13 ms·

Uber takes its self-driving cars off the road after one flipped over in Arizona

54 points by sosuke 10y ago

CptJamesCook 10y ago
I imagine this is a response to the awful press around the company the past several months. The Uber of 2015 would not have taken these cars off the road.
- notyourwork 10y ago
  I agree, especially considering the uber was not considered at fault. This gives uber press in a different light.
  - Preemo 10y ago
    The 'Uber Driver' may not be at fault, however the car failed to prevent or avoid an accident. It suddenly appears self-driving cars are no safer than human driven cars. Of course these are purely speculations but valid points. Interesting to see it's flipped itself somehow, too, I wonder what the computer decided to do that it maybe shouldn't have done? I suspect Uber will keep very quiet on this one, as there's all kinds of assumptions to be made.
    - notahacker 10y ago
      There's also a difference between the other driver being responsible for the incident because they failed to yield and pulled out in a dangerous and illegal manner and it not being possible the Uber vehicle could have responded better to the other car's dangerous driving.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        One would need to know more details. Yields in particular is one area where, under many conditions, you have to expect drivers to do reasonable things. Of course, you don't expect a driver to just blow through a yield sign. But maybe the driver with the right of way slows down a bit or changes lanes to let someone in or because they see someone edging out into traffic.
        tanin 10y ago
        During the behind-the-wheel test, I slowed down toward the 4-way junction in which I had the right of way. The examiner marked it as a minor mistake; He told me that I could get rear end for that. I didn't argue with him as he was the examiner. But I'd prefer 10 rear ends over one t-bone. When implementing a self-driving car, I'm not sure if we can explicitly write code that is against the DMV guidelines. For example, human seems to slow down at the junction even with the right of way and drive 5mph over the speed limit.
    - 36bydesignBL 10y ago
      "It suddenly appears self-driving cars are no safer than human driven cars," says the guy who just read an article about a crash caused by a human while a self-driving car was not at fault.
      - Preemo 10y ago
        You quoted me out-of-context.
- andrewksl 10y ago
  I'm certainly no Uber apologist, but talk about damned if you do, damned if you don't.
- brudgers 10y ago
  I think the odds that Uber would make money developing self driving cars was approximately zero. Look where Tesla Motors is after fourteen years in terms of producing and selling automobiles and without internal competition from another primary line of business. Self driving vehicles will have the same profile as the existing automotive industry: high capital costs and commodity margins. The existing automotive mega-corporations already have the capital investment and distribution networks like ships and rail cars and lots and auto-carrier semi-trailers. Tesla is building some of that and the jury is still out on whether Tesla will make a meaningful dent. Even the idea of Uber rolling out a self-driving fleet means a massive infusion of capital that is at odds with its current cost structure. And the existing automotive mega-corps can step into the ondemand business with a cost advantage in regard to rolling out vehicle fleets.
  - Mtinie 10y ago
    What still isn't clear to me is why Uber is involved in the development of self-driving cars, vs. profiteering and duplicating once the first viable examples have been released. On the surface autonomous vehicles appear to be a long-term capital draining exercise. Do they view the first mover advantage as that beneficial in this case that they'd risk all their future growth to be first to market for something that they could, conceivably, get a better ROI for being "second" to market with a more durable option?
    - dbot 10y ago
      Uber reached its current success with a first mover advantage. But I think the real reason is that everyone building self-driving cars today - including the big car manufacturers - will have little interest in selling to Uber. They will be running their own Uber-style Car-as-a-Service.
      - mrkgnao 10y ago
        IOW, Tesla will be to Uber as Uber wants to be to its drivers.
sharkweek 10y ago
>Local police say there were no injuries and Uber’s vehicle was not responsible for the incident. Seems odd that they'd make this move unless it was to avoid more negative press for continuing the program.
- brogrammernot 10y ago
  Easier to pull the cars from the markets and have less attention be paid to the Waymo suit. Good, bad, meh reports will mention the lawsuit every time and that's a larger PR nightmare than this right now.
samcheng 10y ago
Makes sense to me. Every bit of "Uber self-driving car" press is going to mention that nasty Waymo lawsuit. At this point, Uber has got to be looking to stop the bleeding.
username223 10y ago
I found this bit the most interesting: > Recode also obtained documents showing that Uber’s self-driving cars currently need to be handled by their human safety drivers roughly once every 0.8 miles. That's really far from autonomous. EDIT: Here's the Recode article: https://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/14737438/uber-self-driving-turmoil-otto-travis-kalanick-civil-war https://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/14737438/uber-self-driving-... and things just get worse. The cars only make it an average of 2 miles between incorrect sudden movements, down from 4 in January. What a joke.
- Animats 10y ago
  Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet. They should be testing at GoMentum Station, which is the former Concord Naval Weapons Station north of Oakland. That place was built to store battleship ammo; if anything bad happens there, there's nobody close enough to get hurt. Google/Waymo's California DMV disengagement report for 2016 reports 0.20 disengagements per 1000 miles, or one disengagement per 5000 miles.[1] Google's cars drove 635,868 miles autonomously in 2016, so there's enough driving behind this for that number to be meaningful. This is 4x better than 2015, incidentally. CA DMV accident and disengagement reports are worth reading, since they're one of the few objective data sources available on automatic driving. So far, nobody has been willing to turn a self-driving car over to Top Gear or Road and Track. Google/Waymo is thus three orders of magnitude better than Uber, and about two orders of magnitude better than anybody else who tests in California. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b-b119-91319c27788f/GoogleAutoWaymo_disengage_report_2016.pdf?MOD=AJPERES https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b...
  - iiiggglll 10y ago
    > Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet. No kidding! Yet somehow I'm not surprised, as it has always been pretty obvious that these jackasses didn't know what they were doing. This just adds to the many reasons why I am fully 100% behind getting them and other amateur-hour efforts (like geohot's comma.ai) off the road right now, and keeping them off until they can prove they are safe enough to be out on the public streets mixed with human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. I live and work in San Francisco and walk pretty much everywhere I go. I don't need to be watching out for some shitty "self driving" car that has to have a person take over every 0.8 miles whenever I'm trying to cross the street. Fuck that. If they keep this up, someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed.
Animats 10y ago
"Anthony Levandowski, the Otto founder who became head of Uber’s self-driving efforts last summer, also shares Kalanick’s brash disregard for regulatory authority. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that a running joke at Otto was “safety third.” Uh oh. The California DMV won't yet allow testing of autonomous vehicles heavier than 10,000 pounds on California public roads. Otto is thus testing in Arizona. Looks like that was a good decision by DMV. I wrote this on HN yesterday: An important question is whether their system is smart enough to take evasive action. It's becoming clear that there are two ways to approach self-driving. The first stems from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was about off-road driving. For that, the vehicles had to profile the terrain, plotting a path around obstacles, potholes, and cliff edges. The GPS route was just general guidance on where to go. That's the approach Google took, as can be seen from their SXSW videos. Google also identifies moving objects and tries to classify them. With all that capability, it's possible to take evasive action if some other road user is a threat. The control system has situational awareness and knows where there's clear space for escape. The other approach is to start with lane following and automatic cruise control, and try to build them up into self-driving. This can be done entirely with vision systems. That's the Cruise Automation and Tesla approach. This puts the car on a track defined by lines on the pavement, with lane changes and intersections handled as a special case. There usually isn't a full terrain profile; that requires LIDAR. So there isn't enough info to plan an emergency maneuver for collision avoidance. This distinction is not well understood, and it should be.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Such distinctions are only ever understood by most when they care enough to pay attention, and that usually takes time and a body count.
- arglebarnacle 10y ago
  Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but your last paragraph seems to imply that the "Tesla approach" is unable to "plan an emergency maneuver for collision avoidance" If true, that would seem to mean that Tesla's self-driving car program is dead on arrival. Clearly emergency collision avoidance is not optional for a self driving car with mass adoption. That's a pretty serious claim to make.
seibelj 10y ago
Is anyone interested in making a public bet with me about autonomous vehicles? I'm thinking something like, we publicly state that within 5 years a self-driving car will be able to take me from my apartment in Boston to my work in Cambridge, regardless of weather, time of day, etc. If it can, I pay you $1000, if it can't, you pay me $1000. Basically I'm getting super annoyed at people claiming self driving cars are right around the corner, which I've been reading for a decade, but it's always "just 5 years away". I would love to counter arguments with, "If you are so convinced why not bet me $1000?"
- onewland 10y ago
  I'd consider that bet on non-1:1 odds. You could submit a more strict version of it as a category on PredictIt.
- nostromo95 10y ago
  I mean there's a rational financial reason why someone optimistic about self-driving cars would be hesitant to take your bet -- they're magnifying their risk wrt self-driving cars, so if the technology doesn't come to fruition they're doubly screwed. If anything they'd rather take the opposite side of the bet so they can hedge.
  - seibelj 10y ago
    It's more about people publicly putting their name against me, which I would post on my website, saying to the world that they actually think self driving cars are going to happen. I would like people actually in the tech industry to bet against me, not people looking to make money. It's more a reality check about who is willing to put their money where their mouth is, because I think there are few. I think a fair wager would be, "On March 26th 2022 at 2am, 830am, 5pm, and 11pm, a self driving call will legally take seibelj from [his address] in Boston to [address] in Cambridge. The car will require no human intervention and it will arrive at the destination regardless of time, weather, traffic, and construction."
    - nostromo95 10y ago
andy_ppp 10y ago
It's weird that there is no way for regulators to know how good a self driving car really is; there might be many hours of driving but it's not like an aeroplane where you can have coverage of most conditions. New conditions could happen all the while. Add to the fact that Tesla have the richest dataset they have a huge advantage in this area one that will reap rewards and crash less that the competition. I think Uber and Volvo will be far behind.
- konceptz 10y ago
  That's an interesting point. What are the challenges behind creating a licensing test similar to the ones we take as humans(could be virtual)? This would be before allowing the software on the road.
  - andy_ppp 10y ago
    Actually this would be a great YC company; tests for self driving cars that added certain unexpected events to proceedings that were internal to the testing. Such things could include push bikes, road crashes, collisions, crazy Deathproof style driving, etc. How do self driving cars react to other drivers using their horns or ambulances for that matter? How does a police car pull over a self driving car?
ffjffsfr 10y ago
I think at this point it is clear that main problem with self-driving cars is not technology but social, psychological, political and legal challenges. People often forget that having good tech is just one step that does not guarantee any commercial success. People dont change their habits just because new tech is available. People are not going to start buying or using self-driving cars just because tech is available. There is huge psychological and social environment around car driving - e.g. think about all legal paperwork you have to go through to start driving, learning how to drive, buying insurance, all traffic regulations. All this cultural/human factors are based on specific definition of what car is and they all rely there is human subject operating this car. If self-driving cars are really going to succeed all this huge extremely social framework would have to change. I don't think this will happen. I think there are simply too many strong human emotions and purely financial interests around cars.
awinter-py 10y ago
it was probably trying to drift park a la stanford's 'Junior'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY93kr8PaC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY93kr8PaC4 But that trademark Volvo understeer doesn't like to powerslide.
4258HzG 10y ago
As much as I dislike Uber, I hate the uniformly negative tone the media has switched to now that it's the popular thing instead of singing Uber's praises far more. The same with the possibilities with autonomous driving. Like Theranos, it's not as if many of these issues weren't there for some time, but we've magically transitioned from them being visionary and daring to evil.
- forthefuture 10y ago
  Like Theranos, the mistake is ever having positive coverage, not only now having negative coverage.
dang 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954323
rdlecler1 10y ago
Reading the comments below. Looks like a rush to judgement as I've seen other articles suggesting that the Uber car was bit by another driver who failed to yield. Should driverless cars be under scrutiny for every counterpartt human error.

54 points by sosuke 10y ago

I imagine this is a response to the awful press around the company the past several months. The Uber of 2015 would not have taken these cars off the road.

notyourwork 10y ago
I agree, especially considering the uber was not considered at fault. This gives uber press in a different light.
- Preemo 10y ago
  The 'Uber Driver' may not be at fault, however the car failed to prevent or avoid an accident. It suddenly appears self-driving cars are no safer than human driven cars. Of course these are purely speculations but valid points. Interesting to see it's flipped itself somehow, too, I wonder what the computer decided to do that it maybe shouldn't have done? I suspect Uber will keep very quiet on this one, as there's all kinds of assumptions to be made.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    There's also a difference between the other driver being responsible for the incident because they failed to yield and pulled out in a dangerous and illegal manner and it not being possible the Uber vehicle could have responded better to the other car's dangerous driving.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      One would need to know more details. Yields in particular is one area where, under many conditions, you have to expect drivers to do reasonable things. Of course, you don't expect a driver to just blow through a yield sign. But maybe the driver with the right of way slows down a bit or changes lanes to let someone in or because they see someone edging out into traffic.
      - tanin 10y ago
        During the behind-the-wheel test, I slowed down toward the 4-way junction in which I had the right of way. The examiner marked it as a minor mistake; He told me that I could get rear end for that. I didn't argue with him as he was the examiner. But I'd prefer 10 rear ends over one t-bone. When implementing a self-driving car, I'm not sure if we can explicitly write code that is against the DMV guidelines. For example, human seems to slow down at the junction even with the right of way and drive 5mph over the speed limit.
  - 36bydesignBL 10y ago
    "It suddenly appears self-driving cars are no safer than human driven cars," says the guy who just read an article about a crash caused by a human while a self-driving car was not at fault.
    - Preemo 10y ago
      You quoted me out-of-context.
andrewksl 10y ago
I'm certainly no Uber apologist, but talk about damned if you do, damned if you don't.
brudgers 10y ago
I think the odds that Uber would make money developing self driving cars was approximately zero. Look where Tesla Motors is after fourteen years in terms of producing and selling automobiles and without internal competition from another primary line of business. Self driving vehicles will have the same profile as the existing automotive industry: high capital costs and commodity margins. The existing automotive mega-corporations already have the capital investment and distribution networks like ships and rail cars and lots and auto-carrier semi-trailers. Tesla is building some of that and the jury is still out on whether Tesla will make a meaningful dent. Even the idea of Uber rolling out a self-driving fleet means a massive infusion of capital that is at odds with its current cost structure. And the existing automotive mega-corps can step into the ondemand business with a cost advantage in regard to rolling out vehicle fleets.
- Mtinie 10y ago
  What still isn't clear to me is why Uber is involved in the development of self-driving cars, vs. profiteering and duplicating once the first viable examples have been released. On the surface autonomous vehicles appear to be a long-term capital draining exercise. Do they view the first mover advantage as that beneficial in this case that they'd risk all their future growth to be first to market for something that they could, conceivably, get a better ROI for being "second" to market with a more durable option?
  - dbot 10y ago
    Uber reached its current success with a first mover advantage. But I think the real reason is that everyone building self-driving cars today - including the big car manufacturers - will have little interest in selling to Uber. They will be running their own Uber-style Car-as-a-Service.
    - mrkgnao 10y ago
      IOW, Tesla will be to Uber as Uber wants to be to its drivers.

sharkweek 10y ago

>Local police say there were no injuries and Uber’s vehicle was not responsible for the incident. Seems odd that they'd make this move unless it was to avoid more negative press for continuing the program.

brogrammernot 10y ago
Easier to pull the cars from the markets and have less attention be paid to the Waymo suit. Good, bad, meh reports will mention the lawsuit every time and that's a larger PR nightmare than this right now.

samcheng 10y ago

Makes sense to me. Every bit of "Uber self-driving car" press is going to mention that nasty Waymo lawsuit. At this point, Uber has got to be looking to stop the bleeding.

username223 10y ago

I found this bit the most interesting: > Recode also obtained documents showing that Uber’s self-driving cars currently need to be handled by their human safety drivers roughly once every 0.8 miles. That's really far from autonomous. EDIT: Here's the Recode article: https://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/14737438/uber-self-driving-turmoil-otto-travis-kalanick-civil-war https://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/14737438/uber-self-driving-... and things just get worse. The cars only make it an average of 2 miles between incorrect sudden movements, down from 4 in January. What a joke.

Animats 10y ago
Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet. They should be testing at GoMentum Station, which is the former Concord Naval Weapons Station north of Oakland. That place was built to store battleship ammo; if anything bad happens there, there's nobody close enough to get hurt. Google/Waymo's California DMV disengagement report for 2016 reports 0.20 disengagements per 1000 miles, or one disengagement per 5000 miles.[1] Google's cars drove 635,868 miles autonomously in 2016, so there's enough driving behind this for that number to be meaningful. This is 4x better than 2015, incidentally. CA DMV accident and disengagement reports are worth reading, since they're one of the few objective data sources available on automatic driving. So far, nobody has been willing to turn a self-driving car over to Top Gear or Road and Track. Google/Waymo is thus three orders of magnitude better than Uber, and about two orders of magnitude better than anybody else who tests in California. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b-b119-91319c27788f/GoogleAutoWaymo_disengage_report_2016.pdf?MOD=AJPERES https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b...
- iiiggglll 10y ago
  > Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet. No kidding! Yet somehow I'm not surprised, as it has always been pretty obvious that these jackasses didn't know what they were doing. This just adds to the many reasons why I am fully 100% behind getting them and other amateur-hour efforts (like geohot's comma.ai) off the road right now, and keeping them off until they can prove they are safe enough to be out on the public streets mixed with human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. I live and work in San Francisco and walk pretty much everywhere I go. I don't need to be watching out for some shitty "self driving" car that has to have a person take over every 0.8 miles whenever I'm trying to cross the street. Fuck that. If they keep this up, someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed.

Animats 10y ago

"Anthony Levandowski, the Otto founder who became head of Uber’s self-driving efforts last summer, also shares Kalanick’s brash disregard for regulatory authority. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that a running joke at Otto was “safety third.” Uh oh. The California DMV won't yet allow testing of autonomous vehicles heavier than 10,000 pounds on California public roads. Otto is thus testing in Arizona. Looks like that was a good decision by DMV. I wrote this on HN yesterday: An important question is whether their system is smart enough to take evasive action. It's becoming clear that there are two ways to approach self-driving. The first stems from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was about off-road driving. For that, the vehicles had to profile the terrain, plotting a path around obstacles, potholes, and cliff edges. The GPS route was just general guidance on where to go. That's the approach Google took, as can be seen from their SXSW videos. Google also identifies moving objects and tries to classify them. With all that capability, it's possible to take evasive action if some other road user is a threat. The control system has situational awareness and knows where there's clear space for escape. The other approach is to start with lane following and automatic cruise control, and try to build them up into self-driving. This can be done entirely with vision systems. That's the Cruise Automation and Tesla approach. This puts the car on a track defined by lines on the pavement, with lane changes and intersections handled as a special case. There usually isn't a full terrain profile; that requires LIDAR. So there isn't enough info to plan an emergency maneuver for collision avoidance. This distinction is not well understood, and it should be.

M_Grey 10y ago
Such distinctions are only ever understood by most when they care enough to pay attention, and that usually takes time and a body count.
arglebarnacle 10y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but your last paragraph seems to imply that the "Tesla approach" is unable to "plan an emergency maneuver for collision avoidance" If true, that would seem to mean that Tesla's self-driving car program is dead on arrival. Clearly emergency collision avoidance is not optional for a self driving car with mass adoption. That's a pretty serious claim to make.

seibelj 10y ago

Is anyone interested in making a public bet with me about autonomous vehicles? I'm thinking something like, we publicly state that within 5 years a self-driving car will be able to take me from my apartment in Boston to my work in Cambridge, regardless of weather, time of day, etc. If it can, I pay you $1000, if it can't, you pay me $1000. Basically I'm getting super annoyed at people claiming self driving cars are right around the corner, which I've been reading for a decade, but it's always "just 5 years away". I would love to counter arguments with, "If you are so convinced why not bet me $1000?"

onewland 10y ago
I'd consider that bet on non-1:1 odds. You could submit a more strict version of it as a category on PredictIt.
nostromo95 10y ago
I mean there's a rational financial reason why someone optimistic about self-driving cars would be hesitant to take your bet -- they're magnifying their risk wrt self-driving cars, so if the technology doesn't come to fruition they're doubly screwed. If anything they'd rather take the opposite side of the bet so they can hedge.
- seibelj 10y ago
  It's more about people publicly putting their name against me, which I would post on my website, saying to the world that they actually think self driving cars are going to happen. I would like people actually in the tech industry to bet against me, not people looking to make money. It's more a reality check about who is willing to put their money where their mouth is, because I think there are few. I think a fair wager would be, "On March 26th 2022 at 2am, 830am, 5pm, and 11pm, a self driving call will legally take seibelj from [his address] in Boston to [address] in Cambridge. The car will require no human intervention and it will arrive at the destination regardless of time, weather, traffic, and construction."
  - nostromo95 10y ago

andy_ppp 10y ago

It's weird that there is no way for regulators to know how good a self driving car really is; there might be many hours of driving but it's not like an aeroplane where you can have coverage of most conditions. New conditions could happen all the while. Add to the fact that Tesla have the richest dataset they have a huge advantage in this area one that will reap rewards and crash less that the competition. I think Uber and Volvo will be far behind.

konceptz 10y ago
That's an interesting point. What are the challenges behind creating a licensing test similar to the ones we take as humans(could be virtual)? This would be before allowing the software on the road.
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  Actually this would be a great YC company; tests for self driving cars that added certain unexpected events to proceedings that were internal to the testing. Such things could include push bikes, road crashes, collisions, crazy Deathproof style driving, etc. How do self driving cars react to other drivers using their horns or ambulances for that matter? How does a police car pull over a self driving car?

ffjffsfr 10y ago

I think at this point it is clear that main problem with self-driving cars is not technology but social, psychological, political and legal challenges. People often forget that having good tech is just one step that does not guarantee any commercial success. People dont change their habits just because new tech is available. People are not going to start buying or using self-driving cars just because tech is available. There is huge psychological and social environment around car driving - e.g. think about all legal paperwork you have to go through to start driving, learning how to drive, buying insurance, all traffic regulations. All this cultural/human factors are based on specific definition of what car is and they all rely there is human subject operating this car. If self-driving cars are really going to succeed all this huge extremely social framework would have to change. I don't think this will happen. I think there are simply too many strong human emotions and purely financial interests around cars.

awinter-py 10y ago

it was probably trying to drift park a la stanford's 'Junior'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY93kr8PaC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY93kr8PaC4 But that trademark Volvo understeer doesn't like to powerslide.

4258HzG 10y ago

As much as I dislike Uber, I hate the uniformly negative tone the media has switched to now that it's the popular thing instead of singing Uber's praises far more. The same with the possibilities with autonomous driving. Like Theranos, it's not as if many of these issues weren't there for some time, but we've magically transitioned from them being visionary and daring to evil.

forthefuture 10y ago
Like Theranos, the mistake is ever having positive coverage, not only now having negative coverage.

dang 10y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954323

rdlecler1 10y ago

Reading the comments below. Looks like a rush to judgement as I've seen other articles suggesting that the Uber car was bit by another driver who failed to yield. Should driverless cars be under scrutiny for every counterpartt human error.