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> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such

> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when someone walks out into the road. Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. The autonomous vehicle and the human attendant might have made a glaring error, or they might have done everything correctly and still failed to prevent a fatality. It's far too early to say. It's undoubtedly a dent to the public image of autonomous vehicles, but hopefully the car's telemetry data will reveal whether this was a case of error, negligence or unavoidable tragedy.

Twisell 9y ago
Yet this tragic accident will now set a precedent and finally start to scratch the delicate unspoken question: Who is responsible now?
- pishpash 9y ago
  Obviously Uber in this case, but as mentioned in response to a separate article, AI's must be like pets or children and have a liable guardian.
  - birdmanjeremy 9y ago
    Not obviously. Let's wait to judge until we have the facts. The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk. There's not a whole lot of information about the events that lead up to the accident. It is possible that a pedestrian is at fault if they stepped in the way of moving traffic outside of a crosswalk. It's also possible Uber's cars are not up to the task of driving on public roadways.
    - bluetwo 9y ago
      The penalty for walking outside a crosswalk is not death.
      - birdmanjeremy 9y ago
        Arizona requires drivers to "exercise due care to avoid colliding with a pedestrian". If a fatality results, but due care was taken by the driver to avoid it, then the tragic accident is just that, an accident. Like my comment says, let's wait until we have facts before passing judgement.
        bluetwo 9y ago
        Sure, we don't know many of the details. But from this distance, things don't look good for the technology or the future of autonomous trials on public roads. The evidence that due care was not taken will pretty much be the existence of the fatality. There surely will be video, from the car itself and also perhaps third party security or traffic cameras. The level of carelessness we are going to have to see in order for a jury to blame the victim will be pretty high.
        birdmanjeremy 9y ago
        I agree with the final paragraph in your comment. All I'm saying is let's reserve judgement until we know what happened. As for a fatality proving that due care was not taken, I agree. It doesn't tell you who failed to take due care though.
  - laythea 9y ago
    Who would the guardian (and therefore responsible) be - the driver or the car manufacturer? Sounds like a circular argument to me!
    - gowld 9y ago
      In this case, the driver is an Uber employee, and the automation is Uber-created and deployed, so the driver is the car manufacturer.
- will_brown 9y ago
  Likely the more apt word is liable. In law you split that into criminal and civil. Very unlikely there will be any criminal charge, hence no criminal liability but it’s possible. Civil liability is more interesting, but if the deceased’s estate brings suit it opens up a can of worms in the discovery process. Every internal communication, prior incident, etc... At the end of the day it’s not much different than any other vehicular fatality case, but there will be a defective product component (again nothing unheard of in the case of vehicular fatalities). At the end of the day the car will be insured for accidents, so we will probably learn more about the insurance coverage for self-driving cars.
  - drb91 9y ago
    Corporate manslaughter is still criminal.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
soperj 9y ago
The cars telemetry data will undoubtedly point to a unavoidable tragedy if it's just uber analyzing it.
- coryfklein 9y ago
  Makes me wonder the likelihood of the public ever seeing that telemetry if it appears incriminating to Uber.
  - scarmig 9y ago
    The data will have been lost in an unfortunate accident, which Uber will promise never to repeat.
    - WalterSear 9y ago
      ...despite them taking this incident very, very seriously.
- orbitur 9y ago
  This stuff needs to be regulated sooner rather than later.
- sydd 9y ago
  That wont be the case, the data is an evidence in a criminal investigation.
  - emn13 9y ago
    Making evidence disappear is indeed inconceivable. Especially for a firm of Uber's stature.
oconnore 9y ago
If you have good judgement, it's quite easy to prevent a fatality. I.e. I go slower in places where I know pedestrians might jump out.
- cjsawyer 9y ago
  Lower the chances of, not prevent.
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    Exactly, you can never reduce accident rates to zero, even if you slow to a crawl or stop (now you're endanger traffic behind you). Debris could fall on your car and make the steering non-responsive. A flat tire could burst at any speed and cause a bicyclist to veer into traffic/off a cliff/whatever. When it comes to human drivers we deal with probabilities, but for some reason people want absolutes with autonomous ones.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    This seems like the opinion of someone who drives too fast?
    - 0xfeba 9y ago
      Sounds like the opinion of someone who knows minimum braking distances still exist even when going slowly.
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        If pedestrians or especially children are present, one should be driving very slowly. 15mph sounds about right. At that speed one is unlikely to kill, since even if a pedestrian "jumps out" (an event that is vanishingly less common than drivers not paying attention), one has enough time to stop. Most drivers drive too fast. (Me too!) Most drivers have not killed anyone. All drivers who have killed someone, were driving too fast at the time. Many drivers will disagree with me, but they are simply wrong about appropriate speeds, and we will all be safer when robocars are driving for them.
exelius 9y ago
I’m kind of in the Elon Musk camp here where you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette? Human-driven cars kill a lot of pedestrians today, but we can actually do something to improve the human-recognition algorithms in a self-driving car. As long as self driving cars represent an improvement over human drivers, I’m ok with them having a non-zero accident date while we work out the kinks.
- pboutros 9y ago
  FYI, that's traditionally known as the Stalin camp.
  - rebuilder 9y ago
    Omelet metaphor aside,that doesn't really seem fair. We're talking about accepting more than 0 deaths caused by AI because the death rate should still be much lower than with humans driving. IOW, the perfect is the enemy if the good.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  The problem is the blame game. Human behind a wheel hits a pedestrian, if they're found at fault then that "horrible inattentive/drunk/whatever driver" goes to jail for the death of another human being. It never makes anything "right", and I won't even start on how a jail sentence regardless of length can ruin your life in the US, but the public as a whole gets a feel good that "justice has been served". How do we handle this for autonomous vehicles? Do we just fine/sue the company that made the vehicle/developed the software? Do we send imperfect human developers to jail because they made a mistake, even if in the grand scheme of things they have saved lives compared to humans being behind every action made by a vehicle? A big part of the public image for autonomous cars is increased safety, any deaths at their hands starts raising where and how to place the blame - a subject I think very few are prepared for right now, which is likely part of why Tesla explicitly states autopilot needs a human driver present right now, and why Google has been extremely cautious with operator-supervised tests up until recently.
  - 9y ago
foolfoolz 9y ago
you seem to be giving uber a big benefit of the doubt. these autonomous cars generally go slow. tempe has flat roads with great line of sight and clear weather. coefficient of friction? highly doubt it. the sensors should be looking more than just straight a head
adamsea 9y ago
It's not unreasonable for there to an expectation of basically zero accidents of this nature during testing in cities. The public puts a huge amount of trust in private companies when they do this. And, pragmatically, Google, Uber, etc, all know that it would be horrible publicity for something like this to happen. One would think they'd be overly cautious and conservative to avoid even the possibility of this. Lastly, the whole point of the human operator is to be the final safety check. You're right that we have no idea of the cause until the data is analyzed (and the human operator interviewed). Yet, my first thought was, "Of course it'd be Uber."
rockarage 9y ago
>If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. This only true for the uninitiated, never let it get to that. I drove for Uber/Lyft/Via in New York city so I can experience and study these situation. These sort of accidents are preventable. The following is the basic: 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past. 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone. 3.) Extra diligence in surveying the area/danger zone to predict a potential accident. 4.) Make up for the reduce speed by using highways and parkways as much as possible. It helps that Manhattan street traffic tends to be very slow to begin with. Ideally I will like use my knowledge to offer a service to help train autonomous vehicles to deal with these situation. It has to be simulated numerous times in a closed circuit for the machine to learn what I've learn intuitively driving professionally in NYC.
- rmwaite 9y ago
  While what you are saying can reduce the number of occurrences, it does not change what your parent post said.
- burlesona 9y ago
  You're making an observation about what it's like in an urban area. Sadly, in a suburban area like Tempe the presence of any pedestrian anywhere is unexpected.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    The ASU campus area around Tempe has diverse traffic conditions. There are spots near the campus where you would expect to stop at every crosswalk, while in some roadways, a pedestrian would be completely unexpected. Around the bars, people stumble into traffic all the time. Any driver, automated or human, would need to anticipate that.
- dpark 9y ago
  > 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past. So essentially everywhere? I have seen pedestrians walk unexpectedly into traffic on high-speed 4-lane divided roads with no crosswalks. > 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone. What "position" are you referring to? There are places where you can account for or predict pedestrians. There are also places where you cannot, such as when someone walks into traffic from behind a tall parked vehicle, where you have no chance to see them in advance.
simplyluke 9y ago
Agreed that it's too early to really say one way or another. In maybe 100k miles of urban driving I've had one cyclist run into my car and a girl on her phone walk directly into the corner of the front, I was at a complete stop watching them both times. Until there's a detailed report it's really hard to say if it was preventable or not - but I think regardless the optics are bad and this is going to chill a lot of people's feelings on self driving whether or not that is an emotion backed by data.
zkms 9y ago
> If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. This holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to ensure that there's no way the pedestrian can get into your path before your car arrive there than it is to stand on the brakes and hope for the best. Indeed, the faster you're moving, the more you should consider swerving away over braking -- take advantage of that lethal speed to clear the pedestrian's potential paths before he can get into yours. Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws (and might involve colliding into a a parked or moving automobile on the other side of the road) and also involves potentially unusual manoeuvring on a very short deadline; but it's far better to avoid a vehicle-pedestrian collision even if it's at the cost of possibly busting into the opposing lane / driving off the road / hitting a parked car. Decently experienced drivers can do this, I can do this (and have successfully avoided a collision with a pedestrian who ran out between parked cars on a dark and raining night), there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws... ...so you probably won't find any support for it in this crowd. > there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this. Sure, there's no fundamental reason you can't swerve but you need to identify the thing in the road you're trying not to hit before you can decide whether to swerve or brake. Self driving cars can't yet reliably ID things well enough to take the only evasive action they know (stopping).
- tboughen 9y ago
  I think you touched on the fundamental reason self driving cars cannot currently do this. It would mean programming self driving cars to, in some circumstances, break the law. I agree with the thrust of your comment though, and think that a change in the law may be required to allign incentives for machines as well as people to drive humanely.
acdha 9y ago
That’s technically true but the number of truly unavoidable cases is orders of magnitude lower. With human drivers, “jumped out in front of me” really means inattention 99.9% of the time and police departments historically tend to be unlikely to question such claims. (For example, here in DC there have been a number of cases where that was used to declare a cyclist at fault only to have private video footage show the opposite - which mattered a lot for medical insurance claims) With self-driving cars this really seems to call for mandatory investigations by a third-party with access to the raw telemetry data. There’s just too much incentive for a company to say they weren’t at fault otherwise.
bargl 9y ago
The hope is that AV can see 360 and observe things outside of blind spots further away. So the kid running from a yard into the road after a ball should be safer, but a person walking out from behind a parked truck wouldn't.
ubernostrum 9y ago
If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. I mentioned in another comment that something I use to try to improve my own driving is watching videos from /r/roadcam on reddit, and trying to guess where the unexpected vehicle or pedestrian is going to come from. Here's an example of a pedestrian suddenly appearing from between stopped cars (and coming from a traffic lane, not from a sidewalk), and a human driver spotting it and safely stopping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI Why can't a self-driving car do this?

Twisell 9y ago

Yet this tragic accident will now set a precedent and finally start to scratch the delicate unspoken question: Who is responsible now?

pishpash 9y ago
Obviously Uber in this case, but as mentioned in response to a separate article, AI's must be like pets or children and have a liable guardian.
- birdmanjeremy 9y ago
  Not obviously. Let's wait to judge until we have the facts. The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk. There's not a whole lot of information about the events that lead up to the accident. It is possible that a pedestrian is at fault if they stepped in the way of moving traffic outside of a crosswalk. It's also possible Uber's cars are not up to the task of driving on public roadways.
  - bluetwo 9y ago
    The penalty for walking outside a crosswalk is not death.
    - birdmanjeremy 9y ago
      Arizona requires drivers to "exercise due care to avoid colliding with a pedestrian". If a fatality results, but due care was taken by the driver to avoid it, then the tragic accident is just that, an accident. Like my comment says, let's wait until we have facts before passing judgement.
      - bluetwo 9y ago
        Sure, we don't know many of the details. But from this distance, things don't look good for the technology or the future of autonomous trials on public roads. The evidence that due care was not taken will pretty much be the existence of the fatality. There surely will be video, from the car itself and also perhaps third party security or traffic cameras. The level of carelessness we are going to have to see in order for a jury to blame the victim will be pretty high.
        birdmanjeremy 9y ago
        I agree with the final paragraph in your comment. All I'm saying is let's reserve judgement until we know what happened. As for a fatality proving that due care was not taken, I agree. It doesn't tell you who failed to take due care though.
- laythea 9y ago
  Who would the guardian (and therefore responsible) be - the driver or the car manufacturer? Sounds like a circular argument to me!
  - gowld 9y ago
    In this case, the driver is an Uber employee, and the automation is Uber-created and deployed, so the driver is the car manufacturer.
will_brown 9y ago
Likely the more apt word is liable. In law you split that into criminal and civil. Very unlikely there will be any criminal charge, hence no criminal liability but it’s possible. Civil liability is more interesting, but if the deceased’s estate brings suit it opens up a can of worms in the discovery process. Every internal communication, prior incident, etc... At the end of the day it’s not much different than any other vehicular fatality case, but there will be a defective product component (again nothing unheard of in the case of vehicular fatalities). At the end of the day the car will be insured for accidents, so we will probably learn more about the insurance coverage for self-driving cars.
- drb91 9y ago
  Corporate manslaughter is still criminal.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

soperj 9y ago

The cars telemetry data will undoubtedly point to a unavoidable tragedy if it's just uber analyzing it.

coryfklein 9y ago
Makes me wonder the likelihood of the public ever seeing that telemetry if it appears incriminating to Uber.
- scarmig 9y ago
  The data will have been lost in an unfortunate accident, which Uber will promise never to repeat.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    ...despite them taking this incident very, very seriously.
orbitur 9y ago
This stuff needs to be regulated sooner rather than later.
sydd 9y ago
That wont be the case, the data is an evidence in a criminal investigation.
- emn13 9y ago
  Making evidence disappear is indeed inconceivable. Especially for a firm of Uber's stature.

oconnore 9y ago

If you have good judgement, it's quite easy to prevent a fatality. I.e. I go slower in places where I know pedestrians might jump out.

cjsawyer 9y ago
Lower the chances of, not prevent.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  Exactly, you can never reduce accident rates to zero, even if you slow to a crawl or stop (now you're endanger traffic behind you). Debris could fall on your car and make the steering non-responsive. A flat tire could burst at any speed and cause a bicyclist to veer into traffic/off a cliff/whatever. When it comes to human drivers we deal with probabilities, but for some reason people want absolutes with autonomous ones.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  This seems like the opinion of someone who drives too fast?
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    Sounds like the opinion of someone who knows minimum braking distances still exist even when going slowly.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      If pedestrians or especially children are present, one should be driving very slowly. 15mph sounds about right. At that speed one is unlikely to kill, since even if a pedestrian "jumps out" (an event that is vanishingly less common than drivers not paying attention), one has enough time to stop. Most drivers drive too fast. (Me too!) Most drivers have not killed anyone. All drivers who have killed someone, were driving too fast at the time. Many drivers will disagree with me, but they are simply wrong about appropriate speeds, and we will all be safer when robocars are driving for them.

exelius 9y ago

I’m kind of in the Elon Musk camp here where you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette? Human-driven cars kill a lot of pedestrians today, but we can actually do something to improve the human-recognition algorithms in a self-driving car. As long as self driving cars represent an improvement over human drivers, I’m ok with them having a non-zero accident date while we work out the kinks.

pboutros 9y ago
FYI, that's traditionally known as the Stalin camp.
- rebuilder 9y ago
  Omelet metaphor aside,that doesn't really seem fair. We're talking about accepting more than 0 deaths caused by AI because the death rate should still be much lower than with humans driving. IOW, the perfect is the enemy if the good.
snuxoll 9y ago
The problem is the blame game. Human behind a wheel hits a pedestrian, if they're found at fault then that "horrible inattentive/drunk/whatever driver" goes to jail for the death of another human being. It never makes anything "right", and I won't even start on how a jail sentence regardless of length can ruin your life in the US, but the public as a whole gets a feel good that "justice has been served". How do we handle this for autonomous vehicles? Do we just fine/sue the company that made the vehicle/developed the software? Do we send imperfect human developers to jail because they made a mistake, even if in the grand scheme of things they have saved lives compared to humans being behind every action made by a vehicle? A big part of the public image for autonomous cars is increased safety, any deaths at their hands starts raising where and how to place the blame - a subject I think very few are prepared for right now, which is likely part of why Tesla explicitly states autopilot needs a human driver present right now, and why Google has been extremely cautious with operator-supervised tests up until recently.
- 9y ago

foolfoolz 9y ago

you seem to be giving uber a big benefit of the doubt. these autonomous cars generally go slow. tempe has flat roads with great line of sight and clear weather. coefficient of friction? highly doubt it. the sensors should be looking more than just straight a head

adamsea 9y ago

It's not unreasonable for there to an expectation of basically zero accidents of this nature during testing in cities. The public puts a huge amount of trust in private companies when they do this. And, pragmatically, Google, Uber, etc, all know that it would be horrible publicity for something like this to happen. One would think they'd be overly cautious and conservative to avoid even the possibility of this. Lastly, the whole point of the human operator is to be the final safety check. You're right that we have no idea of the cause until the data is analyzed (and the human operator interviewed). Yet, my first thought was, "Of course it'd be Uber."

rockarage 9y ago

>If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. This only true for the uninitiated, never let it get to that. I drove for Uber/Lyft/Via in New York city so I can experience and study these situation. These sort of accidents are preventable. The following is the basic: 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past. 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone. 3.) Extra diligence in surveying the area/danger zone to predict a potential accident. 4.) Make up for the reduce speed by using highways and parkways as much as possible. It helps that Manhattan street traffic tends to be very slow to begin with. Ideally I will like use my knowledge to offer a service to help train autonomous vehicles to deal with these situation. It has to be simulated numerous times in a closed circuit for the machine to learn what I've learn intuitively driving professionally in NYC.

rmwaite 9y ago
While what you are saying can reduce the number of occurrences, it does not change what your parent post said.
burlesona 9y ago
You're making an observation about what it's like in an urban area. Sadly, in a suburban area like Tempe the presence of any pedestrian anywhere is unexpected.
- linkregister 9y ago
  The ASU campus area around Tempe has diverse traffic conditions. There are spots near the campus where you would expect to stop at every crosswalk, while in some roadways, a pedestrian would be completely unexpected. Around the bars, people stumble into traffic all the time. Any driver, automated or human, would need to anticipate that.
dpark 9y ago
> 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past. So essentially everywhere? I have seen pedestrians walk unexpectedly into traffic on high-speed 4-lane divided roads with no crosswalks. > 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone. What "position" are you referring to? There are places where you can account for or predict pedestrians. There are also places where you cannot, such as when someone walks into traffic from behind a tall parked vehicle, where you have no chance to see them in advance.

simplyluke 9y ago

Agreed that it's too early to really say one way or another. In maybe 100k miles of urban driving I've had one cyclist run into my car and a girl on her phone walk directly into the corner of the front, I was at a complete stop watching them both times. Until there's a detailed report it's really hard to say if it was preventable or not - but I think regardless the optics are bad and this is going to chill a lot of people's feelings on self driving whether or not that is an emotion backed by data.

zkms 9y ago

> If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. This holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to ensure that there's no way the pedestrian can get into your path before your car arrive there than it is to stand on the brakes and hope for the best. Indeed, the faster you're moving, the more you should consider swerving away over braking -- take advantage of that lethal speed to clear the pedestrian's potential paths before he can get into yours. Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws (and might involve colliding into a a parked or moving automobile on the other side of the road) and also involves potentially unusual manoeuvring on a very short deadline; but it's far better to avoid a vehicle-pedestrian collision even if it's at the cost of possibly busting into the opposing lane / driving off the road / hitting a parked car. Decently experienced drivers can do this, I can do this (and have successfully avoided a collision with a pedestrian who ran out between parked cars on a dark and raining night), there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws... ...so you probably won't find any support for it in this crowd. > there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this. Sure, there's no fundamental reason you can't swerve but you need to identify the thing in the road you're trying not to hit before you can decide whether to swerve or brake. Self driving cars can't yet reliably ID things well enough to take the only evasive action they know (stopping).
tboughen 9y ago
I think you touched on the fundamental reason self driving cars cannot currently do this. It would mean programming self driving cars to, in some circumstances, break the law. I agree with the thrust of your comment though, and think that a change in the law may be required to allign incentives for machines as well as people to drive humanely.

acdha 9y ago

That’s technically true but the number of truly unavoidable cases is orders of magnitude lower. With human drivers, “jumped out in front of me” really means inattention 99.9% of the time and police departments historically tend to be unlikely to question such claims. (For example, here in DC there have been a number of cases where that was used to declare a cyclist at fault only to have private video footage show the opposite - which mattered a lot for medical insurance claims) With self-driving cars this really seems to call for mandatory investigations by a third-party with access to the raw telemetry data. There’s just too much incentive for a company to say they weren’t at fault otherwise.

bargl 9y ago

The hope is that AV can see 360 and observe things outside of blind spots further away. So the kid running from a yard into the road after a ball should be safer, but a person walking out from behind a parked truck wouldn't.

ubernostrum 9y ago

If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. I mentioned in another comment that something I use to try to improve my own driving is watching videos from /r/roadcam on reddit, and trying to guess where the unexpected vehicle or pedestrian is going to come from. Here's an example of a pedestrian suddenly appearing from between stopped cars (and coming from a traffic lane, not from a sidewalk), and a human driver spotting it and safely stopping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI Why can't a self-driving car do this?