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From my perspective, the first question should be, "Given the same circumstances, would a human driver have performed better?". After viewing the video of the

From my perspective, the first question should be, "Given the same circumstances, would a human driver have performed better?". After viewing the video of the incident, I strongly believe that human driver would NOT have done better. Therefore, I believe that any attempt to blame or spread mistrust in these technologies because of this incident is (at best) misguided and (at worst) alarmist.

iancarroll 9y ago
Regardless of whether or not a human driver could have done it, the vehicle had a pretty critical sensor onboard that should have been able to see the pedestrian. It’s important to figure out how this collision managed to happen.
hcknwscommenter 9y ago
You are being manipulated. Your strong belief is based on a hugely misleading video. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Nighttime dashcam videos typically do a very poor job of representing what a scene looks like to the human eyes. Here is a phone camera video of the same stretch of road as the accident took place on, at night: https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=26 https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=26 From this you can see how good the visibility is. We know that the visibility on this stretch of road was pretty good for nighttime driving. We know that the pedestrian that got hit had crossed an entire (empty) lane of traffic before entering the Uber vehicle's lane. I would say that any competent driver who was paying attention and who was driving a car with working headlights (or perhaps even without) would have spotted the pedestrian well in advance and been able to avoid the collision fairly easily. The fact that the Uber vehicle did not do so despite having an abundance of opportunity and despite having not only visible light data but also lidar and radar is almost certainly a massive failure on its part. Almost certainly this is due to a failure to integrate sensor data properly or to fail to categorize a pedestrian correctly. I have no faith that the local PD will do a good job here, but I do have faith that the NTSB will be exquisitely thorough, and I would bet hard-earned dollars that they are going to tear Uber's self-driving technology up one side and down the other.
chrismcb 9y ago
The entire point if self driving cars is they are supposed to be better than humans. So the first question should NOT be if a human could do it better. Of course in this situation a human probably could have done better. The real question here is why we they allowed to test an unproven car on the unsuspecting population?

iancarroll 9y ago

Regardless of whether or not a human driver could have done it, the vehicle had a pretty critical sensor onboard that should have been able to see the pedestrian. It’s important to figure out how this collision managed to happen.

hcknwscommenter 9y ago

You are being manipulated. Your strong belief is based on a hugely misleading video. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Nighttime dashcam videos typically do a very poor job of representing what a scene looks like to the human eyes. Here is a phone camera video of the same stretch of road as the accident took place on, at night: https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=26 https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=26 From this you can see how good the visibility is. We know that the visibility on this stretch of road was pretty good for nighttime driving. We know that the pedestrian that got hit had crossed an entire (empty) lane of traffic before entering the Uber vehicle's lane. I would say that any competent driver who was paying attention and who was driving a car with working headlights (or perhaps even without) would have spotted the pedestrian well in advance and been able to avoid the collision fairly easily. The fact that the Uber vehicle did not do so despite having an abundance of opportunity and despite having not only visible light data but also lidar and radar is almost certainly a massive failure on its part. Almost certainly this is due to a failure to integrate sensor data properly or to fail to categorize a pedestrian correctly. I have no faith that the local PD will do a good job here, but I do have faith that the NTSB will be exquisitely thorough, and I would bet hard-earned dollars that they are going to tear Uber's self-driving technology up one side and down the other.

chrismcb 9y ago

The entire point if self driving cars is they are supposed to be better than humans. So the first question should NOT be if a human could do it better. Of course in this situation a human probably could have done better. The real question here is why we they allowed to test an unproven car on the unsuspecting population?