Arizona halts...self-driving tests; supplier says Uber disabled Volvo safety system before fatality

L A Times ^

[Reno89519]

You are not seeing the whole thing! First, the whole video, per the police, shows the lady walking her bike across from the walkway in the median (look at the Google/Bing pictures which show a stone walkway for crossing the median), then crossing the road from left to right. And apparently out of sight of the camera. As the car approaches, the road curves right, the woman comes into the headlights as it turns with the road, you can see she is still continuing left to right. It runs her down in what turns out to be the bike lane and beginning of turn lane. Uber admitted problem with bicycles and bike lanes previously. Now, a human driver, noting the woman crossing down the road, would be watching for her as they approach--slowing down or moving left. The area is lit well, look at the media pics after the accidents. The headlights create bright area to see, video aperture darkens the rest, so looks like she suddenly appears. The car, according to police, did not slow or brake. Ran her down, murdered her. Now, today, Uber admits it turned off the avoidance system, which would have seen the woman. Not only did they have a inattentive felon at the wheel, they turned off the very systems that should have sensed the woman. Again, murder or homicide or whatever you want to call it. Their carelessness or intentional action killed the woman. Pre-meditated? Anyway, as this posted article reports, Arizona immediately revoked their license today.

Again, an attentive human driver would have avoid the collision and not killed the woman.

[VRWC For Truth]

Bwahahahahahayhahahaha ! ...

[CurlyDave]

...If they have an internal compass that includes magnetic declination, then great. Otherwise they will need to depend on the pics, radar, and lidar to finetune their location within the roadway...

A ring laser gyro or fiber optic gyro would allow traveling many miles by dead reckoning. I don't think cost is an issue, if someone makes millions of them the costs will come down.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

Or road construction sites where the guys doing aren’t sure exactly how your supposed to get through it. Doesn’t happen often but more tha I would like. Or when emergency vehicles have the road blocked and expect you to pull a road out of your rectum to get where your going. Happened a couple of times to me in the last few years but lucky for me a knew the area.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

I meant “the guys doing it” and “I knew the area.”

[Nifster]

Uber is a hot mess

[Vendome]

[Moonman62]

Misleading headline. Uber used their own system rather than the one that comes with the car.

[TheNext]

A safe human woukd have avoided the accident.

But humans deserve special rights too, like the software glitch privilege.

[BobL]

Can’t speak for others, but I would NEVER trust a self-driving car to stop for me if I were crossing the street.

[Fresh Wind]

What’s disturbing about that video is how misleading it is. It may very well have been deliberately darkened to support the “she came out of nowhere” CYA excuse.

Here’s another video recorded over the same stretch of road at night. It lays waste to the bogus claim from Uber that the road was too dark to see a pedestrian. An alert human driver would have had no trouble seeing the woman and her bike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRW0q8i3u6E

Even so, dark or not, the vehicle’s sensors and software were clearly not up to the task of dealing with an obstruction in the road.

[Paladin2]

Better to stand behind your product....

[BobL]

“Better to stand behind your product....”

Generally true, but they do have a reverse gear. Probably better to be on one side.

[trebb]

Knew something was wrong - even my Rav4 would have at least locked them up (as much as the ABS would allow) trying to stop and the Uber car never twitched.

[Delta 21]

In High School I could drive up to the local Sonic and order with my CB radio. It could over power everyone else and bleed through into the ordering console and blast my skip talk with no problem. I only ordered once that way, cause I didnt want John Lawman knowing I was 100watts over power.

[Delta 21]

That dude driving must have several PhDs. That or a few felony convictions.

Stock tip ‘O the day - Sell UBER - NOW

[Right Wing Assault]

These are still experimental vehicles. They should be driven by trained technicians, not some poor schlump Uber driver. They are intentionally putting incomplete technology into a life or death scenario and the various governments are giving them their blessing to run them around in their cities. Why?

[Delta 21]

I would figure that the radar or what ever “sensor” is looking should be able to see farther than the headlights of the car. People used to get charged with over driveing their headlight if you got caught speeding at night. It turned into wreckless driving with possible felony vehicular homicide if someone got killed. Breaking and swerving to the left would have prevented the death. A human driver paying proper attention could have avoided this completely. A normal human of today’s attention span would perform marginally better than the computer.

Was the guy watching porn on his cell phone when he ran her over?

[PAR35]

In the video, it appeared that there was a large blank rectangle on the screen then the woman suddenly popped into view. It wasn’t clear if it was a camera failure or if the video had been (poorly) doctored.

[PAR35]

If you stop the video at about the 9 second mark, you can see a dark mask in the center of the screen. When the car was further away, it blocked the entire bicycle; by that point in the video it blocks from her shoulders to her waist and from even with the center of the rear wheel to the handlebars. Her head is just appearing at the upper right of the mask.

Camera fault or doctored video?