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Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

262 points by samcampbell 9y ago

samcampbell 9y ago
> "The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them," Moir said, referring to the back-up driver who was behind the wheel but not operating the vehicle. "His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision."
alistproducer2 9y ago
Call me crazy but isn't a big part of the promise of these systems supposed to be they see things humans wouldn't or couldn't? If they're just as surprised as the human behind the wheel, that feels like a problem.
- samcampbell 9y ago
  Agreed! This seems like an instance where even if the car knew it needed to stop, it couldn't do so in time.
  - Maybestring 9y ago
    Every millisecond of braking reduces the severity of the collision.
- danso 9y ago
  Yes, to me, this is the most relevant part of the posted article: > “It’s possible that Uber’s automated driving system did not detect the pedestrian, did not classify her as a pedestrian, or did not predict her departure from the median,” Smith said in an email. “I don’t know whether these steps occurred too late to prevent or lessen the collision or whether they never occurred at all, but the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.” We can accept that by the time the Uber AV "saw" the victim, it was too late to brake. But that doesn't mean we can't ask questions about what the AI actually saw and classified. And even if it was a "sudden" event for humans, was it "sudden" relative to computer reaction time? How fast did the victim move into the road that the Uber AV couldn't even brake?
  - Taniwha 9y ago
    it could be that they never saw someone pushing a bike across a road in tests before, maybe it confused that with someone riding on the road at a different angle
    - nathanielc 9y ago
      If either of those two cases is true, then the AI is not ready to be driving on public roads.
    - danso 9y ago
      But why is accurate classification needed, when the overriding decision is about how the car should react now that an unidentified, moving object is moving directly into the car's path? Even if someone were riding at an angle, it's still in a direction that may intersect with the car's path.
      - taneq 9y ago
        Exactly, it shouldn't matter what the thing is, if it's in front of my car and bigger than a plastic shopping bag I don't want to hit it.
  - BurningFrog 9y ago
    The most relevant part is from someone with zero knowledge of what happened?
    - danso 9y ago
      Yeah, but my comment was made back when there were 2 stories about the Uber accident. This one, and the original one. The Bloomberg story has little more information than what the police chief claimed to the Chronicle, and at that point, the Tempe PD was downplaying the importance of her determination. But everything the police claimed was in context of witness interview and camera footage. Since this is a self-driving car, we know there is more data and more ways to assess performance besides camera vision.
- branchan 9y ago
  If the autonomous vehicle performed just as well as the human did (meaning a human would've hit her also), then yes although it can be improved, I don't see how it is a problem.
  - alistproducer2 9y ago
    If they are just robot versions of humans then I would argue they are far too underdeveloped to be on real roads with real people.
- vha32oiwe 9y ago
  How can a computer know to handle something when it is relying on us to supply models we don't have answers for? These systems are fancy statistical sorting engines, looking up the most relevant next steps provided BY US. They cannot subvert the laws of physics with their actions. We don't have an answer for this at all because humans just swerve or hit the brakes, regardless of the outcome (often creating an outcome that's worse). What else is there given the constraints of physics? Time and space aren't not mutable, no matter how big the data set we apply.
dzdt 9y ago
Yes, the report you'd hope to be hearing from Uber is along the lines of "0.2 seconds after the pedestrian entered the travel lane the automated system identified her as a hazard and initiated an avoidance maneuver. Despite braking and beginning to swerve away, the car impacted the pedestrian 1.2 seconds later." Thats the promise the automated vehicle people are selling. But in this case it seems the car was clueless.
- Jackalopiate 9y ago
  As was the driver, mind you
- TillE 9y ago
  I'm really skeptical about swerving as an evasive maneuver. It's complicated to get that right. But yes, if it didn't at least slam the brakes then something went badly wrong. Maybe you can't prevent an accident, but you can at least reduce momentum and demonstrate that your system was working correctly.
  - PunchTornado 9y ago
    Why didn't the human hit the brake? I don't understand how this is even news to be honest. There was a human in the driving seat and he failed to stop just like the computer.
    - Scaevolus 9y ago
      Computers have better reaction times than humans. Forcibly braking is a simple maneuver.
      - IncRnd 9y ago
        > Computers have better reaction times than humans. Forcibly braking is a simple maneuver. The question isn't about the MHZ speed of a computer or the theoretical reaction time but the lack of reaction by the computer in the actual real world. It doesn't matter if this is a sensor failure, a software bug, or a slow reaction by a computer. The result is the same. A person died. From the article: *"... the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.”
DanBC 9y ago
> "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” But it's made harder if you're speeding.
- GhostVII 9y ago
  It was going 3mph over the speed limit, a perfectly reasonable speed that is still probably lower than almost everyone else on the road.
  - danso 9y ago
    There was no one else on the road (or, reports haven't mentioned other traffic being a factor).
    - 111_1_111 9y ago
      That doesn't change the fact that posted speed limits are almost always slower than is reasonable. 38 mph is a reasonable speed on all but the windiest of roads.
  - rhacker 9y ago
    That actually really sucks to hear, I was hoping that SDVs would adhere and never break the speed limit. 3 MPH at the forces we're talking about can actually make a difference in life or death.
    - question_that 9y ago
      It would be pretty hilarious if SDVs never broke speed limits, accident after accident caused by irate human drivers attempting to pass.
    - burntwater 9y ago
      I believe it's not clear whether or not it was speeding, From the article, it sounds like it may have been in the middle of transitioning from 35MPH to/from 40MPH.
AngeloAnolin 9y ago
Went to the link hoping to see a video, but I guess, pending all other investigations, that video would not be released.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  Whether the video will be released may also depend on her family’s wishes.
GoToRO 9y ago
Are these systems designed to honk?
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  Per this old article from 2016, yes: https://medium.com/waymo/sounds-of-the-self-driving-car-c26f30fcf76c https://medium.com/waymo/sounds-of-the-self-driving-car-c26f...
  - dkonofalski 9y ago
    Clarification - the article you posted is about the Waymo technology, not the Uber technology. It's possible that Uber does not use those capabilities.
  - Zitrax 9y ago
    The culture of using the horn differs a lot between countries. Would they use locale aware honk schemes? And similarly are self driving cars listening? Will they detect emergency vehicles by the sirens, or even listen to other cars honking at them?
    - tintor 9y ago
      Emergency and police vehicles by sirens yes, but likely not other cars.
sudeepj 9y ago
I cannot imagine the detailed logging the engineers might have to do in such a system. When I code I wonder sometimes if I am logging unnecessary events at info level. This led to one more question. Do driverless cars have (or will have) a black box like that of aeroplane?
- subie 9y ago
  > Do driverless cars have (or will have) a black box like that of aeroplane? I believe most modern cars already have this.
  - derefr 9y ago
    Yes; in fact, cars have had this technology since before there was flash memory or GPS or (good) accelerometers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder s were originally designed to record the instantaneous mechanical state of the car (e.g. whether seatbelts were buckled, to what degree the accelerator was depressed, etc.) during a crash, for insurance purposes.
- Fricken 9y ago
  Test vehicles collect all the data. I think it was Cruise that mentioned they collect about 4 terabytes per day per vehicle. It likely isn't much different for Uber.
- yazaddaruvala 9y ago
  What we really need is for all of the logs from a company like Uber or Google to get streamed to some third party. All of the logs are encrypted (with different keys), and only when an issue occurs, the company who owns the data gives the key for that particular car at that particular hour for decryption. Basically a data-escrow. This way we know the logs are not being tampered with, and we keep the data hidden from the third party.
  - notatoad 9y ago
    These are test vehicles. If you don't let the engineers have access to the results of their testing except in the event of an accident, then we will never have autonomous cars. Of course, maybe thats what you're arguing for. But either way, I think it's a bad idea.
robotbikes 9y ago
I haven't seen anyone post this yet but I highly suspect the fact that she was pushing a bicycle impacted the machine learning driven AIs ability to determine she was a pedestrian. This reminds me of the kangaroos messing up the AV programs being tested in Australia. A human paying attention may have been wary of a person pushing a bike in the shadows but for all we know the algorithm thought that she was a bush or something because her profile was impacted by the bike. There is a lot to speculate about but machine learning isn't as smart as we humans tend to believe it is and nowhere does it yet approach the form of general intelligence required to respond appropriately to all of it's inputs the way a human paying attention could.
- lulmerchant 9y ago
  I don't understand this line of reasoning at all, but it's getting repeated a lot on HN. Is the AI expected to hit cyclists, but not pedestrians? Shouldn't it consider any moving object to be a hazard?
  - Roodgorf 9y ago
    It may not have had good enough information to tell that she was a cyclist at all, and instead interpreted her to be something static/non-human altogether (in parent's example, a bush). Of course, without seeing the data its sensors gathered, and what that data registered as, it's all speculation. The problem is with misidentification, not bad priorities.
    - danso 9y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of classification problem involved. But wouldn't the AV by default treat a solid object on the road as a hazard to brake for? There's no possible way to specifically train for every variation of thing that could be encountered on a city street (imagine Halloween, for starters).
      - lukeschlather 9y ago
preparat 9y ago
Could people start wearing small transmitters that nearby autonomous vehicles can read?
- etrautmann 9y ago
  Please no. You should not be required to carry a beacon in order to be safe walking around a city or crossing a street.
  - Para2016 9y ago
    People are supposed to wear bright clothing when walking at night or biking. Maybe we can have an optional beacon..
  - asdsa5325 9y ago
    The woman who was hit ran across the road. It's easy to be safe: don't do that.
    - phyzome 9y ago
      Am I supposed to get in a car to cross the street?
      - josefx 9y ago
        You could hail an Uber.
      - asdsa5325 9y ago
        Use a crosswalk?
        phyzome 9y ago
        Sure, when they're available. Have you looked at the area where the woman was hit?
- cdolan 9y ago
danso 9y ago
The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-driving-uber-pedestrian-killed.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-drivi... This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40 mph, had no time to react, in a location with good street lighting and with clear weather. I would think most humans would be able to at least hit the brakes, if not completely avoid a collision.
- lolc 9y ago
  If this was indeed the overall scenario, there are few factors I could think of that would excuse a human driver here: 1. Another car was in the lane left of the fatal car, blocking its view of the pedestrian. 2. The pedestrian fell back after reaching the curb. But it looks like both the artificial and the human driver were asleep.
  - bbarn 9y ago
    1. Wouldn't the pedestrian have to walk through said car then? 2. Quite plausible, especially trying to heft what looks like a pretty heavy loaded bike onto a curb.
    - InclinedPlane 9y ago
      Maybe that car had stopped for the pedestrian. We're not going to actually know what happened until the video is released.
      - saalweachter 9y ago
        Random note: drivers, when you are on a two-plus lane road, do not randomly stop (when their is no designated yield) to let pedestrians cross/other drivers turn. Cars in the other lanes may (probably, even) not stop, causing an accident. It probably is completely unrelated to this event, but it’s an anti-pattern by well-meaning drivers.
deft 9y ago
Great that all these articles are coming out defending Uber. Even if (it wasn't) her own fault, these make it sound like "well I mean she was stupid and therefore deserved it".
gnicholas 9y ago
> The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa County Superior Court records. Uber declined to comment on Vasquez’s criminal record. I didn't realize that people with criminal records like this could become Uber drivers. That is, these types of crimes are relevant to working as an Uber driver—more than things like tax fraud or failure to pay child support.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > I didn't realize that people with criminal records like this could become Uber drivers. In a civilized society people should be able to get jobs when they get out of prison. It's called "time served" for a reason. Everything other is just paving the path to recidivism - when people can't make a living because no one will hire ex-cons, they don't have any other way of literally staying alive than living as hobos or breaking the law. The attitude in your comment is imho perfectly representing why the US has such problems with career criminals. The only class of people where even after time served there should be safeguards are when there's a psychological reason that actually makes people dangerous, like pedophilia.
  - lsaferite 9y ago
    My understanding is that in Europe a criminal record is hidden from all but LEOs after 7 years as well.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      Depends on the country and the type of offense(s). I'm fine with justified accesses for employers - e.g. a trucking company might be allowed to ask the state "has XYZ committed a drunk/drugged or other driving offense in the last 3 years", but I see no valid reason to (involuntarily) disclosing to any new employer that someone has been sentenced for public urination or fare dodging. AFAIK, there is no such "filtering" option available anywhere... and especially with fare dodging, people get essentially criminalized for being poor. The state should provide an interface for employers to input the personal data of the candidate and the job the candidate is applying for, and the interface should simply give a "OK", "not OK", "no way OK" (e.g. for pedophiles applying for childcare jobs) and "OK with conditions". That would be a safeguard for privacy while also providing employers with a check that they don't hire someone totally wrong for the job.
drcross 9y ago
At the risk of sounding macabre, the engineers will be pouring over thousands of lines of logs and if Uber self driving cars ever do survive to make it onto the roads again, the circumstance of woman's death and the after analysis will mean it will never ever happen again. I expect that during the coming years we will analyse car crashes with the same scrutiny as airplane crashes with the hope to solve every single edge case. RIP.
- chii 9y ago
  having cars follow the same level of investigation as a plane crash is probably the best thing to happen.
- aetherson 9y ago
  That's a very optimistic view of what will happen -- or I suppose a pessimistic one. I agree that there will be a lot of scrutiny of the logs, but unless they identify an actual bug ("Oh shit, we had a buffer overrun right here!") it's not necessarily going to be possible to preclude this or something very similar from happening again. The driving of an autonomous vehicle is an emergent event of large numbers of complicated and in some cases opaque subsystems. Changing the interactions of these subsystems in a narrow way to preclude this particular kind of event is not necessarily something they'll be able to figure out a way to do without causing more problems.
  - dmix 9y ago
    But it's still optimistic compared to todays current status quo. We now have a system we can optimize and build into to make our best effort to prevent in future events. Which is how it similar to airplane crashes, as it's a heavily automated and centralized system (ie, humans are far less a factor in the event than cars, which can't be optimized nearly as easily). While cars have had improvements in safety via vehicle design, and popular culture, road signs, traffic laws, etc can influence human behaviour to drive differently, I don't think there has ever been a better time to reduce these events if not everytime, then at least far less often than the current standard. Which is what is so often missing in these conversations: a rational baseline and a clear reliable process that we will now be in a better position going forward for this not to happen again (assuming the right processes are in place, which they may very well not be in this case).
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jaweb 9y ago
It's interesting how high profile this post-crash analysis is - name another time you read so much commentary about the details that caused a car crash? It seems to me that this is exposing a few gaps in how we think about driverless cars currently: - A framework for how cars should be making "moral" decisions (the trolley problem [0]) - A defined process for post car crash investigations - akin to the process in air crashes Will be interesting to see if these emerge soon (or are emerging and I have missed) [0] https://qz.com/1204395/self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-philosophers-are-building-ethical-algorithms-to-solve-the-problem/ https://qz.com/1204395/self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-phi...
- sdrothrock 9y ago
  > name another time you read so much commentary about the details that caused a car crash? Doesn't this happen every time a Tesla is involved, too? I think this might be so high-profile because it's the first automated vehicle incident (that I'm aware of) that involves a pedestrian. I know that one of the Tesla incidents resulted in the driver's death, but that was clearly user error. IIRC Tesla was very quick to release the data on the incident as well, so it was pretty clear versus this situation, which is mostly people guessing.
- hughes 9y ago
  I really don't see how the trolley problem is relevant to this situation. The car didn't decide that killing a person was better than some less-moral alternative.
  - c22 9y ago
    I think that's why it's relevant. It's likely the system can't make such a decision because its developers wanted to avoid having to deal with that can of worms. If this is the case the car may have insufficient options available to it in this type of situation. With a working "trolley function" it's possible the system could have noticed the obstacle then done some "moral math" with the chances the obstacle is a pedestrian and the odds of survival for the car's occupant(s) then chosen to drive off the road and crash into a ditch. Without this feature it's likely the system's only recourse is to stop and ask for help, which it may not have time to do.
ksk 9y ago
Self-driving cars are still a fantasy. I don't want the AI to be comparable to an average driver (who collectively get into 6 million accidents) . I want the AI to meet/exceed the skills of the best driver. There is no way anyone would trust an "average" driver to pickup their kids, more than themselves.
- derefr 9y ago
  > There is no way anyone would trust an "average" driver to pickup their kids, more than themselves. I mean, most parents will—at some point—trust their teenage children to pick up their younger siblings. And teenagers are decidedly below-average drivers.
- asdsa5325 9y ago
  Self-driving car companies have no intention of building an average system.
- rconti 9y ago
  I've been in plenty of cars driven by Uber/Lyft/Taxi drivers not to mention coworkers/friends/family who were decidedly below-average.
  - ksk 9y ago
    Well, I want my computer to be able to do perfect math, without mistakes too. Its one of the reasons people use computers to begin with !
- notatoad 9y ago
  The average driver is pretty terrible though. Average is a pretty low bar to clear, and I think there's a decent argument to be made that waymo's disengagement numbers are already better than an average driver.
- ACow_Adonis 9y ago
  Well...except everyone who trusts anyone to pick up their kids. On average... Unless they're picking up their kids from lake wobegong elementary or something...
dwighttk 9y ago
It is astonishing how many conflicting bits of information are slowly trickling out about this person's death.
- phkahler 9y ago
  Especially when there is video of it. Please tell me there is dashcam footage, since that's the first thing that should be available as evidence with a self-driving car.
  - netsharc 9y ago
    Well, considering the whole thing is in a test phase, they must have a recording of all the sensor data, including what the cameras saw.
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      I wonder if they have a camera pointed at the safety driver? I'm curious if he is telling the truth, or was just distracted and could have theoretically braked for the woman.
      - netsharc 9y ago
        Interestingly, pointing the finger at the driver is a get-out-of-"jail" card for Uber, but will ruin his life. They can claim he's an integral safety for the test of the whole self-driving system, and he failed to do his job. Which would make other safety drivers either think "I have to pay 100 %attention" (which they should, anyway), or "I'm outta here!"
- skybrian 9y ago
  It seems pretty common after a newsworthy crash for there to be a lot of uninformed speculation. Investigations take time. Just like with airplane crashes, it's probably best to ignore everything about this incident until we see the results of the investigation.
daodedickinson 9y ago
If this car hit a woman coming from so far on the other side of the street, how are they going to deal with suicides? A coworker was driving home once when a man jumped out in front of her van and she barely stopped in time. He started whomping on her driver's side window screaming "Why didn't you hit me?!?!" again and again. She quickly got away and tried to come up with an explanation for her kids and called 911.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  I don't think we can really know whether or not this incident was a suicide.
  - dmix 9y ago
    The fact the woman was pushing a bike with tons of plastic bags late a night makes me think it wasn't. It sounds to me like a homeless person jaywalking in a dangerous fashion.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      Yes, that's the obvious explanation. But I spent 5.7 years homeless and was often suicidal, in part because I was homeless and things seemed hopeless, in part because I have a history of being suicidal. I had no knife, no gun, no poison. My suicidal ideation typically involved ideas like hurling myself into some nearby body of water or "playing in traffic." I was often camped near a highway and just walking out into traffic on the highway was often the most immediately available means to try to die. I was homeless with two adult relatives who were not ever suicidal themselves. Their support is part of why I never acted on such impulses. Most homeless people are on the street alone, which means there is no one to talk to if they are suicidal and no one to try to prevent a spontaneous impulse of "I have had enough and would like to just check out of life since the entire fucking world hates me and there is no means to solve my problems." This is part of why I say we can't really know. Homeless people often jaywalk very dangerously and it is entirely possible that one reason they do so is because they figure ending up dead would be one path out of their awful situation and bonus points for it looking like a tragic accident since suicide is stigmatizing.
tintor 9y ago
Did Uber release sensor data from the vehicle?
- phkahler 9y ago
  My guess is that they won't release video footage out of respect for the victim and her family. That's mostly an excuse on their part though.
  - marcc 9y ago
    I don't think that respect for the victim and her family is an excuse to not release video footage. It's a valid reason to hesitate releasing actual video footage of a such a terrible event. Sensor data is different. If Uber wants to help the story that self-driving cars are safer, then they should release sensor data to help substantiate any claims they may make in the future about what the car did and did not do.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    You could release everything up until the moment of impact.
corny 9y ago
I wonder if test drivers should also be video monitored to record their alertness? It's quite a responsibility.
mindslight 9y ago
What exactly is the point of reposting yesterday's unsubstantiated press release? The video can't "show" anything if the video is unavailable! flagged.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
There's at least two other trends that are, IMO, more to blame. SUVs in general for one, and the proliferation of particular mixed-use road antipattern. SUVs is an easy one. When an SUV hits a bicyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian, the unfortunate person tends to go through rather than the over they'd be subjected to by a sedan. Motorcycle accident stats bear this out - the overall accident rate has gone down as people have started riding safer, but the fatality rate has gone up as SUVs have taken over market share. The roads this is a bit more complicated, but basically roads need to either be slow enough to safely share space (25mph or below), separated out so that only cars can use it (freeways), or kill an alarming number of pedestrians and bicyclists. Four lanes and a 35 MPH speed limit with infrequent crossings is pretty much going to have a body count. I'm not trying to excuse Uber here, just trying to maybe convince urban planners to stop building things that convince people to try to cross four lanes of traffic going 35 MPH.
- awakeasleep 9y ago
  I'm a dreamer, but I'm dreaming self driving cars or even just sensors on normal cars are able to record the data and make this kind of thing indisputable. Then maybe we'll have corporate pressure aligned with social pressure to change the laws and move traffic patterns beyond what random luck has 'evolved' to safe and sensible defaults.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Well...there's supposed to be a video. The police claims to have seen it, so at least NTSB should have it. The proliferation of dashcams makes your dream far more likely.
- swyx 9y ago
  how are SUVs even remotely related here? makes the rest of your argument difficult to take seriously
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    The self-driving car involved in the accident is a SUV.
phyzome 9y ago
We only have the word of the Arizona police on the veracity of the headline. Not exactly a stellar source.
- bfuller 9y ago
  And the human being behind the wheel, who I also have a problem trusting
eecsninja 9y ago
I'll just leave this here. Arizona pedestrian deaths increased 9% in 2017. https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/arizona-pedestrian-deaths-increased-in-2017-new-data-shows/75-504506914 https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/arizona-pe...
alexandercrohde 9y ago
This title should read "Tempe Police Chief alleges/interprets video shows woman stepped out suddenly in front of self-driving uber"
notananthem 9y ago
Sorry for the dumb question, but is there already any conclusion on how driverless cars will be handled for accidents, collisions, fatalities, etc? In the short term it sounds like poor Vasquez is boned as the driver considering the media is profiling his previous conviction. There's no profiling a "driverless car" though, how inherently risky it can be. I'm all for the future and driverless cars I've just always thought this was an idiotic idea that will turn people into Idiocracy characters. This woman was killed by a very expensive robotic car with a human being that could have prevented it, but wasn't permitted to, because the future of driverless cars is being tested.
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rhacker 9y ago
I found a few things interesting when I add them up: 1. She was walking from left to right. 2. The dent was on the right side of the car She probably knew she was going to be hit if she sped up like that, AND... it was probably more than .2 seconds of total visibility to the SDV.
jdavis703 9y ago
When I was getting my learners permit I was practicing on a curvy mountain road. I saw a person with a camera phone on the "drop off" side of the road, taking a picture of from what my angle would've been a boring cliff face. But I knew that a camera phone photographer was probably actually photographing a human, who would likely be on the other side of the blind corner. So I slowed down, despite my instructor chastising me for doing so. When we came around and there was a person in the road she asked, "How did you know?" If a self driving vehicle can't make predictions about "irrational" pedestrian behaviour like this and slow down it shouldn't be on the road.
- cle 9y ago
  Should your driving instructor also not be on the road?
  - hndamien 9y ago
    Maybe shouldn't be a driving instructor.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    Probably not. But I also failed my first driving test for going to slow (I was within the minimum and maximum speed range, but new drivers going slow I guess is a sign of an unconfident driver).
    - dfee 9y ago
      It’s been a while since I took a driving test, but I recall the test to be more than staying within the speed limit. There was also staying in between the lines, following road signs, and integrating with traffic. Do you think you might have failed not because you weren’t pegged at the speed limit, but instead because you weren’t capable of driving safely? I wasn’t there, so it could’ve been because you really were just driving too slowly. But maybe it was more than that.
      - jdavis703 9y ago
paul7986 9y ago
Oh it's her fault she was jay walking and the robots now take precedence. No need to ticket jay walkers! Uber's fleet will take care of these law breakers! Ridiculous and this company after all it's done is still around and now it's killing people!
- deleted 9y ago
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- akkat 9y ago
  I assure you that if you jump in front of a moving train you will be killed. How is this different?
  - princeb 9y ago
    cars are not trains, for one. road usage is shared among cars, motorcycles and scooters, trucks, pedestrians, bicycles, mobility scooters, and other things.
    - akkat 9y ago
      Train tracks are also shared at train crossings. Yet if a car went there after the warning lights went on, the car would be to blame.
      - petee 9y ago
        So autonomous vehicles should come with flashing warning lights every where they go? Also, trains don't change lanes, or stop quickly. Its simply a bad analogy.
        akkat 9y ago
        You are right, a better analogy would be if a person tried to cross in the middle of a random track segment. The woman didn't cross at a crosswalk so that part of road was not designated to pedestrians at all. Cars (at lease autonomous ones) signal before changing lanes and slowing down. I think that flashing lights is too annoying, but forcing cars that drive in the night to have lights sounds like a reasonable (and existent) rule.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
Bloomberg title: >> Uber Victim Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Car First line of the first paragraph in the article (my underlining): >> Police say a video from the Uber self-driving car that struck and killed a woman on Sunday shows her moving in front of it suddenly And the title on this thread: >> Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber Both titles are very misleading. The Bloomberg title because it doesn't clarify it's repeating a police statement, the HN title because it makes it look like the relevant video is in the article, or at least that someone from Bloomberg has seen it, neither of which is the case.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Yes, this is a serious abuse of headline on both counts. Mods, can we change the title on HN? It’s a significant misrepresentation as it stands.
- KC8ZKF 9y ago
  Yes. Maybe it's time we quit obsessing over headlines, and realized that actually reading the article might be necessary.
  - sxyuan 9y ago
    I was confused when I clicked on the article and could not find a video. The title is misleading, and while it would be nice if we always had the time to carefully read every article we come across, the reality is that I (and probably many others here) will skim through multiple titles and only click on the most interesting ones. Something as definitive as "Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly..." can easily leave a false impression in people's minds.
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    Maybe you are unemployed or something and have tons of free time, but the rest of us are too busy to read every single article that arrives at the front page. That is why headlines should be accurate summaries or descriptions of the submissions.
- 9y ago
sgustard 9y ago
Did the car stop itself after the accident? Are autonomous cars programmed with a "we've just hit something, stop and pull over" mode? Which sensors on the car even know if it has hit something?
blendo 9y ago
A 4000 lb SUV, traveling nearly 40mph, at night, on a 4 lane divided highway, hits a pedestrian walking a bike. The kinetic energy mismatch is the real problem, and at the very least, these companies should be testing at only 20-25mph, with _much_ lighter vehicles. We'll have to wait for the NTSB to check in, but I'd be surprised if Uber isn't shut down(at least in Tempe) for a good long while.
- turtlebits 9y ago
  Agreed. While I can understand it's much easier to strap sensors/equipment on a already available car, it makes more sense to me from a safety point of view to test with some lightweight shell of a vehicle to cause the least damage to other entities.
DonHopkins 9y ago
To Uber's credit, it was working as designed, because the pedestrian had just hailed a Lyft.
KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
Some of the commenters here think they can do a better job reconstructing the incident from newspaper cartoons than actual investigators who are working at the scene. You guys can just as well make up a story in which a murderous Uber robot chased a pedestrian off of the sidewalk and onto the road and then intentionally ran her over.
- dildo_fingers 9y ago
  Murder Robot is a dope metal band name.
- falcolas 9y ago
  Why are we resorting to reconstructing a scene when Uber's Robot caught the whole thing on camera and LIDAR? The police statement seems quite premature, especially when the NTSB is running an investigation into the accident.
  - ekovarski 9y ago
    +1; Time will tell what happened as there should be enough data onboard. These systems are essentially in training mode and new scenarios will need to be accounted for. I am curious as to why the driver didn't react. I wonder if the system keeps track of the driver as well as I would imagine it has to be mind numbing to sit behind a wheel for hours on end and not do anything... So in this situation, how attentive and alert was really the driver who is supposed to be the fail safe mechanism.
    - 11011111 9y ago
      There's video from inside too: https://t.co/2dVP72TziQ https://t.co/2dVP72TziQ
- coding123 9y ago
  I think part of the problem is that almost all of the news articles have painted a picture of the fault being the biker. And there seems to be no one defending her and its ridiculous that the news articles are already one-sided here considering that this is a brand-spanking new type of thing that has happened on this planet. That being said, I'm totally open to this being the fault of either Uber or the woman, but there are too many questions in my head that suggest it was the fault of the woman. Are we saying that at this point we're going to let the initial police statement win because they are "experts" at driving. Are they also expects at the software in SDVs? I think at this point we shouldn't assume either story - but at the same time we can't let either Uber, the police, governments cover this story up for the sake of money and politics. I think there are some pretty massive implications that should come from this - even if a human driver may have very well killed this person too (which I don't personally believe) don't we need to take a minute and ask a few questions about why the vehicle reportedly didn't even slow down after the hit? Why the dent is on the RIGHT hand side of the car (.2 seconds seems false)? Would a human that was driving slowed a lot earlier - was the pedestrian/biker expecting the car to slow because she clearly had a hand signal up - seeing a fake driver in the car? There are too many questions and I hope that this specific story is treated with the utmost careful consideration. I for one can't seem to let it go in my head. Someone died and it very well could have been because of our collective ego that we can accomplish this (SDVs) at this point in our history. We'll never hear from this woman again.
paul7986 9y ago
Uber is damaged goods! What's next their going to kill a bunch of kids trying to help their blind friend out of the street? I mean the headlines this company writes!
jaclaz 9y ago
As a side note, I find - as always - this part disturbing: >The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa County Superior Court records. He served time in prison for armed robbery more than 15 years ago, what kind of relevance would have this? Presumably he has a valid driving license issued by the State, and was not under the effect of alcohol or drugs. Having committed armed robbery has seemingly no connection (I mean it isn't like he was condemned for having killed someone while driving a car or something like that), and even if that was the case some State must have issued (or renewed) his driving license, meaning that he was legally authorized to drive the car.
- lancepioch 9y ago
  In the US, once you commit a crime, it'll follow you for the rest of your life, even after you paid your time and money.
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    >In the US, once you commit a crime, it'll follow you for the rest of your life, even after you paid your time and money. I know, and understand how this (right or wrong as it might be[1]) could be of use for the police or for the judiciary system, what I am highlighting is just how gratuitious it is on a piece of news. [1] this is a (lesser known) writing by G.K Chesterton: "The perpetuation of punishment" (page 504 of "On Lying in Bed and Other Essays") circa 1907 https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504 https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504
- adrianmonk 9y ago
  I imagine they're trying to imply that someone who was convicted of a serious crime could still be an unreliable, irresponsible, or untrustworthy person. It's another question whether it's fair to assume that. I don't think it is, though personally I think it's reasonable to take the information into account as long as you restrain yourself from jumping to any conclusions.
  - 9y ago
stillsut 9y ago
Was the car electric? I've had a close call with a silent electric car which would have been my fault. The scenario goes like this: I'm saying goodbye to Joe and about to cross the street and notice there is no traffic around. I realize as I'm about to leave Joe, I forgot to mention something, so I turn back to him and say "By the way, blah blah", and with that, I then step off the curb onto the street without checking for oncoming traffic again, probably thinking about some chore I have to get done when I get home. If I heard cars, I would instinctually check again, but the silent electric mode does not allow for this. I'd be interested in any studies about this: how much more often do pedestrian-at-fault collisions occur in silent electric mode?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wonton2 9y ago
I cannot understand how this could be the womans fault? Is it because of the rules of jaywalking in USA? Where I am from it is always considered the drivers fault, even if a pedestrian literally throws themselves in front of the car. Simply because the car can kill a pedestrian and not the other way around. The way I see it the uber vehicle should have slowed down to a speed at which it would have been able to react to these kind of abrupt motions. This should be cracked down hard on, not making it illegal for self driving car but the fine should be high. I dont like the thought of a self deiving car company becoming «too big to fail» and getting excused for killing pedestrians that dont understand how self driving cars work.

262 points by samcampbell 9y ago

> "The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them," Moir said, referring to the back-up driver who was behind the wheel but not operating the vehicle. "His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision."

alistproducer2 9y ago

Call me crazy but isn't a big part of the promise of these systems supposed to be they see things humans wouldn't or couldn't? If they're just as surprised as the human behind the wheel, that feels like a problem.

samcampbell 9y ago
Agreed! This seems like an instance where even if the car knew it needed to stop, it couldn't do so in time.
- Maybestring 9y ago
  Every millisecond of braking reduces the severity of the collision.
danso 9y ago
Yes, to me, this is the most relevant part of the posted article: > “It’s possible that Uber’s automated driving system did not detect the pedestrian, did not classify her as a pedestrian, or did not predict her departure from the median,” Smith said in an email. “I don’t know whether these steps occurred too late to prevent or lessen the collision or whether they never occurred at all, but the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.” We can accept that by the time the Uber AV "saw" the victim, it was too late to brake. But that doesn't mean we can't ask questions about what the AI actually saw and classified. And even if it was a "sudden" event for humans, was it "sudden" relative to computer reaction time? How fast did the victim move into the road that the Uber AV couldn't even brake?
- Taniwha 9y ago
  it could be that they never saw someone pushing a bike across a road in tests before, maybe it confused that with someone riding on the road at a different angle
  - nathanielc 9y ago
    If either of those two cases is true, then the AI is not ready to be driving on public roads.
  - danso 9y ago
    But why is accurate classification needed, when the overriding decision is about how the car should react now that an unidentified, moving object is moving directly into the car's path? Even if someone were riding at an angle, it's still in a direction that may intersect with the car's path.
    - taneq 9y ago
      Exactly, it shouldn't matter what the thing is, if it's in front of my car and bigger than a plastic shopping bag I don't want to hit it.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  The most relevant part is from someone with zero knowledge of what happened?
  - danso 9y ago
    Yeah, but my comment was made back when there were 2 stories about the Uber accident. This one, and the original one. The Bloomberg story has little more information than what the police chief claimed to the Chronicle, and at that point, the Tempe PD was downplaying the importance of her determination. But everything the police claimed was in context of witness interview and camera footage. Since this is a self-driving car, we know there is more data and more ways to assess performance besides camera vision.
branchan 9y ago
If the autonomous vehicle performed just as well as the human did (meaning a human would've hit her also), then yes although it can be improved, I don't see how it is a problem.
- alistproducer2 9y ago
  If they are just robot versions of humans then I would argue they are far too underdeveloped to be on real roads with real people.
vha32oiwe 9y ago
How can a computer know to handle something when it is relying on us to supply models we don't have answers for? These systems are fancy statistical sorting engines, looking up the most relevant next steps provided BY US. They cannot subvert the laws of physics with their actions. We don't have an answer for this at all because humans just swerve or hit the brakes, regardless of the outcome (often creating an outcome that's worse). What else is there given the constraints of physics? Time and space aren't not mutable, no matter how big the data set we apply.

dzdt 9y ago

Yes, the report you'd hope to be hearing from Uber is along the lines of "0.2 seconds after the pedestrian entered the travel lane the automated system identified her as a hazard and initiated an avoidance maneuver. Despite braking and beginning to swerve away, the car impacted the pedestrian 1.2 seconds later." Thats the promise the automated vehicle people are selling. But in this case it seems the car was clueless.

Jackalopiate 9y ago
As was the driver, mind you
TillE 9y ago
I'm really skeptical about swerving as an evasive maneuver. It's complicated to get that right. But yes, if it didn't at least slam the brakes then something went badly wrong. Maybe you can't prevent an accident, but you can at least reduce momentum and demonstrate that your system was working correctly.
- PunchTornado 9y ago
  Why didn't the human hit the brake? I don't understand how this is even news to be honest. There was a human in the driving seat and he failed to stop just like the computer.
  - Scaevolus 9y ago
    Computers have better reaction times than humans. Forcibly braking is a simple maneuver.
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      > Computers have better reaction times than humans. Forcibly braking is a simple maneuver. The question isn't about the MHZ speed of a computer or the theoretical reaction time but the lack of reaction by the computer in the actual real world. It doesn't matter if this is a sensor failure, a software bug, or a slow reaction by a computer. The result is the same. A person died. From the article: *"... the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.”

DanBC 9y ago

> "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” But it's made harder if you're speeding.

GhostVII 9y ago
It was going 3mph over the speed limit, a perfectly reasonable speed that is still probably lower than almost everyone else on the road.
- danso 9y ago
  There was no one else on the road (or, reports haven't mentioned other traffic being a factor).
  - 111_1_111 9y ago
    That doesn't change the fact that posted speed limits are almost always slower than is reasonable. 38 mph is a reasonable speed on all but the windiest of roads.
- rhacker 9y ago
  That actually really sucks to hear, I was hoping that SDVs would adhere and never break the speed limit. 3 MPH at the forces we're talking about can actually make a difference in life or death.
  - question_that 9y ago
    It would be pretty hilarious if SDVs never broke speed limits, accident after accident caused by irate human drivers attempting to pass.
  - burntwater 9y ago
    I believe it's not clear whether or not it was speeding, From the article, it sounds like it may have been in the middle of transitioning from 35MPH to/from 40MPH.

AngeloAnolin 9y ago

Went to the link hoping to see a video, but I guess, pending all other investigations, that video would not be released.

ggg9990 9y ago
Whether the video will be released may also depend on her family’s wishes.

GoToRO 9y ago

Are these systems designed to honk?

CobrastanJorji 9y ago
Per this old article from 2016, yes: https://medium.com/waymo/sounds-of-the-self-driving-car-c26f30fcf76c https://medium.com/waymo/sounds-of-the-self-driving-car-c26f...
- dkonofalski 9y ago
  Clarification - the article you posted is about the Waymo technology, not the Uber technology. It's possible that Uber does not use those capabilities.
- Zitrax 9y ago
  The culture of using the horn differs a lot between countries. Would they use locale aware honk schemes? And similarly are self driving cars listening? Will they detect emergency vehicles by the sirens, or even listen to other cars honking at them?
  - tintor 9y ago
    Emergency and police vehicles by sirens yes, but likely not other cars.

sudeepj 9y ago

I cannot imagine the detailed logging the engineers might have to do in such a system. When I code I wonder sometimes if I am logging unnecessary events at info level. This led to one more question. Do driverless cars have (or will have) a black box like that of aeroplane?

subie 9y ago
> Do driverless cars have (or will have) a black box like that of aeroplane? I believe most modern cars already have this.
- derefr 9y ago
  Yes; in fact, cars have had this technology since before there was flash memory or GPS or (good) accelerometers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder s were originally designed to record the instantaneous mechanical state of the car (e.g. whether seatbelts were buckled, to what degree the accelerator was depressed, etc.) during a crash, for insurance purposes.
Fricken 9y ago
Test vehicles collect all the data. I think it was Cruise that mentioned they collect about 4 terabytes per day per vehicle. It likely isn't much different for Uber.
yazaddaruvala 9y ago
What we really need is for all of the logs from a company like Uber or Google to get streamed to some third party. All of the logs are encrypted (with different keys), and only when an issue occurs, the company who owns the data gives the key for that particular car at that particular hour for decryption. Basically a data-escrow. This way we know the logs are not being tampered with, and we keep the data hidden from the third party.
- notatoad 9y ago
  These are test vehicles. If you don't let the engineers have access to the results of their testing except in the event of an accident, then we will never have autonomous cars. Of course, maybe thats what you're arguing for. But either way, I think it's a bad idea.

robotbikes 9y ago

I haven't seen anyone post this yet but I highly suspect the fact that she was pushing a bicycle impacted the machine learning driven AIs ability to determine she was a pedestrian. This reminds me of the kangaroos messing up the AV programs being tested in Australia. A human paying attention may have been wary of a person pushing a bike in the shadows but for all we know the algorithm thought that she was a bush or something because her profile was impacted by the bike. There is a lot to speculate about but machine learning isn't as smart as we humans tend to believe it is and nowhere does it yet approach the form of general intelligence required to respond appropriately to all of it's inputs the way a human paying attention could.

lulmerchant 9y ago
I don't understand this line of reasoning at all, but it's getting repeated a lot on HN. Is the AI expected to hit cyclists, but not pedestrians? Shouldn't it consider any moving object to be a hazard?
- Roodgorf 9y ago
  It may not have had good enough information to tell that she was a cyclist at all, and instead interpreted her to be something static/non-human altogether (in parent's example, a bush). Of course, without seeing the data its sensors gathered, and what that data registered as, it's all speculation. The problem is with misidentification, not bad priorities.
  - danso 9y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of classification problem involved. But wouldn't the AV by default treat a solid object on the road as a hazard to brake for? There's no possible way to specifically train for every variation of thing that could be encountered on a city street (imagine Halloween, for starters).
    - lukeschlather 9y ago

preparat 9y ago

Could people start wearing small transmitters that nearby autonomous vehicles can read?

etrautmann 9y ago
Please no. You should not be required to carry a beacon in order to be safe walking around a city or crossing a street.
- Para2016 9y ago
  People are supposed to wear bright clothing when walking at night or biking. Maybe we can have an optional beacon..
- asdsa5325 9y ago
  The woman who was hit ran across the road. It's easy to be safe: don't do that.
  - phyzome 9y ago
    Am I supposed to get in a car to cross the street?
    - josefx 9y ago
      You could hail an Uber.
    - asdsa5325 9y ago
      Use a crosswalk?
      - phyzome 9y ago
        Sure, when they're available. Have you looked at the area where the woman was hit?
cdolan 9y ago

danso 9y ago

The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-driving-uber-pedestrian-killed.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-drivi... This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40 mph, had no time to react, in a location with good street lighting and with clear weather. I would think most humans would be able to at least hit the brakes, if not completely avoid a collision.

lolc 9y ago
If this was indeed the overall scenario, there are few factors I could think of that would excuse a human driver here: 1. Another car was in the lane left of the fatal car, blocking its view of the pedestrian. 2. The pedestrian fell back after reaching the curb. But it looks like both the artificial and the human driver were asleep.
- bbarn 9y ago
  1. Wouldn't the pedestrian have to walk through said car then? 2. Quite plausible, especially trying to heft what looks like a pretty heavy loaded bike onto a curb.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Maybe that car had stopped for the pedestrian. We're not going to actually know what happened until the video is released.
    - saalweachter 9y ago
      Random note: drivers, when you are on a two-plus lane road, do not randomly stop (when their is no designated yield) to let pedestrians cross/other drivers turn. Cars in the other lanes may (probably, even) not stop, causing an accident. It probably is completely unrelated to this event, but it’s an anti-pattern by well-meaning drivers.

deft 9y ago

Great that all these articles are coming out defending Uber. Even if (it wasn't) her own fault, these make it sound like "well I mean she was stupid and therefore deserved it".

gnicholas 9y ago

> The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa County Superior Court records. Uber declined to comment on Vasquez’s criminal record. I didn't realize that people with criminal records like this could become Uber drivers. That is, these types of crimes are relevant to working as an Uber driver—more than things like tax fraud or failure to pay child support.

mschuster91 9y ago
> I didn't realize that people with criminal records like this could become Uber drivers. In a civilized society people should be able to get jobs when they get out of prison. It's called "time served" for a reason. Everything other is just paving the path to recidivism - when people can't make a living because no one will hire ex-cons, they don't have any other way of literally staying alive than living as hobos or breaking the law. The attitude in your comment is imho perfectly representing why the US has such problems with career criminals. The only class of people where even after time served there should be safeguards are when there's a psychological reason that actually makes people dangerous, like pedophilia.
- lsaferite 9y ago
  My understanding is that in Europe a criminal record is hidden from all but LEOs after 7 years as well.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    Depends on the country and the type of offense(s). I'm fine with justified accesses for employers - e.g. a trucking company might be allowed to ask the state "has XYZ committed a drunk/drugged or other driving offense in the last 3 years", but I see no valid reason to (involuntarily) disclosing to any new employer that someone has been sentenced for public urination or fare dodging. AFAIK, there is no such "filtering" option available anywhere... and especially with fare dodging, people get essentially criminalized for being poor. The state should provide an interface for employers to input the personal data of the candidate and the job the candidate is applying for, and the interface should simply give a "OK", "not OK", "no way OK" (e.g. for pedophiles applying for childcare jobs) and "OK with conditions". That would be a safeguard for privacy while also providing employers with a check that they don't hire someone totally wrong for the job.

drcross 9y ago

At the risk of sounding macabre, the engineers will be pouring over thousands of lines of logs and if Uber self driving cars ever do survive to make it onto the roads again, the circumstance of woman's death and the after analysis will mean it will never ever happen again. I expect that during the coming years we will analyse car crashes with the same scrutiny as airplane crashes with the hope to solve every single edge case. RIP.

chii 9y ago
having cars follow the same level of investigation as a plane crash is probably the best thing to happen.
aetherson 9y ago
That's a very optimistic view of what will happen -- or I suppose a pessimistic one. I agree that there will be a lot of scrutiny of the logs, but unless they identify an actual bug ("Oh shit, we had a buffer overrun right here!") it's not necessarily going to be possible to preclude this or something very similar from happening again. The driving of an autonomous vehicle is an emergent event of large numbers of complicated and in some cases opaque subsystems. Changing the interactions of these subsystems in a narrow way to preclude this particular kind of event is not necessarily something they'll be able to figure out a way to do without causing more problems.
- dmix 9y ago
  But it's still optimistic compared to todays current status quo. We now have a system we can optimize and build into to make our best effort to prevent in future events. Which is how it similar to airplane crashes, as it's a heavily automated and centralized system (ie, humans are far less a factor in the event than cars, which can't be optimized nearly as easily). While cars have had improvements in safety via vehicle design, and popular culture, road signs, traffic laws, etc can influence human behaviour to drive differently, I don't think there has ever been a better time to reduce these events if not everytime, then at least far less often than the current standard. Which is what is so often missing in these conversations: a rational baseline and a clear reliable process that we will now be in a better position going forward for this not to happen again (assuming the right processes are in place, which they may very well not be in this case).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jaweb 9y ago

It's interesting how high profile this post-crash analysis is - name another time you read so much commentary about the details that caused a car crash? It seems to me that this is exposing a few gaps in how we think about driverless cars currently: - A framework for how cars should be making "moral" decisions (the trolley problem [0]) - A defined process for post car crash investigations - akin to the process in air crashes Will be interesting to see if these emerge soon (or are emerging and I have missed) [0] https://qz.com/1204395/self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-philosophers-are-building-ethical-algorithms-to-solve-the-problem/ https://qz.com/1204395/self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-phi...

sdrothrock 9y ago
> name another time you read so much commentary about the details that caused a car crash? Doesn't this happen every time a Tesla is involved, too? I think this might be so high-profile because it's the first automated vehicle incident (that I'm aware of) that involves a pedestrian. I know that one of the Tesla incidents resulted in the driver's death, but that was clearly user error. IIRC Tesla was very quick to release the data on the incident as well, so it was pretty clear versus this situation, which is mostly people guessing.
hughes 9y ago
I really don't see how the trolley problem is relevant to this situation. The car didn't decide that killing a person was better than some less-moral alternative.
- c22 9y ago
  I think that's why it's relevant. It's likely the system can't make such a decision because its developers wanted to avoid having to deal with that can of worms. If this is the case the car may have insufficient options available to it in this type of situation. With a working "trolley function" it's possible the system could have noticed the obstacle then done some "moral math" with the chances the obstacle is a pedestrian and the odds of survival for the car's occupant(s) then chosen to drive off the road and crash into a ditch. Without this feature it's likely the system's only recourse is to stop and ask for help, which it may not have time to do.

ksk 9y ago

Self-driving cars are still a fantasy. I don't want the AI to be comparable to an average driver (who collectively get into 6 million accidents) . I want the AI to meet/exceed the skills of the best driver. There is no way anyone would trust an "average" driver to pickup their kids, more than themselves.

derefr 9y ago
> There is no way anyone would trust an "average" driver to pickup their kids, more than themselves. I mean, most parents will—at some point—trust their teenage children to pick up their younger siblings. And teenagers are decidedly below-average drivers.
asdsa5325 9y ago
Self-driving car companies have no intention of building an average system.
rconti 9y ago
I've been in plenty of cars driven by Uber/Lyft/Taxi drivers not to mention coworkers/friends/family who were decidedly below-average.
- ksk 9y ago
  Well, I want my computer to be able to do perfect math, without mistakes too. Its one of the reasons people use computers to begin with !
notatoad 9y ago
The average driver is pretty terrible though. Average is a pretty low bar to clear, and I think there's a decent argument to be made that waymo's disengagement numbers are already better than an average driver.
ACow_Adonis 9y ago
Well...except everyone who trusts anyone to pick up their kids. On average... Unless they're picking up their kids from lake wobegong elementary or something...

dwighttk 9y ago

It is astonishing how many conflicting bits of information are slowly trickling out about this person's death.

phkahler 9y ago
Especially when there is video of it. Please tell me there is dashcam footage, since that's the first thing that should be available as evidence with a self-driving car.
- netsharc 9y ago
  Well, considering the whole thing is in a test phase, they must have a recording of all the sensor data, including what the cameras saw.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    I wonder if they have a camera pointed at the safety driver? I'm curious if he is telling the truth, or was just distracted and could have theoretically braked for the woman.
    - netsharc 9y ago
      Interestingly, pointing the finger at the driver is a get-out-of-"jail" card for Uber, but will ruin his life. They can claim he's an integral safety for the test of the whole self-driving system, and he failed to do his job. Which would make other safety drivers either think "I have to pay 100 %attention" (which they should, anyway), or "I'm outta here!"
skybrian 9y ago
It seems pretty common after a newsworthy crash for there to be a lot of uninformed speculation. Investigations take time. Just like with airplane crashes, it's probably best to ignore everything about this incident until we see the results of the investigation.

daodedickinson 9y ago

If this car hit a woman coming from so far on the other side of the street, how are they going to deal with suicides? A coworker was driving home once when a man jumped out in front of her van and she barely stopped in time. He started whomping on her driver's side window screaming "Why didn't you hit me?!?!" again and again. She quickly got away and tried to come up with an explanation for her kids and called 911.

DoreenMichele 9y ago
I don't think we can really know whether or not this incident was a suicide.
- dmix 9y ago
  The fact the woman was pushing a bike with tons of plastic bags late a night makes me think it wasn't. It sounds to me like a homeless person jaywalking in a dangerous fashion.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    Yes, that's the obvious explanation. But I spent 5.7 years homeless and was often suicidal, in part because I was homeless and things seemed hopeless, in part because I have a history of being suicidal. I had no knife, no gun, no poison. My suicidal ideation typically involved ideas like hurling myself into some nearby body of water or "playing in traffic." I was often camped near a highway and just walking out into traffic on the highway was often the most immediately available means to try to die. I was homeless with two adult relatives who were not ever suicidal themselves. Their support is part of why I never acted on such impulses. Most homeless people are on the street alone, which means there is no one to talk to if they are suicidal and no one to try to prevent a spontaneous impulse of "I have had enough and would like to just check out of life since the entire fucking world hates me and there is no means to solve my problems." This is part of why I say we can't really know. Homeless people often jaywalk very dangerously and it is entirely possible that one reason they do so is because they figure ending up dead would be one path out of their awful situation and bonus points for it looking like a tragic accident since suicide is stigmatizing.

tintor 9y ago

Did Uber release sensor data from the vehicle?

phkahler 9y ago
My guess is that they won't release video footage out of respect for the victim and her family. That's mostly an excuse on their part though.
- marcc 9y ago
  I don't think that respect for the victim and her family is an excuse to not release video footage. It's a valid reason to hesitate releasing actual video footage of a such a terrible event. Sensor data is different. If Uber wants to help the story that self-driving cars are safer, then they should release sensor data to help substantiate any claims they may make in the future about what the car did and did not do.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  You could release everything up until the moment of impact.

corny 9y ago

I wonder if test drivers should also be video monitored to record their alertness? It's quite a responsibility.

mindslight 9y ago

What exactly is the point of reposting yesterday's unsubstantiated press release? The video can't "show" anything if the video is unavailable! flagged.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

There's at least two other trends that are, IMO, more to blame. SUVs in general for one, and the proliferation of particular mixed-use road antipattern. SUVs is an easy one. When an SUV hits a bicyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian, the unfortunate person tends to go through rather than the over they'd be subjected to by a sedan. Motorcycle accident stats bear this out - the overall accident rate has gone down as people have started riding safer, but the fatality rate has gone up as SUVs have taken over market share. The roads this is a bit more complicated, but basically roads need to either be slow enough to safely share space (25mph or below), separated out so that only cars can use it (freeways), or kill an alarming number of pedestrians and bicyclists. Four lanes and a 35 MPH speed limit with infrequent crossings is pretty much going to have a body count. I'm not trying to excuse Uber here, just trying to maybe convince urban planners to stop building things that convince people to try to cross four lanes of traffic going 35 MPH.

awakeasleep 9y ago
I'm a dreamer, but I'm dreaming self driving cars or even just sensors on normal cars are able to record the data and make this kind of thing indisputable. Then maybe we'll have corporate pressure aligned with social pressure to change the laws and move traffic patterns beyond what random luck has 'evolved' to safe and sensible defaults.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Well...there's supposed to be a video. The police claims to have seen it, so at least NTSB should have it. The proliferation of dashcams makes your dream far more likely.
swyx 9y ago
how are SUVs even remotely related here? makes the rest of your argument difficult to take seriously
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  The self-driving car involved in the accident is a SUV.

phyzome 9y ago

We only have the word of the Arizona police on the veracity of the headline. Not exactly a stellar source.

bfuller 9y ago
And the human being behind the wheel, who I also have a problem trusting

eecsninja 9y ago

I'll just leave this here. Arizona pedestrian deaths increased 9% in 2017. https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/arizona-pedestrian-deaths-increased-in-2017-new-data-shows/75-504506914 https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/arizona-pe...

alexandercrohde 9y ago

This title should read "Tempe Police Chief alleges/interprets video shows woman stepped out suddenly in front of self-driving uber"

notananthem 9y ago

Sorry for the dumb question, but is there already any conclusion on how driverless cars will be handled for accidents, collisions, fatalities, etc? In the short term it sounds like poor Vasquez is boned as the driver considering the media is profiling his previous conviction. There's no profiling a "driverless car" though, how inherently risky it can be. I'm all for the future and driverless cars I've just always thought this was an idiotic idea that will turn people into Idiocracy characters. This woman was killed by a very expensive robotic car with a human being that could have prevented it, but wasn't permitted to, because the future of driverless cars is being tested.

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rhacker 9y ago

I found a few things interesting when I add them up: 1. She was walking from left to right. 2. The dent was on the right side of the car She probably knew she was going to be hit if she sped up like that, AND... it was probably more than .2 seconds of total visibility to the SDV.

jdavis703 9y ago

When I was getting my learners permit I was practicing on a curvy mountain road. I saw a person with a camera phone on the "drop off" side of the road, taking a picture of from what my angle would've been a boring cliff face. But I knew that a camera phone photographer was probably actually photographing a human, who would likely be on the other side of the blind corner. So I slowed down, despite my instructor chastising me for doing so. When we came around and there was a person in the road she asked, "How did you know?" If a self driving vehicle can't make predictions about "irrational" pedestrian behaviour like this and slow down it shouldn't be on the road.

cle 9y ago
Should your driving instructor also not be on the road?
- hndamien 9y ago
  Maybe shouldn't be a driving instructor.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  Probably not. But I also failed my first driving test for going to slow (I was within the minimum and maximum speed range, but new drivers going slow I guess is a sign of an unconfident driver).
  - dfee 9y ago
    It’s been a while since I took a driving test, but I recall the test to be more than staying within the speed limit. There was also staying in between the lines, following road signs, and integrating with traffic. Do you think you might have failed not because you weren’t pegged at the speed limit, but instead because you weren’t capable of driving safely? I wasn’t there, so it could’ve been because you really were just driving too slowly. But maybe it was more than that.
    - jdavis703 9y ago

paul7986 9y ago

Oh it's her fault she was jay walking and the robots now take precedence. No need to ticket jay walkers! Uber's fleet will take care of these law breakers! Ridiculous and this company after all it's done is still around and now it's killing people!

deleted 9y ago
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akkat 9y ago
I assure you that if you jump in front of a moving train you will be killed. How is this different?
- princeb 9y ago
  cars are not trains, for one. road usage is shared among cars, motorcycles and scooters, trucks, pedestrians, bicycles, mobility scooters, and other things.
  - akkat 9y ago
    Train tracks are also shared at train crossings. Yet if a car went there after the warning lights went on, the car would be to blame.
    - petee 9y ago
      So autonomous vehicles should come with flashing warning lights every where they go? Also, trains don't change lanes, or stop quickly. Its simply a bad analogy.
      - akkat 9y ago
        You are right, a better analogy would be if a person tried to cross in the middle of a random track segment. The woman didn't cross at a crosswalk so that part of road was not designated to pedestrians at all. Cars (at lease autonomous ones) signal before changing lanes and slowing down. I think that flashing lights is too annoying, but forcing cars that drive in the night to have lights sounds like a reasonable (and existent) rule.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

Bloomberg title: >> Uber Victim Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Car First line of the first paragraph in the article (my underlining): >> Police say a video from the Uber self-driving car that struck and killed a woman on Sunday shows her moving in front of it suddenly And the title on this thread: >> Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber Both titles are very misleading. The Bloomberg title because it doesn't clarify it's repeating a police statement, the HN title because it makes it look like the relevant video is in the article, or at least that someone from Bloomberg has seen it, neither of which is the case.

dsacco 9y ago
Yes, this is a serious abuse of headline on both counts. Mods, can we change the title on HN? It’s a significant misrepresentation as it stands.
KC8ZKF 9y ago
Yes. Maybe it's time we quit obsessing over headlines, and realized that actually reading the article might be necessary.
- sxyuan 9y ago
  I was confused when I clicked on the article and could not find a video. The title is misleading, and while it would be nice if we always had the time to carefully read every article we come across, the reality is that I (and probably many others here) will skim through multiple titles and only click on the most interesting ones. Something as definitive as "Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly..." can easily leave a false impression in people's minds.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  Maybe you are unemployed or something and have tons of free time, but the rest of us are too busy to read every single article that arrives at the front page. That is why headlines should be accurate summaries or descriptions of the submissions.
9y ago

sgustard 9y ago

Did the car stop itself after the accident? Are autonomous cars programmed with a "we've just hit something, stop and pull over" mode? Which sensors on the car even know if it has hit something?

blendo 9y ago

A 4000 lb SUV, traveling nearly 40mph, at night, on a 4 lane divided highway, hits a pedestrian walking a bike. The kinetic energy mismatch is the real problem, and at the very least, these companies should be testing at only 20-25mph, with _much_ lighter vehicles. We'll have to wait for the NTSB to check in, but I'd be surprised if Uber isn't shut down(at least in Tempe) for a good long while.

turtlebits 9y ago
Agreed. While I can understand it's much easier to strap sensors/equipment on a already available car, it makes more sense to me from a safety point of view to test with some lightweight shell of a vehicle to cause the least damage to other entities.

DonHopkins 9y ago

To Uber's credit, it was working as designed, because the pedestrian had just hailed a Lyft.

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago

Some of the commenters here think they can do a better job reconstructing the incident from newspaper cartoons than actual investigators who are working at the scene. You guys can just as well make up a story in which a murderous Uber robot chased a pedestrian off of the sidewalk and onto the road and then intentionally ran her over.

dildo_fingers 9y ago
Murder Robot is a dope metal band name.
falcolas 9y ago
Why are we resorting to reconstructing a scene when Uber's Robot caught the whole thing on camera and LIDAR? The police statement seems quite premature, especially when the NTSB is running an investigation into the accident.
- ekovarski 9y ago
  +1; Time will tell what happened as there should be enough data onboard. These systems are essentially in training mode and new scenarios will need to be accounted for. I am curious as to why the driver didn't react. I wonder if the system keeps track of the driver as well as I would imagine it has to be mind numbing to sit behind a wheel for hours on end and not do anything... So in this situation, how attentive and alert was really the driver who is supposed to be the fail safe mechanism.
  - 11011111 9y ago
    There's video from inside too: https://t.co/2dVP72TziQ https://t.co/2dVP72TziQ
coding123 9y ago
I think part of the problem is that almost all of the news articles have painted a picture of the fault being the biker. And there seems to be no one defending her and its ridiculous that the news articles are already one-sided here considering that this is a brand-spanking new type of thing that has happened on this planet. That being said, I'm totally open to this being the fault of either Uber or the woman, but there are too many questions in my head that suggest it was the fault of the woman. Are we saying that at this point we're going to let the initial police statement win because they are "experts" at driving. Are they also expects at the software in SDVs? I think at this point we shouldn't assume either story - but at the same time we can't let either Uber, the police, governments cover this story up for the sake of money and politics. I think there are some pretty massive implications that should come from this - even if a human driver may have very well killed this person too (which I don't personally believe) don't we need to take a minute and ask a few questions about why the vehicle reportedly didn't even slow down after the hit? Why the dent is on the RIGHT hand side of the car (.2 seconds seems false)? Would a human that was driving slowed a lot earlier - was the pedestrian/biker expecting the car to slow because she clearly had a hand signal up - seeing a fake driver in the car? There are too many questions and I hope that this specific story is treated with the utmost careful consideration. I for one can't seem to let it go in my head. Someone died and it very well could have been because of our collective ego that we can accomplish this (SDVs) at this point in our history. We'll never hear from this woman again.

paul7986 9y ago

Uber is damaged goods! What's next their going to kill a bunch of kids trying to help their blind friend out of the street? I mean the headlines this company writes!

jaclaz 9y ago

As a side note, I find - as always - this part disturbing: >The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa County Superior Court records. He served time in prison for armed robbery more than 15 years ago, what kind of relevance would have this? Presumably he has a valid driving license issued by the State, and was not under the effect of alcohol or drugs. Having committed armed robbery has seemingly no connection (I mean it isn't like he was condemned for having killed someone while driving a car or something like that), and even if that was the case some State must have issued (or renewed) his driving license, meaning that he was legally authorized to drive the car.

lancepioch 9y ago
In the US, once you commit a crime, it'll follow you for the rest of your life, even after you paid your time and money.
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >In the US, once you commit a crime, it'll follow you for the rest of your life, even after you paid your time and money. I know, and understand how this (right or wrong as it might be[1]) could be of use for the police or for the judiciary system, what I am highlighting is just how gratuitious it is on a piece of news. [1] this is a (lesser known) writing by G.K Chesterton: "The perpetuation of punishment" (page 504 of "On Lying in Bed and Other Essays") circa 1907 https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504 https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504
adrianmonk 9y ago
I imagine they're trying to imply that someone who was convicted of a serious crime could still be an unreliable, irresponsible, or untrustworthy person. It's another question whether it's fair to assume that. I don't think it is, though personally I think it's reasonable to take the information into account as long as you restrain yourself from jumping to any conclusions.
- 9y ago

stillsut 9y ago

Was the car electric? I've had a close call with a silent electric car which would have been my fault. The scenario goes like this: I'm saying goodbye to Joe and about to cross the street and notice there is no traffic around. I realize as I'm about to leave Joe, I forgot to mention something, so I turn back to him and say "By the way, blah blah", and with that, I then step off the curb onto the street without checking for oncoming traffic again, probably thinking about some chore I have to get done when I get home. If I heard cars, I would instinctually check again, but the silent electric mode does not allow for this. I'd be interested in any studies about this: how much more often do pedestrian-at-fault collisions occur in silent electric mode?

deleted 9y ago

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wonton2 9y ago

I cannot understand how this could be the womans fault? Is it because of the rules of jaywalking in USA? Where I am from it is always considered the drivers fault, even if a pedestrian literally throws themselves in front of the car. Simply because the car can kill a pedestrian and not the other way around. The way I see it the uber vehicle should have slowed down to a speed at which it would have been able to react to these kind of abrupt motions. This should be cracked down hard on, not making it illegal for self driving car but the fine should be high. I dont like the thought of a self deiving car company becoming «too big to fail» and getting excused for killing pedestrians that dont understand how self driving cars work.