29 ms·

Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck Pedestrian Wasn’t Set to Stop in an Emergency

431 points by jeffreyrogers 8y ago

sarreph 8y ago
Does anyone have a non-paywalled link? Thanks :)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- justin66 8y ago
  WSJ is blocking me 100% of the time, no matter how I get in, perhaps because of ad-blocking or something. Anyhow: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-crash/ntsb-uber-self-driving-car-failed-to-recognize-pedestrian-brake-idUSKCN1IP26K https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-crash/ntsb-uber-self...
- madcow2011 8y ago
  Incognito mode used to work, but it seems they patched that. And web.archive is blocked for me at work, unfortunately.
- ilarum 8y ago
  If you are okay with going via Facebook, you can replace the domain name with fullwsj.com instead of wsj.com to bypass the WSJ paywall.
- aeorgnoieang 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm of two minds of the usefulness of sharing links to things that a significant proportion of people might not be able to access. This is actually a good use-case for that pay-per-article site/app (but I can't remember its name off the top of my head). Unfortunately, I don't know how easily I could find the article in it. I emailed them about that and they told me they were working on integrating with publisher sites; maybe they should look into integrating with aggregator sites instead.
  - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    [Blendle](https://blendle.com https://blendle.com) was the site of which I was thinking.
    - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
      Here's my Blendle link for the article (which costs $0.49): https://blendle.com/i/wsj-com/uber-self-driving-car-that-struck-killed-pedestrian-wasnt-set-to-stop-in-an-emergency/bnl-wsj-20180524-SB11988325855978843674704584244083984615954?sharer=eyJ2ZXJzaW9uIjoiMSIsInVpZCI6Imtlbm55ZXZpdHQiLCJpdGVtX2lkIjoiYm5sLXdzai0yMDE4MDUyNC1TQjExOTg4MzI1ODU1OTc4ODQzNjc0NzA0NTg0MjQ0MDgzOTg0NjE1OTU0In0%3D https://blendle.com/i/wsj-com/uber-self-driving-car-that-str...
  - Bud 8y ago
    WSJ links also open just fine if you simply right-click them and open them in a private or "incognito" window.
    - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
      Others have stated that that's not true for them.
- OnACoffeeBreak 8y ago
  Top link from the Google search works for me: https://www.google.com/search?q=Uber+Self-Driving+Car+That+Struck%2C+Killed+Pedestrian+Wasn%E2%80%99t+Set+to+Stop+in+an+Emergency https://www.google.com/search?q=Uber+Self-Driving+Car+That+S...
- oftenwrong 8y ago
  I recommend reading the NTSB press release: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.as...
- NelsonMinar 8y ago
  https://archive.is/vNxkI https://archive.is/vNxkI
- wffurr 8y ago
  Can we change the link to either the direct link to the report or a non-paywall report like the one on Ars Technica? There's nothing special about the WSJ coverage of this, other than it was the one that got voted onto the front page. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-disabled-by-ubers-self-driving-software-ntsb-says/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-d...
moonbug 8y ago
Notwithstanding a click-baiting take from the headline writer, why on earth would that be a configurable option?
- josecastillo 8y ago
  I'm not sure the title is click-baiting; the reality sounds exactly as dire as the headline. > The agency, which investigates deadly transit accidents, said Uber’s self-driving system determined the need to emergency-brake the car 1.3 seconds before the deadly impact. The NTSB report said that, according to Uber, automatic emergency braking isn’t enabled in order to “reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior” and that the system also isn’t designed to alert the operator in case of an emergency.
JorgeGT 8y ago
Direct link to NTSB preliminary report: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... According to data obtained from the self-driving system, the system first registered radar and LIDAR observations of the pedestrian about 6 seconds before impact, when the vehicle was traveling at 43 mph. As the vehicle and pedestrian paths converged, the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path. At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2). 2 According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.
- bytematic 8y ago
  That makes no sense
  - 762236 8y ago
    I suspect that Uber was optimizing for the common case, which is normal traffic conditions, and didn't want their emergency braking accidentally firing during normal driving causing rear endings. So the question becomes why couldn't they get emergency braking solved before driving on the road? Maybe that requires collecting good data first, for training the system?
    - mannykannot 8y ago
      You don't make things safe by optimizing for the common case, and "it can't be safe until after we have tested it on the road" is not a valid reason to allow testing of an unsafe vehicle on public roads.
    - namibj 8y ago
      Considering that 1) you are supposed to keep sufficient distance to break even if the vehicle/generic object in front of you suddenly freezes in space, e.g. a massive wall flush with the rear end of the vehicle in front of you suddenly appears, and 2) the only things that could conceivably rear end an emergency breaking Uber/Volvo would be bikes and other >=4 wheel vehicles (cars/trucks/etc.), which either drive carefully anyway ((non-)motorized bikes), or have a low probability of human damage (cars/trucks), false positives should be preferred to false negatives by somewhere between 5:1 and 1000:1. The latter only if the following vehicles are civilized enough to hold the distance. The car could figure this in, and computer probabilities for what damage an emergency maneuver would cause, which means that it'd break for a stray cat if it's otherwise alone on the road and the surface is dry. But it won't break for a wolf if it's tailgated by a truck, but potentially even accelerate, to make up for the loss of momentum (but light the rear break lights, to stop as soon as it registers the truck to slow down).
pavlov 8y ago
What's the point of this emergency braking system if it can't take action and can't alert the driver? Maybe it reports so many false positives that Uber turned those off and just collects the data to improve the algorithm?
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  I could be totally wrong, but I thought I read the emergency braking function was Volvo’s, and built into the base vehicle. Uber had disabled because they were testing their own software.
  - ericye16 8y ago
    That's not how I interpreted it. The report calls Volvo's system "advanced driver assistance functions" and "automatic emergency braking." When the report refers to "self driving systems" or "emergency braking maneuvers", they are talking about Uber's system.
  - JorgeGT 8y ago
    They disabled both the Volvo system and Uber's own system ability to trigger "emergency braking".
  - vatueil 8y ago
    The NTSB report mentions the standard automatic emergency braking features from Volvo: > The vehicle was factory equipped with several advanced driver assistance functions by Volvo Cars, the original manufacturer. The systems included a collision avoidance function with automatic emergency braking, known as City Safety, as well as functions for detecting driver alertness and road sign information. All these Volvo functions are disabled when the test vehicle is operated in computer control but are operational when the vehicle is operated in manual control. However, that appears to be separate from emergency braking under Uber's self-driving system: > At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2).[2] According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator. > [2]: In Uber’s self-driving system, an emergency brake maneuver refers to a deceleration greater than 6.5 meters per second squared (m/s^2). It sounds like Uber didn't trust their own self-driving system enough to allow it to initiate sudden crash stops. Too many false positives, I guess? Of course, simply disabling the function leads to other obvious problems, as shown.
joncrane 8y ago
Uber has the ability to learn from it's mistakes, I hope.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Doesn’t seem it. Read any article about Uber. The LAST thing they seem to be concerned with is ride sharing. While everyone else is trying to be the Uber of X... Uber doesn’t even want to be Uber. Their latest thing is taking funding from the US Military for some project iirc. This “technology” company has no idea what it really is.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    Their core business is losing money hand over fist, and it's not clear the economics will ever work out. I think they were floundering -- until the new CEO took over. Their approach appears to now be building an Expedia for local travel which includes ridesharing, JUMP bikes and Getaround. These side projects (self-driving, logistics, etc) I believe are the holdovers of the earlier era before they knew what they were doing. They always struck me as more of as a way of distracting everyone else until they did.
  - Itaxpica 8y ago
    It makes sense from a business perspective; their current core competency is mainly "blazing through VC money at an astounding rate". Uber's only shot at approaching any kind of profitability is from self-driving technology advancing to a point where they can cut out their biggest costs, namely, people.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mindfulplay 8y ago
  A "mistake" might have been "we fucked up the concept of a self-driving car completely, sorry about that, we will pull our fleet off completely before we kill anyone". This is not a mistake. This is straight up manslaughter.
- 8y ago
TheForumTroll 8y ago
Let me get this straight: The driver has to look down on a console to see warnings like this AND drive the car? This and that the emergency system was off tells me that the accident was 100 % the fault of Uber even if the "driver" were dancing in the backseat.
mLuby 8y ago
"Struck" is a strange euphemism for "killed". :(
- nkrisc 8y ago
  I agree, but in this context "struck" is what happened. "Killed" was the consequence in this case but not necessarily a guaranteed one (although at the speeds involved in this particular case, it was almost certainly guaranteed).
  - mLuby 8y ago
    Pedantically true, but in this case (and most) the result is more newsworthy than the action. See "person pulls trigger many times in school".
    - danso 8y ago
      The event of interest is the vehicle striking/killing someone. Pulling the trigger is not that in the context of a shooting, and "pulling the trigger" is not really a euphemism for shooting and killing someone with a firearm.
      - solarkraft 8y ago
        "person shoots at people in school" still doesn't convey them killing anyone when the effect is a newsworthy subject (though maybe not that much in the US).
    - nkrisc 8y ago
      Yes, it was pedantic. I didn't want it to be but I won't pretend it wasn't. The point I was trying to make is that I believe the noteworthy event is that a self-driving car struck a person, without even attempting to avoid it. That she was killed is a tragic twist to the story. I believe that even if she wasn't killed it would still be a noteworthy event because, again, the car did not attempt to avoid it. I do not at all intend to diminish the fact that Uber killed someone.
- 8y ago
sschueller 8y ago
- 70mph to 0 around 184 ft. [1] - 43mph = 63.066667 Feet per Second - At 6 seconds the car was 378 ft. away. [1] http://media.caranddriver.com/files/2016-volvo-xc90-t6-awd-inscriptioncomplete-specs-and-performance-data-2016-volvo-xc90-t6-awd-inscription-september-2015-road-test.pdf http://media.caranddriver.com/files/2016-volvo-xc90-t6-awd-i...
- IkmoIkmo 8y ago
  The detection at 6 seconds was just of an object though, not an object moving in to the car's path. You couldn't drive a car if you had to constantly break because objects (such as people standing by the road) were being detected. It's not clear at what point the car ascertained a collision would occur between detection 6s before and the determination that emergency breaking was necessary 1.3 seconds before. Was there any other determination in between, and when? What I'd like to see is Uber's modelling of the woman's trajectory and the likeliness of collision across the 6 second window. That's completely left unsaid. The average braking distance of a car is about 24m at 40mph, which is approximately the distance between the woman and the car at 1.3 seconds out. So perhaps the 1.3s figure wasn't the first moment the car determined a brake was necessary, but rather, the last moment the car could have braked to prevent a substantial collision. I want to know the first moment the car determined a brake was necessary at all. It's likely not 6s, but it's also likely not 1.3 seconds. It seems this was entirely preventable, or at least the collision impact could have been mitigated severely, had there been a braking and/or warning system in place. Shutting off brakes on literally the only driving agent tasked with full attention is inexcusable. But that's what they did. To me that's murder. They used to have two passengers, one for tagging circumstantial data, the other to override the car when necessary and keep eyes on the road at all times. Either keep that and shut off emergency brakes from the car and put a warning system in place for the 'driver'. Or do not shut off emergency brakes. Instead they put a single person in the car, tasked to do things that kept her eyes off the road half of the time, and shut off brakes for the AI. That's insane.
  - bo1024 8y ago
    > You couldn't drive a car if you had to constantly break [sic] because objects (such as people standing by the road) were being detected. Yes, you could -- that's how I drive. Do you not? If I detect a mobile object that might be moving into my path, I slow down to give myself time to react until I am reasonably certain of safety. When doing so I take into account my situation-specific knowledge -- have I made eye contact with the pedestrian and do they know I'm coming? Is the dog on a leash and is the owner being attentive? Does the cyclist seem aware of my presence? I would expect no less from anyone licensed to drive a car, be they human or software.
rossdavidh 8y ago
So, can't read the article but I did read the ntsb report directly. Basically, it sounds like Uber was not ready, but reassured themselves with "but there's a human driver who can intervene". The fact is, humans are very bad at remaining vigilant for long periods of doing nothing, then needing to intervene at a moments notice. Computers are good at that (and Volvo's built-in safety systems might have worked if Uber had not disabled them), but humans are bad at it. Volvo has it right: human driver, computer backup. Uber's idea of a human acting as a last-second backup to a computer gets the relative strengths and weaknesses of each exactly wrong.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Worse than just assuming a human driver could intervene: they put a human in the car and then overloaded that human with additional tasks.
  - sgnelson 8y ago
    Worse, they knew they needed two people and previously had two individuals, but then felt that was unnecessary and went to only one person per vehicle.
sly010 8y ago
Does this mean the technology is so early that they are struggling to program it to do the right thing in normal conditions, let alone to prevent an accident?
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  It sure suggests the possibility of, "that thing keeps braking when we don't want it to, turn it off". When, you know, human drivers manage to do quite fine with it on. If you have to disable the built-in safety features of the Volvo to get your driving software to work, then you're not ready to do a road test.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    One wild guess would be their equipment interfering. Still seems legendarily stupid to just disable the possible free backup to your totally inadequate system, however.
  - uxp100 8y ago
    I don't think that is right. My understanding is that they didn't HAVE to turn the built-in safety features of the Volvo off to make it work, but instead they had to in order to test their equivalent safety feature. If they have a feature that exactly mimics Volvo's, it can't be tested while Volvo's is active (or at least that is the idea, I think it probably could be tested in some way.) But then they turned their own safety feature off, because it failed to be as good as Volvo's. And then did not turn Volvo's feature back on.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      You either works with higher error margins than the Volvo software (what should be the case, since yours is being tested), or you log your software decisions and compare with the Volvo's one after the fact.
      - uxp100 8y ago
jerf 8y ago
"According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior." If you can't give your "self-driving software" full access to the brakes because it becomes an "erratic driver" when you do that, you do not have self-driving software. You just have some software that is controlling a car that you know is an inadequate driver. If the self-driving software is not fully capable of replacing the driver in the car you have placed it in, as shipped except for the modifications necessary to be driven by software, you do not have a safe driving system.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  So, let the two software systems fight with each other during emergencies and hope it somehow results in something positive? That sounds like a terrible idea.
  - JorgeGT 8y ago
    On the contrary: the Volvo system is designed not to fight but to override any other input, including the human driver. In any other Volvo car currently on the road that detects an obstacle, the Volvo system will override the driver and bring the car to a stop even if the driver insists in hitting the obstacle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKoFalJiazQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKoFalJiazQ Independently-working override-capable systems are the base of engineering redundancy safety. See airborne collision avoidance systems (ACAS), which will automatically and forcefully steer an aircraft to avoid a collision if necessary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_collision_avoidance_system?oldformat=true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_collision_avoidance_s...
    - jjoonathan 8y ago
      If the Uber engineers shared your confidence that it would play out that way, they would not have disabled it. Redundant safety systems are a great idea, evidently Uber needed more of them, and integrating with the Volvo system might have been a reasonable option. It's silly to suggest that the integration would necessarily have been trivial, though. That's what I'm objecting to.
kbos87 8y ago
Someone should be facing manslaughter charges here.
- zerostar07 8y ago
  It's gonna be a case of distributed responsibility
antihero 8y ago
Why on earth would they mention that someone's been on weed and meth when they are the victim of a car not stopping?
- danso 8y ago
  Possibly as an explanation for why the victim was slow to react or had decided to cross at that particular time.
- pjc50 8y ago
  To imply that it's their fault. That's how press smearing works.
  - artursapek 8y ago
    I think drugs, especially drugs like meth, are usually an important detail in vehicle collision investigations.
    - solarkraft 8y ago
      When it doesn't have to do with anyone driving? Yeah, maybe the victim was wrong to go there, but the car should and could have stopped in time.
      - artursapek 8y ago
        Why does walking/biking differ from driving if the two collided in the road? Not saying Uber couldn't have prevented this, just explaining why the media mentions the detected drug use...
- jbeckham 8y ago
  The NTSB always includes whether drugs or alcohol potentially played any role in an accident and puts it in their reports for all parties. This isn't a smear tactic, just standard practice because they are trying to determine all contributing factors.
mindfulplay 8y ago
This is what happens when software companies that have traditionally had an incentive to "fail fast, fail often" mentality ship something in the physical world. Especially something as powerful as a ton of steel moving like a missle on our roads. Absolutely stunningly stupid that there are teams that built this and felt incentivized to put this on our roads without any concerns or safety mechanism. Shameful. Legally, it will be amazing in the future to hold these people - the engineers, product managers, the PR people and the CEO (ex and current) all accountable. We did for something far less serious with VW...
- castratikron 8y ago
  I think most people here can relate to being an engineer who is held to other people's unrealistic expectations. Problems happen when there is not a critical mass of individuals to push back on those requirements. It's possible that this project is Uber's last ditch effort at existing, in which case there would be enormous pressure on everyone to make self-driving work at any cost. It was a design decision to disable the car's stock automatic braking feature, for example. It's not that they're stupid, it's that they're putting their morals on the shelf in order to get this to work. At some point you need to have a regulatory body in place that sets standard for safety, otherwise people are going to die.
  - admax88q 8y ago
    > It's possible that this project is Uber's last ditch effort at existing, in which case there would be enormous pressure on everyone to make self-driving work at any cost. If you're an engineer at Uber and you're facing this kind of pressure that's causing you to take safety shortcuts, walk away. Go work somewhere else. Real engineers are responsible for their decisions they can't just defer personal responsibility to management. If you build a bridge you know is unsafe because the company you work for will go under if it doesn't get built, it's still your fault when the bridge fails and kills people. Walk away.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  I have to blame management in this regard. There must have certainly been engineers that spoke up about this problem who may be silenced by NDA's (or other means), even if they did resign in protest. Stopping in time to not run over an unexpected pedestrian crossing the road would be item number one on any sensible person's agenda. Uber needs to be liquidated.
matt-attack 8y ago
> the operator said she had been monitoring the self-driving system interface I guarantee that driver was on her phone. Just watch.
- jacksmith21006 8y ago
  Yes they were. You can not be kind of driving. Google has indicated this several times. Either the car can drive itself or not. This half way is dangerous.
bb101 8y ago
Nice little FUD by WSJ in their subheadline: "Pedestrian tested positive for methamphetamine and marijuana" -- not referred to again in the article, moreover I have trouble seeing the relevance to the accident.
- Zak 8y ago
  It is mentioned again at the end of the article. It's relevant to the accident because it provides an explanation for the pedestrian crossing the road outside a crosswalk without adequately checking for traffic.
  - admax88q 8y ago
    Yeah only druggies J-walk.
    - filoleg 8y ago
      Not at all, sober people jaywalk too. They just tend to check their surroundings a bit better than their high counterparts for any cars coming to potentially hit them.
      - IncRnd 8y ago
        Nice try, but that doesn't apply to this specific case, where the car could and should have stopped but didn't.
        Zak 8y ago
        The car should have stopped automatically, but that system was disabled. The pedestrian shouldn't have been there, but made a bad decision. The pedestrian should have been more aware of her surroundings, but was impaired or not paying attention. The safety driver should have been paying more attention to the road, but was also monitoring system displays. This crash didn't have a single cause. Any one of those factors being handled correctly would have prevented it.
fixermark 8y ago
I'm irritated at myself for swallowing Uber's initial line on this (and the interpretation of the officers who reviewed the cam footage provided by Uber) without sufficient critique. This accident should have been avoided. No excuses.
- remote_phone 8y ago
  Your bias is showing. Uber didn’t release anything. They left the entire narrative to the police and the NTSB.
- bo1024 8y ago
  The sensors observed the pedestrian 6 seconds before impact! That's more than enough time to come to a complete stop. That's enough time to play a bell that alerts the driver and for the driver to manually react, press the brakes, and come to a complete stop. And this was a pretty easily preventable scenario (which just makes it more tragic of course). Software is nowhere near ready to drive cars on real roads.
  - andygates 8y ago
    This software, and these development processes. The baby may not need to be thrown out with Uber's crappy bathwater.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    I'd caution at avoidance of over-extrapolation. UBER software is nowhere near ready to drive cars on real roads. There are multiple competitors in this space (Waymo and Argo immediately come to mind); they don't generally have Uber's reputation of "move fast and break things" or of "cut human costs as soon as feasible." In my initial assessment, I was reasoning the other direction---from practices I was familiar with from stories of those companies to Uber---and falsely assumed Uber was behaving more responsibly than they were. This Uber tragedy doesn't significanly update my prior assumptions about its competitors.
    - bo1024 8y ago
podiki 8y ago
Coverage on Ars: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-disabled-by-ubers-self-driving-software-ntsb-says/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-d...
lbriner 8y ago
Isn't the problem here much like the presumed cause for Air France 447 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447)? The pilots are so used to automatic operation that happens 99.9% of the time that they are not prepared for the random time when it does. A bit like someone guarding a bank for 20 years and then gets robbed and can't react in time because they mind has taught them that nothing ever happens.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Well, I'd say that's an issue, but not the only one.
  - lbriner 8y ago
    I was thinking that the assumption in the design is that the operator can always handle the hard/fringe cases but the reality is that due to the AF447 principle (whatever it's called), this is precisely what the operator cannot do reliably.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      Yeah, I agree, but it seems that they also had no alert and were asking the operator to simultaneously record data, leading to them not even looking at the road at the time the crash happened.
- ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
  I'd like to throw out that one of the pilots of that flight was pulling up during a stall warning. I don't think it's really similar to this accident, since it'd kind of be like the driver realizing they have to break, but gassing it instead. Also interesting is that in a Boeing, this likely would have never happened. In an Airbus control inputs are averaged together, so the captain had no idea his copilot was pulling back during a stall warning. In a Boeing, the control gear provides feedback (physically moves) to the pilots, so they would have been able to realize they were giving opposite inputs. Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-ha... Excerpt below: 02:13:40 (Robert) Remonte... remonte... remonte... remonte... Climb... climb... climb... climb... 02:13:40 (Bonin) Mais je suis à fond à cabrer depuis tout à l'heure! But I've had the stick back the whole time! At last, Bonin tells the others the crucial fact whose import he has so grievously failed to understand himself. 02:13:42 (Captain) Non, non, non... Ne remonte pas... non, non. No, no, no... Don't climb... no, no.
gepoch 8y ago
A good podcast on the risks of semi-automation: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...
gok 8y ago
Yikes, it had not occurred to me that even Uber would ignore their automation system's pleas to emergency brake because it was making their cars look too jumpy.
jacksmith21006 8y ago
Uber should bail on doing their own and work a deal with Waymo.
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  I have this weird hunch that those two companies' self-driving car divisions may not be huge fans of each other these days.
  - forgot-my-pw 8y ago
    It's possible. The lawsuit is settled and Waymo actually owns like 1% of Uber. In the past, Google also invested on Uber.
    - jacksmith21006 8y ago
      Google owns more like 7% or maybe 8% of Uber. They already owned a piece before the lawsuit. Think they also own a piece of Lyft.
perl4ever 8y ago
Two semi-automated types of cars are out there: 1. Ones where a human pilots them most of the time, but a computer steps in in emergencies. 2. Ones where a computer pilots them most of the time, but a human steps in in emergencies (hopefully). For some reason I don't understand, people treat (2) as an evolution of (1). But it is the inverse.
- forgot-my-pw 8y ago
  What would be the point of #2? Humans have bad reaction time at emergencies most the time.
  - JackCh 8y ago
    Presumably the point of #2 is that it's easier than the implied #3 ("The computer always drives") which is their as-of-yet unrealized goal. Of course deploying #2 into the wild may prove to be ethically unjustifiable. Being easier than the implied #3 is a poor excuse.
yalogin 8y ago
Now I understand why Uber started their advertising campaign. They know this will come out and show the world how irresponsible they are, and they wanted to get in front of that.
tareqak 8y ago
Yet another reason in favour of professional engineers being required to design and implement safety-critical features using software: because "move fast, and break things" becomes unacceptable when those "things" are the lives of living, breathing people.
knodi 8y ago
Why not alert to the driver???? BMW has collision detection system that makes a loud beep when it determines an imminent collision. The beep alerts the driver regardless of false positives or false negatives. Its a simple solution which many cars have had for over 10 years. Why Uber engineers chose to not alert the driver is beyond me.
ggg9990 8y ago
The one thing I spent years teaching my wife is that when there’s anything untoward on the highway, JUST STOP. I’ve avoided at least two major accidents by stopping instead of swerving — in a few feet you can get your speed down to levels where a crash won’t be fatal or severely injurious. And even if you get rear ended by stopping short, it’s usually at a much lower speed. All autonomous cars should just STOP when something is not right.
- cmurf 8y ago
  Or just slow down a lot. The fatality is a way lower at 18mph than it is at 43mph. https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowledge/speed/speed_is_a_central_issue_in_road_safety/speed_and_the_injury_risk_for_different_speed_levels_en https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowle...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
booleandilemma 8y ago
Future engineers growing up today will read about this incident alongside the Therac-25 and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
newnewpdro 8y ago
Criminally negligent.
cmurf 8y ago
a. the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path All of those things are bad things to hit, why not slow down? b. 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed Too late for either a human or computer. c. operator is responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages There is superseding responsibility to drive the car safely. Uber's policy sets up the test driver for failure, and puts people's lives at risk. d. emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control The pedestrian had no chance. The very feature that should make the car safer was disabled, but also the judgement was poor and too late, and Uber policy sabotaged the car driver judgement as the exclusive (not merely primary) safety mechanism by distracting them with data that in most every way would have been more diverting than talking on a cell phone or fiddling with the radio. I hope the family got a lot of money in the settlement.
reacharavindh 8y ago
The number of occurrences of "break" in place of "brake" in this discussion is very disconcerting.
- meritt 8y ago
  Someone at Uber probably recently committed: if (personDetected()) - break(); + brake();
  - ht85 8y ago
    Maybe it's written like a game engine for (;;) { if (detect_obstacle()) break; move_forward(); }
blhack 8y ago
Isn't the person actually driving the car supposed to be driving the car? I've ridden in these self driving Ubers. When I rode in one, the driver drove almost the entire time, except on a few straight stretches of road. They always had their hands ready to grab the wheel, were always attending to what was happening etc. It seems like the marketing and the engineering got crossed here. Marketing says these were self driving, but anybody who rode in them knew they weren't. They were supposed to be getting driven by real drivers. From the report, it sounds like the drivers were listening to the marketing instead of the engineering team (who presumably would have told them that the system doesn't brake on its own). It sounds like the real driver wasn't driving as they were supposed to be. From the video, it looked like they were reading something on their phone[1] instead of driving the car. Compare this to a pilot flying in an autopilot. They don't shut their radios off and stop paying attention to the flight, they still fly the airplane and remain attentive to what is happening with it. That's what this driver should have been doing, not looking at their phone. It frustrates me that this level of negligence could set self driving tech, something that will save countless lives, back. This was the Chernobyl moment for self driving tech. It's safer than alternatives, but now this is all people are associating it with. [1]:the driver states that they were interacting with the Uber self driving system, not their phone.
- ummonk 8y ago
  >It's safer than alternatives, but now this is all people are associating it with. Unlike for nuclear power, this is currently nowhere near true for self-driving tech.
- Jasper_ 8y ago
  > That's what this driver should have been doing, not looking at their phone. According to the NSTB report, they were looking at a separate diagnostic panel and flagging messages which Uber asked them to do as part of self-driving training duties. > It's safer than alternatives The system also decided it should have applied the emergency brakes, but then didn't. I don't think this system is safer than alternatives.
- gkya 8y ago
  > It frustrates me that this level of negligence could set self driving tech, something that will save countless lives, back. This was the Chernobyl moment for self driving tech. It's safer than alternatives, but now this is all people are associating it with. If it can not be done securely at scale, it better be set back, especially on public roads. I am deeply skeptical of how safe and realistic self-driving vehicles are. Even with such less amount of cars dubbed autonomous on the roads, we've seen up until now a great multitude of fatal accidents or near misses already. This putting internet and AI in everything reminds me of a recent Vsauce video I saw which shows radium chocolate bars and underwear: a new fascinating thing that in future will probably prove more harmful than it is useful, because of how we overestimate it's practical utility.
billsmithaustin 8y ago
For a government-authored report, that was very readable.
IncRnd 8y ago
Article from 1996 about Space Shuttle software: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors. Also from the article: “If the software isn’t perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die."
jonbarker 8y ago
This entire debate reminds me of this classic Milton Friedman video (I think the key difference with Uber, and where they are likely to get in trouble, is that they never made any estimate about how many lives their car experiment would cost that I am aware of): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYW5I96h-9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYW5I96h-9w
aphextron 8y ago
Someone from Uber needs to go to jail over this. That woman's death was the result of pure criminal negligence.
lisper 8y ago
This one is a complete no-brainer: At the first hint of an anomaly, the AI should have 1) alerted the driver and 2) started to gradually slow down. If that strategy produces too many false positives, it's time to go back to the drawing board. The right answer in that case is absolutely NOT to say, "Ah, just fuck it" and deploy the system in the field.
mnm1 8y ago
> According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator. Wow. So the vehicle and these tests were run knowing full well that an accident like this would not be preventable. This isn't manslaughter, this is murder. Uber was letting its car drive without any safety systems, without even an alert driver behind the wheel because her job was to monitor the panel. Fuck me. Wow. They should never be allowed to operate another autonomous vehicle again. The ceo should go to fucking jail. Fucking murderers.
FartyMcFarter 8y ago
Does anyone else find these two quotes a bit hard to stomach? > Although toxicological specimens were not collected from the vehicle operator, responding officers from the Tempe Police Department stated that the vehicle operator showed no signs of impairment at the time of the crash. > Toxicology test results for the pedestrian were positive for methamphetamine and marijuana. So they tested the victim for drugs but not the Uber employee in the car?? Other than that, Uber's so-called "self-driving" system sounds like crap and should never have been allowed to be used in that state.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- beisner 8y ago
  The test is probably a routine part of an autopsy, whereas it likely wasn’t a routine part of the police response (which use visual and verbal cues to preliminarily assess inebriation).
pasbesoin 8y ago
Perhaps Uber is going to once again "ask for forgiveness". (As in, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.) This time, I don't think they should get it. (Not that I, for one, should have received it, previously.)
jellicle 8y ago
If any non-rich, non-corporate individual had done the following: sent out a vehicle on city streets, driving fast under computer control, which did not have any capability to brake and which did indeed strike and kill someone, I think that non-rich person would certainly be sent to jail for their reckless behavior and also receive very large fines and civil judgments. It wouldn't even be close. The judge would shout at them during sentencing and the papers would cheer. So, let's see what will happen to the Uber personnel involved. By the way, it's insane to be an Uber test driver under these circumstances. They're going to hang you out to dry. Quit.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Move fast and break, nay, kill people. I hope this accident weighs on the people who made these decisions so that they will be more careful in the future. I would hope they would not see it simply as a bug in the system.
Waterluvian 8y ago
It won't load for me. Are they referring this to the Justice department? Someone needs to go to prison.
codedokode 8y ago
That's so irresponsible. So the system cannot apply emergency braking, but why didn't it try at least to decrease the speed? Those cars are not ready for public roads. If your sensors give too many false alarms then you should improve them. Also I think initially there should be a speed limit for self-driving cars. For example, 15-20 mph should be enough for driving in the city and won't cause too much harm in the case of an accident.
Zelphyr 8y ago
Uber is a prime example that the “Move fast; break shit” mentally that Facebook pioneered and the Valley companies so love is now costing lives.
diebir 8y ago
Interestingly, the picture shows that the car seems to have tried to avoid the collision by moving to the right. Of course, every human drivers with experience knows that you pass pedestrians behind, not ahead. The Artificial Intelligence obviously was not smart enough. In other words, as suspected, the self driving cars are a pipe dream. One can't just mix a bunch of statistical woodoo into a neural net and hope it will work. It may work most of the time, but the mistakes would be catastrophic and incredibly stupid.
raven105x 8y ago
Funny, all this contention around technology that simply doesn't exist yet. When automakers market SAE Autonomy L2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification) certified vehicles as "self-driving" in official marketing media, and even more so when their sales reps blatantly lie to customers (both of which should be illegal), they're responsible for lost lives and undermining their companies' image, ethics and financials. There's only one car certified for SAE L3 / "eyes off" and it's the 2018 Audi A8, only up to 60kmph - this is still not self-driving. The primary concern here is false advertising as pervasive as it is blatant.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> Roadway lighting was present. It's worth remembering that the video of the acciedent that Uber made available showed a pitch-black road with very little lighting, something that is not corroborated by the NTSB report. Given that the only comment about visibility in the preliminary report is that "(r)oadway lighting was present" it sounds very likely that Uber deliberately tried to create a misleading impression. >> The forward-facing videos show the pedestrian coming into view and proceeding into the path of the vehicle This is a little less clear-cut but it also seems to cast doubt onto the initial statement by the Tempe police chief, that Uber was not at fault because the pedestrian dashed onto the road suddendly and the crash was basically "unavoidable". [1] ______________ [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe-police-chief-says-early-probe-12765481.php#photo-15257361 https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe...
uberkills 8y ago
All Uber executives should be forced to recreate this scenario as the pedestrians crossing the street, while their test vehicles drive the loop, over and over again until there are no pedestrians killed by their self-driving cars!
selfsteeringcar 8y ago
Even if the emergency braking was disabled, why was there a lack of automatic steering, e.g. to change lanes, to avoid the collision?
tomtimtall 8y ago
So as many pointed out quite early, this isn’t litterally a case of Uber killing people because they cared more about taking I up miles than safety an in effect human lives. They disabled safety measures because they where getting in the way. Hopefully they will get the book thrown at them and then a couple of chairs.

431 points by jeffreyrogers 8y ago

sarreph 8y ago

Does anyone have a non-paywalled link? Thanks :)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
justin66 8y ago
WSJ is blocking me 100% of the time, no matter how I get in, perhaps because of ad-blocking or something. Anyhow: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-crash/ntsb-uber-self-driving-car-failed-to-recognize-pedestrian-brake-idUSKCN1IP26K https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-crash/ntsb-uber-self...
madcow2011 8y ago
Incognito mode used to work, but it seems they patched that. And web.archive is blocked for me at work, unfortunately.
ilarum 8y ago
If you are okay with going via Facebook, you can replace the domain name with fullwsj.com instead of wsj.com to bypass the WSJ paywall.
aeorgnoieang 8y ago
Yeah, I'm of two minds of the usefulness of sharing links to things that a significant proportion of people might not be able to access. This is actually a good use-case for that pay-per-article site/app (but I can't remember its name off the top of my head). Unfortunately, I don't know how easily I could find the article in it. I emailed them about that and they told me they were working on integrating with publisher sites; maybe they should look into integrating with aggregator sites instead.
- aeorgnoieang 8y ago
  [Blendle](https://blendle.com https://blendle.com) was the site of which I was thinking.
  - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    Here's my Blendle link for the article (which costs $0.49): https://blendle.com/i/wsj-com/uber-self-driving-car-that-struck-killed-pedestrian-wasnt-set-to-stop-in-an-emergency/bnl-wsj-20180524-SB11988325855978843674704584244083984615954?sharer=eyJ2ZXJzaW9uIjoiMSIsInVpZCI6Imtlbm55ZXZpdHQiLCJpdGVtX2lkIjoiYm5sLXdzai0yMDE4MDUyNC1TQjExOTg4MzI1ODU1OTc4ODQzNjc0NzA0NTg0MjQ0MDgzOTg0NjE1OTU0In0%3D https://blendle.com/i/wsj-com/uber-self-driving-car-that-str...
- Bud 8y ago
  WSJ links also open just fine if you simply right-click them and open them in a private or "incognito" window.
  - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    Others have stated that that's not true for them.
OnACoffeeBreak 8y ago
Top link from the Google search works for me: https://www.google.com/search?q=Uber+Self-Driving+Car+That+Struck%2C+Killed+Pedestrian+Wasn%E2%80%99t+Set+to+Stop+in+an+Emergency https://www.google.com/search?q=Uber+Self-Driving+Car+That+S...
oftenwrong 8y ago
I recommend reading the NTSB press release: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.as...
NelsonMinar 8y ago
https://archive.is/vNxkI https://archive.is/vNxkI
wffurr 8y ago
Can we change the link to either the direct link to the report or a non-paywall report like the one on Ars Technica? There's nothing special about the WSJ coverage of this, other than it was the one that got voted onto the front page. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-disabled-by-ubers-self-driving-software-ntsb-says/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-d...

moonbug 8y ago

Notwithstanding a click-baiting take from the headline writer, why on earth would that be a configurable option?

josecastillo 8y ago
I'm not sure the title is click-baiting; the reality sounds exactly as dire as the headline. > The agency, which investigates deadly transit accidents, said Uber’s self-driving system determined the need to emergency-brake the car 1.3 seconds before the deadly impact. The NTSB report said that, according to Uber, automatic emergency braking isn’t enabled in order to “reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior” and that the system also isn’t designed to alert the operator in case of an emergency.

JorgeGT 8y ago

Direct link to NTSB preliminary report: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... According to data obtained from the self-driving system, the system first registered radar and LIDAR observations of the pedestrian about 6 seconds before impact, when the vehicle was traveling at 43 mph. As the vehicle and pedestrian paths converged, the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path. At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2). 2 According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.

bytematic 8y ago
That makes no sense
- 762236 8y ago
  I suspect that Uber was optimizing for the common case, which is normal traffic conditions, and didn't want their emergency braking accidentally firing during normal driving causing rear endings. So the question becomes why couldn't they get emergency braking solved before driving on the road? Maybe that requires collecting good data first, for training the system?
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    You don't make things safe by optimizing for the common case, and "it can't be safe until after we have tested it on the road" is not a valid reason to allow testing of an unsafe vehicle on public roads.
  - namibj 8y ago
    Considering that 1) you are supposed to keep sufficient distance to break even if the vehicle/generic object in front of you suddenly freezes in space, e.g. a massive wall flush with the rear end of the vehicle in front of you suddenly appears, and 2) the only things that could conceivably rear end an emergency breaking Uber/Volvo would be bikes and other >=4 wheel vehicles (cars/trucks/etc.), which either drive carefully anyway ((non-)motorized bikes), or have a low probability of human damage (cars/trucks), false positives should be preferred to false negatives by somewhere between 5:1 and 1000:1. The latter only if the following vehicles are civilized enough to hold the distance. The car could figure this in, and computer probabilities for what damage an emergency maneuver would cause, which means that it'd break for a stray cat if it's otherwise alone on the road and the surface is dry. But it won't break for a wolf if it's tailgated by a truck, but potentially even accelerate, to make up for the loss of momentum (but light the rear break lights, to stop as soon as it registers the truck to slow down).

pavlov 8y ago

What's the point of this emergency braking system if it can't take action and can't alert the driver? Maybe it reports so many false positives that Uber turned those off and just collects the data to improve the algorithm?

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
I could be totally wrong, but I thought I read the emergency braking function was Volvo’s, and built into the base vehicle. Uber had disabled because they were testing their own software.
- ericye16 8y ago
  That's not how I interpreted it. The report calls Volvo's system "advanced driver assistance functions" and "automatic emergency braking." When the report refers to "self driving systems" or "emergency braking maneuvers", they are talking about Uber's system.
- JorgeGT 8y ago
  They disabled both the Volvo system and Uber's own system ability to trigger "emergency braking".
- vatueil 8y ago
  The NTSB report mentions the standard automatic emergency braking features from Volvo: > The vehicle was factory equipped with several advanced driver assistance functions by Volvo Cars, the original manufacturer. The systems included a collision avoidance function with automatic emergency braking, known as City Safety, as well as functions for detecting driver alertness and road sign information. All these Volvo functions are disabled when the test vehicle is operated in computer control but are operational when the vehicle is operated in manual control. However, that appears to be separate from emergency braking under Uber's self-driving system: > At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2).[2] According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator. > [2]: In Uber’s self-driving system, an emergency brake maneuver refers to a deceleration greater than 6.5 meters per second squared (m/s^2). It sounds like Uber didn't trust their own self-driving system enough to allow it to initiate sudden crash stops. Too many false positives, I guess? Of course, simply disabling the function leads to other obvious problems, as shown.

joncrane 8y ago

Uber has the ability to learn from it's mistakes, I hope.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
Doesn’t seem it. Read any article about Uber. The LAST thing they seem to be concerned with is ride sharing. While everyone else is trying to be the Uber of X... Uber doesn’t even want to be Uber. Their latest thing is taking funding from the US Military for some project iirc. This “technology” company has no idea what it really is.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  Their core business is losing money hand over fist, and it's not clear the economics will ever work out. I think they were floundering -- until the new CEO took over. Their approach appears to now be building an Expedia for local travel which includes ridesharing, JUMP bikes and Getaround. These side projects (self-driving, logistics, etc) I believe are the holdovers of the earlier era before they knew what they were doing. They always struck me as more of as a way of distracting everyone else until they did.
- Itaxpica 8y ago
  It makes sense from a business perspective; their current core competency is mainly "blazing through VC money at an astounding rate". Uber's only shot at approaching any kind of profitability is from self-driving technology advancing to a point where they can cut out their biggest costs, namely, people.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mindfulplay 8y ago
A "mistake" might have been "we fucked up the concept of a self-driving car completely, sorry about that, we will pull our fleet off completely before we kill anyone". This is not a mistake. This is straight up manslaughter.
8y ago

TheForumTroll 8y ago

Let me get this straight: The driver has to look down on a console to see warnings like this AND drive the car? This and that the emergency system was off tells me that the accident was 100 % the fault of Uber even if the "driver" were dancing in the backseat.

mLuby 8y ago

"Struck" is a strange euphemism for "killed". :(

nkrisc 8y ago
I agree, but in this context "struck" is what happened. "Killed" was the consequence in this case but not necessarily a guaranteed one (although at the speeds involved in this particular case, it was almost certainly guaranteed).
- mLuby 8y ago
  Pedantically true, but in this case (and most) the result is more newsworthy than the action. See "person pulls trigger many times in school".
  - danso 8y ago
    The event of interest is the vehicle striking/killing someone. Pulling the trigger is not that in the context of a shooting, and "pulling the trigger" is not really a euphemism for shooting and killing someone with a firearm.
    - solarkraft 8y ago
      "person shoots at people in school" still doesn't convey them killing anyone when the effect is a newsworthy subject (though maybe not that much in the US).
  - nkrisc 8y ago
    Yes, it was pedantic. I didn't want it to be but I won't pretend it wasn't. The point I was trying to make is that I believe the noteworthy event is that a self-driving car struck a person, without even attempting to avoid it. That she was killed is a tragic twist to the story. I believe that even if she wasn't killed it would still be a noteworthy event because, again, the car did not attempt to avoid it. I do not at all intend to diminish the fact that Uber killed someone.
8y ago

sschueller 8y ago

- 70mph to 0 around 184 ft. [1] - 43mph = 63.066667 Feet per Second - At 6 seconds the car was 378 ft. away. [1] http://media.caranddriver.com/files/2016-volvo-xc90-t6-awd-inscriptioncomplete-specs-and-performance-data-2016-volvo-xc90-t6-awd-inscription-september-2015-road-test.pdf http://media.caranddriver.com/files/2016-volvo-xc90-t6-awd-i...

IkmoIkmo 8y ago
The detection at 6 seconds was just of an object though, not an object moving in to the car's path. You couldn't drive a car if you had to constantly break because objects (such as people standing by the road) were being detected. It's not clear at what point the car ascertained a collision would occur between detection 6s before and the determination that emergency breaking was necessary 1.3 seconds before. Was there any other determination in between, and when? What I'd like to see is Uber's modelling of the woman's trajectory and the likeliness of collision across the 6 second window. That's completely left unsaid. The average braking distance of a car is about 24m at 40mph, which is approximately the distance between the woman and the car at 1.3 seconds out. So perhaps the 1.3s figure wasn't the first moment the car determined a brake was necessary, but rather, the last moment the car could have braked to prevent a substantial collision. I want to know the first moment the car determined a brake was necessary at all. It's likely not 6s, but it's also likely not 1.3 seconds. It seems this was entirely preventable, or at least the collision impact could have been mitigated severely, had there been a braking and/or warning system in place. Shutting off brakes on literally the only driving agent tasked with full attention is inexcusable. But that's what they did. To me that's murder. They used to have two passengers, one for tagging circumstantial data, the other to override the car when necessary and keep eyes on the road at all times. Either keep that and shut off emergency brakes from the car and put a warning system in place for the 'driver'. Or do not shut off emergency brakes. Instead they put a single person in the car, tasked to do things that kept her eyes off the road half of the time, and shut off brakes for the AI. That's insane.
- bo1024 8y ago
  > You couldn't drive a car if you had to constantly break [sic] because objects (such as people standing by the road) were being detected. Yes, you could -- that's how I drive. Do you not? If I detect a mobile object that might be moving into my path, I slow down to give myself time to react until I am reasonably certain of safety. When doing so I take into account my situation-specific knowledge -- have I made eye contact with the pedestrian and do they know I'm coming? Is the dog on a leash and is the owner being attentive? Does the cyclist seem aware of my presence? I would expect no less from anyone licensed to drive a car, be they human or software.

rossdavidh 8y ago

So, can't read the article but I did read the ntsb report directly. Basically, it sounds like Uber was not ready, but reassured themselves with "but there's a human driver who can intervene". The fact is, humans are very bad at remaining vigilant for long periods of doing nothing, then needing to intervene at a moments notice. Computers are good at that (and Volvo's built-in safety systems might have worked if Uber had not disabled them), but humans are bad at it. Volvo has it right: human driver, computer backup. Uber's idea of a human acting as a last-second backup to a computer gets the relative strengths and weaknesses of each exactly wrong.

fixermark 8y ago
Worse than just assuming a human driver could intervene: they put a human in the car and then overloaded that human with additional tasks.
- sgnelson 8y ago
  Worse, they knew they needed two people and previously had two individuals, but then felt that was unnecessary and went to only one person per vehicle.

sly010 8y ago

Does this mean the technology is so early that they are struggling to program it to do the right thing in normal conditions, let alone to prevent an accident?

rossdavidh 8y ago
It sure suggests the possibility of, "that thing keeps braking when we don't want it to, turn it off". When, you know, human drivers manage to do quite fine with it on. If you have to disable the built-in safety features of the Volvo to get your driving software to work, then you're not ready to do a road test.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  One wild guess would be their equipment interfering. Still seems legendarily stupid to just disable the possible free backup to your totally inadequate system, however.
- uxp100 8y ago
  I don't think that is right. My understanding is that they didn't HAVE to turn the built-in safety features of the Volvo off to make it work, but instead they had to in order to test their equivalent safety feature. If they have a feature that exactly mimics Volvo's, it can't be tested while Volvo's is active (or at least that is the idea, I think it probably could be tested in some way.) But then they turned their own safety feature off, because it failed to be as good as Volvo's. And then did not turn Volvo's feature back on.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    You either works with higher error margins than the Volvo software (what should be the case, since yours is being tested), or you log your software decisions and compare with the Volvo's one after the fact.
    - uxp100 8y ago

jerf 8y ago

"According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior." If you can't give your "self-driving software" full access to the brakes because it becomes an "erratic driver" when you do that, you do not have self-driving software. You just have some software that is controlling a car that you know is an inadequate driver. If the self-driving software is not fully capable of replacing the driver in the car you have placed it in, as shipped except for the modifications necessary to be driven by software, you do not have a safe driving system.

jjoonathan 8y ago
So, let the two software systems fight with each other during emergencies and hope it somehow results in something positive? That sounds like a terrible idea.
- JorgeGT 8y ago
  On the contrary: the Volvo system is designed not to fight but to override any other input, including the human driver. In any other Volvo car currently on the road that detects an obstacle, the Volvo system will override the driver and bring the car to a stop even if the driver insists in hitting the obstacle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKoFalJiazQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKoFalJiazQ Independently-working override-capable systems are the base of engineering redundancy safety. See airborne collision avoidance systems (ACAS), which will automatically and forcefully steer an aircraft to avoid a collision if necessary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_collision_avoidance_system?oldformat=true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_collision_avoidance_s...
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    If the Uber engineers shared your confidence that it would play out that way, they would not have disabled it. Redundant safety systems are a great idea, evidently Uber needed more of them, and integrating with the Volvo system might have been a reasonable option. It's silly to suggest that the integration would necessarily have been trivial, though. That's what I'm objecting to.

kbos87 8y ago

Someone should be facing manslaughter charges here.

zerostar07 8y ago
It's gonna be a case of distributed responsibility

antihero 8y ago

Why on earth would they mention that someone's been on weed and meth when they are the victim of a car not stopping?

danso 8y ago
Possibly as an explanation for why the victim was slow to react or had decided to cross at that particular time.
pjc50 8y ago
To imply that it's their fault. That's how press smearing works.
- artursapek 8y ago
  I think drugs, especially drugs like meth, are usually an important detail in vehicle collision investigations.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    When it doesn't have to do with anyone driving? Yeah, maybe the victim was wrong to go there, but the car should and could have stopped in time.
    - artursapek 8y ago
      Why does walking/biking differ from driving if the two collided in the road? Not saying Uber couldn't have prevented this, just explaining why the media mentions the detected drug use...
jbeckham 8y ago
The NTSB always includes whether drugs or alcohol potentially played any role in an accident and puts it in their reports for all parties. This isn't a smear tactic, just standard practice because they are trying to determine all contributing factors.

mindfulplay 8y ago

This is what happens when software companies that have traditionally had an incentive to "fail fast, fail often" mentality ship something in the physical world. Especially something as powerful as a ton of steel moving like a missle on our roads. Absolutely stunningly stupid that there are teams that built this and felt incentivized to put this on our roads without any concerns or safety mechanism. Shameful. Legally, it will be amazing in the future to hold these people - the engineers, product managers, the PR people and the CEO (ex and current) all accountable. We did for something far less serious with VW...

castratikron 8y ago
I think most people here can relate to being an engineer who is held to other people's unrealistic expectations. Problems happen when there is not a critical mass of individuals to push back on those requirements. It's possible that this project is Uber's last ditch effort at existing, in which case there would be enormous pressure on everyone to make self-driving work at any cost. It was a design decision to disable the car's stock automatic braking feature, for example. It's not that they're stupid, it's that they're putting their morals on the shelf in order to get this to work. At some point you need to have a regulatory body in place that sets standard for safety, otherwise people are going to die.
- admax88q 8y ago
  > It's possible that this project is Uber's last ditch effort at existing, in which case there would be enormous pressure on everyone to make self-driving work at any cost. If you're an engineer at Uber and you're facing this kind of pressure that's causing you to take safety shortcuts, walk away. Go work somewhere else. Real engineers are responsible for their decisions they can't just defer personal responsibility to management. If you build a bridge you know is unsafe because the company you work for will go under if it doesn't get built, it's still your fault when the bridge fails and kills people. Walk away.
linuxftw 8y ago
I have to blame management in this regard. There must have certainly been engineers that spoke up about this problem who may be silenced by NDA's (or other means), even if they did resign in protest. Stopping in time to not run over an unexpected pedestrian crossing the road would be item number one on any sensible person's agenda. Uber needs to be liquidated.

matt-attack 8y ago

> the operator said she had been monitoring the self-driving system interface I guarantee that driver was on her phone. Just watch.

jacksmith21006 8y ago
Yes they were. You can not be kind of driving. Google has indicated this several times. Either the car can drive itself or not. This half way is dangerous.

bb101 8y ago

Nice little FUD by WSJ in their subheadline: "Pedestrian tested positive for methamphetamine and marijuana" -- not referred to again in the article, moreover I have trouble seeing the relevance to the accident.

Zak 8y ago
It is mentioned again at the end of the article. It's relevant to the accident because it provides an explanation for the pedestrian crossing the road outside a crosswalk without adequately checking for traffic.
- admax88q 8y ago
  Yeah only druggies J-walk.
  - filoleg 8y ago
    Not at all, sober people jaywalk too. They just tend to check their surroundings a bit better than their high counterparts for any cars coming to potentially hit them.
    - IncRnd 8y ago
      Nice try, but that doesn't apply to this specific case, where the car could and should have stopped but didn't.
      - Zak 8y ago
        The car should have stopped automatically, but that system was disabled. The pedestrian shouldn't have been there, but made a bad decision. The pedestrian should have been more aware of her surroundings, but was impaired or not paying attention. The safety driver should have been paying more attention to the road, but was also monitoring system displays. This crash didn't have a single cause. Any one of those factors being handled correctly would have prevented it.

fixermark 8y ago

I'm irritated at myself for swallowing Uber's initial line on this (and the interpretation of the officers who reviewed the cam footage provided by Uber) without sufficient critique. This accident should have been avoided. No excuses.

remote_phone 8y ago
Your bias is showing. Uber didn’t release anything. They left the entire narrative to the police and the NTSB.
bo1024 8y ago
The sensors observed the pedestrian 6 seconds before impact! That's more than enough time to come to a complete stop. That's enough time to play a bell that alerts the driver and for the driver to manually react, press the brakes, and come to a complete stop. And this was a pretty easily preventable scenario (which just makes it more tragic of course). Software is nowhere near ready to drive cars on real roads.
- andygates 8y ago
  This software, and these development processes. The baby may not need to be thrown out with Uber's crappy bathwater.
- fixermark 8y ago
  I'd caution at avoidance of over-extrapolation. UBER software is nowhere near ready to drive cars on real roads. There are multiple competitors in this space (Waymo and Argo immediately come to mind); they don't generally have Uber's reputation of "move fast and break things" or of "cut human costs as soon as feasible." In my initial assessment, I was reasoning the other direction---from practices I was familiar with from stories of those companies to Uber---and falsely assumed Uber was behaving more responsibly than they were. This Uber tragedy doesn't significanly update my prior assumptions about its competitors.
  - bo1024 8y ago

podiki 8y ago

Coverage on Ars: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-disabled-by-ubers-self-driving-software-ntsb-says/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-d...

lbriner 8y ago

Isn't the problem here much like the presumed cause for Air France 447 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447)? The pilots are so used to automatic operation that happens 99.9% of the time that they are not prepared for the random time when it does. A bit like someone guarding a bank for 20 years and then gets robbed and can't react in time because they mind has taught them that nothing ever happens.

emodendroket 8y ago
Well, I'd say that's an issue, but not the only one.
- lbriner 8y ago
  I was thinking that the assumption in the design is that the operator can always handle the hard/fringe cases but the reality is that due to the AF447 principle (whatever it's called), this is precisely what the operator cannot do reliably.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Yeah, I agree, but it seems that they also had no alert and were asking the operator to simultaneously record data, leading to them not even looking at the road at the time the crash happened.
ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
I'd like to throw out that one of the pilots of that flight was pulling up during a stall warning. I don't think it's really similar to this accident, since it'd kind of be like the driver realizing they have to break, but gassing it instead. Also interesting is that in a Boeing, this likely would have never happened. In an Airbus control inputs are averaged together, so the captain had no idea his copilot was pulling back during a stall warning. In a Boeing, the control gear provides feedback (physically moves) to the pilots, so they would have been able to realize they were giving opposite inputs. Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-ha... Excerpt below: 02:13:40 (Robert) Remonte... remonte... remonte... remonte... Climb... climb... climb... climb... 02:13:40 (Bonin) Mais je suis à fond à cabrer depuis tout à l'heure! But I've had the stick back the whole time! At last, Bonin tells the others the crucial fact whose import he has so grievously failed to understand himself. 02:13:42 (Captain) Non, non, non... Ne remonte pas... non, non. No, no, no... Don't climb... no, no.

gepoch 8y ago

A good podcast on the risks of semi-automation: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...

gok 8y ago

Yikes, it had not occurred to me that even Uber would ignore their automation system's pleas to emergency brake because it was making their cars look too jumpy.

jacksmith21006 8y ago

Uber should bail on doing their own and work a deal with Waymo.

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
I have this weird hunch that those two companies' self-driving car divisions may not be huge fans of each other these days.
- forgot-my-pw 8y ago
  It's possible. The lawsuit is settled and Waymo actually owns like 1% of Uber. In the past, Google also invested on Uber.
  - jacksmith21006 8y ago
    Google owns more like 7% or maybe 8% of Uber. They already owned a piece before the lawsuit. Think they also own a piece of Lyft.

perl4ever 8y ago

Two semi-automated types of cars are out there: 1. Ones where a human pilots them most of the time, but a computer steps in in emergencies. 2. Ones where a computer pilots them most of the time, but a human steps in in emergencies (hopefully). For some reason I don't understand, people treat (2) as an evolution of (1). But it is the inverse.

forgot-my-pw 8y ago
What would be the point of #2? Humans have bad reaction time at emergencies most the time.
- JackCh 8y ago
  Presumably the point of #2 is that it's easier than the implied #3 ("The computer always drives") which is their as-of-yet unrealized goal. Of course deploying #2 into the wild may prove to be ethically unjustifiable. Being easier than the implied #3 is a poor excuse.

yalogin 8y ago

Now I understand why Uber started their advertising campaign. They know this will come out and show the world how irresponsible they are, and they wanted to get in front of that.

tareqak 8y ago

Yet another reason in favour of professional engineers being required to design and implement safety-critical features using software: because "move fast, and break things" becomes unacceptable when those "things" are the lives of living, breathing people.

knodi 8y ago

Why not alert to the driver???? BMW has collision detection system that makes a loud beep when it determines an imminent collision. The beep alerts the driver regardless of false positives or false negatives. Its a simple solution which many cars have had for over 10 years. Why Uber engineers chose to not alert the driver is beyond me.

ggg9990 8y ago

The one thing I spent years teaching my wife is that when there’s anything untoward on the highway, JUST STOP. I’ve avoided at least two major accidents by stopping instead of swerving — in a few feet you can get your speed down to levels where a crash won’t be fatal or severely injurious. And even if you get rear ended by stopping short, it’s usually at a much lower speed. All autonomous cars should just STOP when something is not right.

cmurf 8y ago
Or just slow down a lot. The fatality is a way lower at 18mph than it is at 43mph. https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowledge/speed/speed_is_a_central_issue_in_road_safety/speed_and_the_injury_risk_for_different_speed_levels_en https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowle...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

booleandilemma 8y ago

Future engineers growing up today will read about this incident alongside the Therac-25 and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

newnewpdro 8y ago

Criminally negligent.

cmurf 8y ago

a. the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path All of those things are bad things to hit, why not slow down? b. 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed Too late for either a human or computer. c. operator is responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages There is superseding responsibility to drive the car safely. Uber's policy sets up the test driver for failure, and puts people's lives at risk. d. emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control The pedestrian had no chance. The very feature that should make the car safer was disabled, but also the judgement was poor and too late, and Uber policy sabotaged the car driver judgement as the exclusive (not merely primary) safety mechanism by distracting them with data that in most every way would have been more diverting than talking on a cell phone or fiddling with the radio. I hope the family got a lot of money in the settlement.

reacharavindh 8y ago

The number of occurrences of "break" in place of "brake" in this discussion is very disconcerting.

meritt 8y ago
Someone at Uber probably recently committed: if (personDetected()) - break(); + brake();
- ht85 8y ago
  Maybe it's written like a game engine for (;;) { if (detect_obstacle()) break; move_forward(); }

blhack 8y ago

Isn't the person actually driving the car supposed to be driving the car? I've ridden in these self driving Ubers. When I rode in one, the driver drove almost the entire time, except on a few straight stretches of road. They always had their hands ready to grab the wheel, were always attending to what was happening etc. It seems like the marketing and the engineering got crossed here. Marketing says these were self driving, but anybody who rode in them knew they weren't. They were supposed to be getting driven by real drivers. From the report, it sounds like the drivers were listening to the marketing instead of the engineering team (who presumably would have told them that the system doesn't brake on its own). It sounds like the real driver wasn't driving as they were supposed to be. From the video, it looked like they were reading something on their phone[1] instead of driving the car. Compare this to a pilot flying in an autopilot. They don't shut their radios off and stop paying attention to the flight, they still fly the airplane and remain attentive to what is happening with it. That's what this driver should have been doing, not looking at their phone. It frustrates me that this level of negligence could set self driving tech, something that will save countless lives, back. This was the Chernobyl moment for self driving tech. It's safer than alternatives, but now this is all people are associating it with. [1]:the driver states that they were interacting with the Uber self driving system, not their phone.

ummonk 8y ago
>It's safer than alternatives, but now this is all people are associating it with. Unlike for nuclear power, this is currently nowhere near true for self-driving tech.
Jasper_ 8y ago
> That's what this driver should have been doing, not looking at their phone. According to the NSTB report, they were looking at a separate diagnostic panel and flagging messages which Uber asked them to do as part of self-driving training duties. > It's safer than alternatives The system also decided it should have applied the emergency brakes, but then didn't. I don't think this system is safer than alternatives.
gkya 8y ago
> It frustrates me that this level of negligence could set self driving tech, something that will save countless lives, back. This was the Chernobyl moment for self driving tech. It's safer than alternatives, but now this is all people are associating it with. If it can not be done securely at scale, it better be set back, especially on public roads. I am deeply skeptical of how safe and realistic self-driving vehicles are. Even with such less amount of cars dubbed autonomous on the roads, we've seen up until now a great multitude of fatal accidents or near misses already. This putting internet and AI in everything reminds me of a recent Vsauce video I saw which shows radium chocolate bars and underwear: a new fascinating thing that in future will probably prove more harmful than it is useful, because of how we overestimate it's practical utility.

billsmithaustin 8y ago

For a government-authored report, that was very readable.

IncRnd 8y ago

Article from 1996 about Space Shuttle software: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors. Also from the article: “If the software isn’t perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die."

jonbarker 8y ago

This entire debate reminds me of this classic Milton Friedman video (I think the key difference with Uber, and where they are likely to get in trouble, is that they never made any estimate about how many lives their car experiment would cost that I am aware of): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYW5I96h-9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYW5I96h-9w

aphextron 8y ago

Someone from Uber needs to go to jail over this. That woman's death was the result of pure criminal negligence.

lisper 8y ago

This one is a complete no-brainer: At the first hint of an anomaly, the AI should have 1) alerted the driver and 2) started to gradually slow down. If that strategy produces too many false positives, it's time to go back to the drawing board. The right answer in that case is absolutely NOT to say, "Ah, just fuck it" and deploy the system in the field.

mnm1 8y ago

> According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator. Wow. So the vehicle and these tests were run knowing full well that an accident like this would not be preventable. This isn't manslaughter, this is murder. Uber was letting its car drive without any safety systems, without even an alert driver behind the wheel because her job was to monitor the panel. Fuck me. Wow. They should never be allowed to operate another autonomous vehicle again. The ceo should go to fucking jail. Fucking murderers.

FartyMcFarter 8y ago

Does anyone else find these two quotes a bit hard to stomach? > Although toxicological specimens were not collected from the vehicle operator, responding officers from the Tempe Police Department stated that the vehicle operator showed no signs of impairment at the time of the crash. > Toxicology test results for the pedestrian were positive for methamphetamine and marijuana. So they tested the victim for drugs but not the Uber employee in the car?? Other than that, Uber's so-called "self-driving" system sounds like crap and should never have been allowed to be used in that state.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
beisner 8y ago
The test is probably a routine part of an autopsy, whereas it likely wasn’t a routine part of the police response (which use visual and verbal cues to preliminarily assess inebriation).

pasbesoin 8y ago

Perhaps Uber is going to once again "ask for forgiveness". (As in, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.) This time, I don't think they should get it. (Not that I, for one, should have received it, previously.)

jellicle 8y ago

If any non-rich, non-corporate individual had done the following: sent out a vehicle on city streets, driving fast under computer control, which did not have any capability to brake and which did indeed strike and kill someone, I think that non-rich person would certainly be sent to jail for their reckless behavior and also receive very large fines and civil judgments. It wouldn't even be close. The judge would shout at them during sentencing and the papers would cheer. So, let's see what will happen to the Uber personnel involved. By the way, it's insane to be an Uber test driver under these circumstances. They're going to hang you out to dry. Quit.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

Move fast and break, nay, kill people. I hope this accident weighs on the people who made these decisions so that they will be more careful in the future. I would hope they would not see it simply as a bug in the system.

Waterluvian 8y ago

It won't load for me. Are they referring this to the Justice department? Someone needs to go to prison.

codedokode 8y ago

That's so irresponsible. So the system cannot apply emergency braking, but why didn't it try at least to decrease the speed? Those cars are not ready for public roads. If your sensors give too many false alarms then you should improve them. Also I think initially there should be a speed limit for self-driving cars. For example, 15-20 mph should be enough for driving in the city and won't cause too much harm in the case of an accident.

Zelphyr 8y ago

Uber is a prime example that the “Move fast; break shit” mentally that Facebook pioneered and the Valley companies so love is now costing lives.

diebir 8y ago

Interestingly, the picture shows that the car seems to have tried to avoid the collision by moving to the right. Of course, every human drivers with experience knows that you pass pedestrians behind, not ahead. The Artificial Intelligence obviously was not smart enough. In other words, as suspected, the self driving cars are a pipe dream. One can't just mix a bunch of statistical woodoo into a neural net and hope it will work. It may work most of the time, but the mistakes would be catastrophic and incredibly stupid.

raven105x 8y ago

Funny, all this contention around technology that simply doesn't exist yet. When automakers market SAE Autonomy L2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification) certified vehicles as "self-driving" in official marketing media, and even more so when their sales reps blatantly lie to customers (both of which should be illegal), they're responsible for lost lives and undermining their companies' image, ethics and financials. There's only one car certified for SAE L3 / "eyes off" and it's the 2018 Audi A8, only up to 60kmph - this is still not self-driving. The primary concern here is false advertising as pervasive as it is blatant.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> Roadway lighting was present. It's worth remembering that the video of the acciedent that Uber made available showed a pitch-black road with very little lighting, something that is not corroborated by the NTSB report. Given that the only comment about visibility in the preliminary report is that "(r)oadway lighting was present" it sounds very likely that Uber deliberately tried to create a misleading impression. >> The forward-facing videos show the pedestrian coming into view and proceeding into the path of the vehicle This is a little less clear-cut but it also seems to cast doubt onto the initial statement by the Tempe police chief, that Uber was not at fault because the pedestrian dashed onto the road suddendly and the crash was basically "unavoidable". [1] ______________ [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe-police-chief-says-early-probe-12765481.php#photo-15257361 https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe...

uberkills 8y ago

All Uber executives should be forced to recreate this scenario as the pedestrians crossing the street, while their test vehicles drive the loop, over and over again until there are no pedestrians killed by their self-driving cars!

selfsteeringcar 8y ago

Even if the emergency braking was disabled, why was there a lack of automatic steering, e.g. to change lanes, to avoid the collision?

tomtimtall 8y ago

So as many pointed out quite early, this isn’t litterally a case of Uber killing people because they cared more about taking I up miles than safety an in effect human lives. They disabled safety measures because they where getting in the way. Hopefully they will get the book thrown at them and then a couple of chairs.