington/Mill intersection to start searching for a speed limit sign.
For the curious, here is the accident location on Google street view [1]. Back up 17 steps from that, continuing to face north, if you want to see the applicable speed limit sign. Or cross to the other side from the accident location and go north 8 steps to find the speed limit for the southbound road (it's on the last street light before you reach the intersection).
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4363673,-111.9425082,3a,75y,...
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Wouldn't those with greater power (the power to kill) be tasked with greater responsibility?
No. If you jump in front of a train, is the train driver's fault? Where is the pedestrian's responsibility?
I don't understand the fuss around this topic. In my country the law is very clear: in such a case the pedestrian has 100% of the guilt, the driver has 0% responsibility. From the movie, the pedestrian is hard to see. Yes, people point at Lidar and other systems, but human driven cars don't have anything like this: any human driver would have the accident in the same circumstances. But how about the pedestrian, didn'…
The “fuss” is largely because someone was killed, and independent of the tech issues here, many people don’t believe that death is a reasonable penalty for jaywalking. The fact that states differ on applying fault in these cases should be a hint about how the morality here is not clear-cut. Then there’s the tech-focused issue of why Uber’s AV could not stop or even slow down when encountering a human-shaped object th…
Not sure if the human with bicycle was sprinting across the road either.
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I really don't know. Even with all the hours of recorded road time by Google/Uber used as a testbed for proper driving conditions, most machine learning systems still suffer from figuring out ways of cheating[1], and in those cases it could be fatal. [1] "The program even learns how to take advantage of bugs and glitches, like timing jumps so that Mario begins falling again at the exact time that he makes contact wit…
You know, medical research would be so much faster and easier and cheaper if we could just test new drugs and devices and procedures on humans. We don’t. We shouldn’t. Half of all humans who have ever lived, died from mosquito-borne illnes, about 5,000,000,000 human lives. People who argue that the relatively paltry number of people killed by automobiles justifies a little “sacrifice” to prevent it in the future, nev…
Your math doesn't work.
The current population of the world is between 7 and 8 billion.
If half of all humans who have ever lived were 5 billion, the total number of people who have ever lived would be 10 billion, of which at least 7 billion are still alive.
That leaves less than 5 billion who could possibly have ever died for any reason, much less mosquito-borne illnesses.