14 ms·

Arizona Uber crash driver was 'watching TV'

131 points by room271 8y ago

jackvalentine 8y ago
> The Tempe police report said the crash was "entirely avoidable" if the Uber operator, Rafaela Vasquez, had been watching the road while the car was operating autonomously. And thus should end the bewildering “but you couldn’t see her to the last minute and I don’t understand how bad cameras are in low light”
- spuz 8y ago
  Yes I don't understand why so much focus has been put on the failure of the technology rather than the failure of the back up driver. We all know that self-driving technology does not exist yet, that is why the back up driver is there. If you have driven at night you will know that a human can see much further than what is shown on the video footage of this incident and so it should be clear that the human back up driver was to blame. Unfortunately for her, the fact that she was not only not watching the road but distracted by a TV show makes any claim that she was not negligent very hard to defend.
  - bryanrasmussen 8y ago
    As a general rule all of the failure of the technology complaints that have registered in my head from HN has to do with Uber intentionally turning off safety features and doing things in such a way that the driver might have assumed things were safer than they actually were and then have decided, idiotically as humans do (humans - such as myself I assure you - being idiots), that it was totally ok to do something stupid like text on a phone or watch tv. Just because one party is neglicent does not mean other parties are cleared of their neglicence.
  - bkor 8y ago
    > Yes I don't understand why so much focus has been put on the failure of the technology rather than the failure of the back up driver. Waymo specifically monitors the driver plus checks their attention span before hiring them. There's various things which went wrong for this to happen. It's not just one cause.
  - acdha 8y ago
    It’s because this is a really well understood problem with human attention. If you put people in a position where they’re supposed to watch for something which rarely happens, they’ll get bored and distracted. People who build systems for industrial production, monitoring, security, etc. have been dealing with the for a long time and it’s one of the selling points for self-driving technology since inattention causes many accidents per year. Responsible engineers deal with this in a number of ways, such as the test images TSA screeners see throughout the day, Waymo’s reported careful monitoring of the drivers, or redesigning the process so the human is continuously engaged. Uber engineers apparently say YOLO! and disable the car manufacturer’s own safety systems.
  - finnthehuman 8y ago
    >Yes I don't understand why so much focus has been put on the failure of the technology rather than the failure of the back up driver. It was well known all along that humans are poorly equipped to remain actively engaged in situations that require split-second reactions, while exerting zero effort or control for hours on end. Air traffic is as safe as it is because the accident analysis always pushes past "pilot error" as the root cause. If one pilot can make the error, why won't another? Did the system set them up to fail? Even if it didn't, could the system be enhanced such that the failure (or class of failures) could be prevented? In the case of the human in Uber's self-driving car, they were set up for failure. And in such a well known way that makes any claim Uber was not negligent very hard to defend.
    - spuz 8y ago
      As far as Uber being negligent for putting an easily-distracted human in charge of a car that ostensibly (even if they claim otherwise) needs little attention, I totally agree they are negligent. The reason for that is I believe it's unreasonable to expect a human driver to pay 100% attention to the road while in a car that only requires 5% attention to the road. However, I also believe as well as telling the driver "pay attention to the road 100% of the time" she would have been told "Do not use your phone while driving" which I believe is a totally reasonable request and expectation. With this assumption and if the blame has to fall on only a single party then I think this news puts it squarely on the driver.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        Aren't they required to use their phones to record diagnostic data? It's a small step from there to messing around on the phone.
        pas 8y ago
        What? Why don't they have their hands on the fucking steering wheel?
        8y ago
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    As far as I am concerned, the issue has always been, and remains, that passive alertness - the assumption underlying the claim that partial autonomy is viable - does not work. All arguments about what drivers ought to do is irrelevant in the face of what they actually do.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    This is not an either-or situation. Both the driver and Uber are fully culpable for this vehicular homicide. Both of them have to be aware that any mistake on their part may result in somebody's death and act accordingly.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Probably PR spin/lobbying as the backup driver is just an excuse to beta test dangerous technology.
  - notheguyouthink 8y ago
    > If you have driven at night you will know that a human can see much further than what is shown on the video footage This is honestly what bothers me most. Firstly, I expect self driving to have massively more information at hand than humans do. I'm talking long range, 360deg sight. I expect multiple sensors to be recording at all time, analyzing. And finally, I expect a "black box" to be able to visualize all of this for cases like this. Visualizing is something I think needs to be black-box level standardized. It's what we need to hold them accountable, I think. We're dealing with proprietary implementations - so humans should be able to review black box "footage"[1] and decide if the scenario was handled better or worse than a human. There's going to be times where this system fails, and I'm not expecting perfection. Yet, humans in non-private positions need to be able to regulate how Uber and friends are behaving on the road. A short sighted grainy video that looks like it was from 1990 is not cutting it. Fully unacceptable in my view. [1]: I say footage loosely, because I imagine a lot of the scanned data is just that, data. So it needs to be rendered in a human friendly, visual manner, fully understandable by lawmakers.
  - s2g 8y ago
    because people have been saying for years that the idea of a backup driver is absurd and dangerous because they won't pay attention for hours on end effectively.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  We have a scapegoat, move on now.
bitL 8y ago
Why manslaughter though? Wasn't the victim the real offender, crossing a road on unmarked spot without paying attention to oncoming traffic? It's a safety failure of a self-driving car tech surely, but the offense came from the victim. Especially given how some human drivers can't avoid similar situations either (see some videos of Chinese driving)...
- soziawa 8y ago
  As driver of the car you need to be able to stop the car at any time for any reason, otherwise you're not in control of your vehicle. By not being in control of your vehicle you accepted the fact that you might seriously harm someone. This is why it's manslaughter.
- bkor 8y ago
  > Wasn't the victim the real offender, crossing a road on unmarked spot without paying attention to oncoming traffic? If someone makes a mistake while in traffic I'm much more happy do not immediately die as a result. There's been a few instances such a thing could've happened to me.
- carlmr 8y ago
  An attentive driver could have at the very least mitigated what happened. Maybe even slowed down enough in order to not cause lethal harm. As a driver you're sent to driving school and you're operating a 2 ton death machine. If you're not in control of your vehicle for whatever reason (alcohol, drugs, phone) you're already at fault, even when you're not the only person to blame (Uber, the driver and the cyclist).
  - bitL 8y ago
    Many drivers get into a state of shock when SHTF, i.e. they are going into an accident and suddenly are paralyzed or doing some boneheaded moves (like bikers turning more which has the opposite effect). You can see it on many videos from China when drivers just can't believe what has just happened and continue, likely in a state of a deep shock. Or when you are face-to-face with a deer on the road, lot of space on each side but you still hit the deer because you were mesmerized by it. You should always predict what could happen even if you are a pedestrian or a biker (oh, cars surely won't open doors while I am on a bike path, right?). Casually strolling through a road with traffic without caring about approaching cars is simply irresponsible. Ofc Uber driver was distracted, it was clear from the video. But I would put 80% blame on the victim.
soziawa 8y ago
> The Tempe police report said the crash was "entirely avoidable" if the Uber operator, Rafaela Vasquez, had been watching the road while the car was operating autonomously. Absolutely no surprises there. Everyone who has ever taken a picture in the dark should have known this after seeing the footage from the car.
- uptown 8y ago
  The videos shot in the same location by another camera give another version of how well-lit those roads are: 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-... Visibility looks considerably better than what the Uber video portrays.
  - andyv 8y ago
    I live there, that road is well-lit. The Uber video is misleading.
msravi 8y ago
I'd suspect that it's harder to take over and avoid a colision in a self driving car, than a car that you're continuously in control of. You first have to recognize that the system is failing or about to fail. And that has to happen well in advance for you to take appropriate action. Doesn't seem like a reliable failover procedure, even if the person behind the wheel is paying attention.
- narrowtux 8y ago
  > You first have to recognize that the system is failing or about to fail For that to work, I'd like that cars that have features like this show you what they're seeing. Tesla does this a bit by showing all the cars it has detected in the dashboard. But it should go further and other car brands should do the same. Without that, you're right, you can not be sure if the car is going to react to something on its own.
  - linsomniac 8y ago
    I honestly don't know where Tesla's head is. I'm surprised that when I turn on the turn signal to change lanes, and the car has detected something in my blind spot via sonar sensors, that it doesn't give me a tone or something. Let alone showing me video from one or both of that side's cameras. Tesla, in putting it's targets on self driving, has omitted a lot of low-hanging fruit that would make significant day-to-day difference to drivers right now.
    - jvreagan 8y ago
      Interesting. My 2013 BMW vibrates the steering wheel if it thinks I'm going to move sideways into something (and that includes fast moving cars coming from behind) or it beeps loudly if it thinks I'm going to hit something in front of my based on my speed and distance of the object in front. And its highly accurate IMHO. My take on self-driving is someone needs to hook up these signals to controls on the car - the "hard part" does a reliable job.
      - 8y ago
pjc50 8y ago
Proposed solution: it should be an offence for the manufacturer to describe a car as "self-driving" or "autonomous" if it is not capable of doing so entirely by itself. Systems which rely on the car driving 99% of the time and then throwing up its hands in order to make the human responsible for the crash are a ridiculous abdication of responsibility. This system would have to be described as "driver assist".
- dzhiurgis 8y ago
  Do you actually think a single line of description are going to change human behaviour?
  - HenryBemis 8y ago
    YES!! Unfortunately people take marketing buzzwords at face value. Since the industry is not yet ready to release a true "autopilot" then they should not be using these words. People die so that Uber, Tesla and others can ab-use these words.\ Someone died that day because that "safety operator" was watching TV? Imagine how 'extra happy' the cyclist's family is right now.
    - acdha 8y ago
      We already have plenty of evidence that this is true, too: people have died using the Uber and Tesla systems while nobody has taken the Volvo safety system Uber disabled as absolving them of responsibility for driving, and those systems have been in the hands of drivers for a number of years by now. Not calling it an “autopilot” is a huge psychological queue that it's an emergency safety measure rather than something you should rely on.
  - wastedhours 8y ago
    It wouldn't have helped in this case, being a test driver for the technology she should have been paying full attention, and the same goes for all of these development drivers - but for the general populace when they release a product, I'd say it would. "Autonomous" and "self-driving" (and "autopilot") are incredibly loaded terms, and manufacturers know it, and really do change the context of the interaction the customer can expect to have with the car. "Driving Assistants" help you drive, "self-driving" means, well, it drives itself, and no matter how many caveats you apply to it, you've just primed your audience with your headline. If the manufacturer expects you to be in control, then I really think they shouldn't knowingly sell it as something else. I like a good analogy and I've been struggling for one, but let's make a tenuous link to the World Cup: if I as a football team buy an "autonomous" or "self-saving" or "autogoalkeeper" goalkeeper, my expectation would be what I bought would stop balls going into the net by itself. My expectation would not be to have to position a back-up defender next to it at all times because it jumps in the wrong direction when presented with an attacker coming at a certain angle.
wepple 8y ago
Any vehicle that is not the highest level of autonomy (ie has no steering wheel, or no need for one) should have systems in place to verify that a human driver is alert, in charge of the vehicle, and able to respond immediately - eye focus cameras, steering wheel sensors, confirmation prompts, etc. Is there a valid reason this should be law?
- megaman22 8y ago
  Then what's the point? Might as well just drive a car the way we always have then, and avoid all this complicated crap.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    The point is to improve the vehicle until it is at the highest level of autonomy.
    - megaman22 8y ago
      Well fine, but I'm gonna run old vehicles that havent been infected by this until then. Having to babysit the self driving car is a no starter
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Serious question, would you back-port the law to fully non-autonomous (subservient? dependent? allonomous?) vehicles? For the counter, why do you think the false positive/negative rate on the attention-sensing system would be better than the false positive/negative rate on the eg emergency brakes?
rayiner 8y ago
Uber should get charged with manslaughter. I don't say that lightly. This isn't an example of programmer error, where a alpha-version self-driving system failed. That would've been unfortunate, but not grossly negligent. Here, Uber put a "driver" in control of the car that by design wasn't able to avoid collisions with pedestrians. According to the NTSB, Uber disabled Uber's own emergency braking system (not just the built-in Volvo one) “to reduce potential for erratic behavior.”[1] That rises to gross, criminal negligence. It is no defense to say that Uber also told a human driver to be present. If Uber had directed a five year old to drive the SUV, with a back-up driver ready to take control, I think everyone would agree that qualifies as gross negligence notwithstanding the presence of the back-up driver. (To be clear, I think some risk in the name of progress is acceptable. But it's one thing to use testing on public roads to work out the kinks in the software. It's another to put vehicles on the road that you know cannot perform the basic, essential functions of driving.) [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-uber-arizona-ntsb-20180524-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-uber-arizona-nts... ("However, Uber also disabled its own emergency braking function whenever the test car was under driverless computer control, 'to reduce potential for erratic behavior.'").
- icebraining 8y ago
  I agree. The system was clearly not prepared for a real-world test. "Human jaywalks with bicycle" is not a one-in-a-million event. I'm not sure if this is legally possible, but frankly I think the humans made the decision to let it on the streets should be personally charged as well.
  - reubenswartz 8y ago
    Yes, starting with the governor, who was very interested in bringing "self-driving" cars to the state without all the pesky regulation and testing. (There are plenty of examples of excessive regulation, but if there's one place where there should be some, it's when 2-3 ton autonomous vehicles are traveling down the road.)
  - JPKab 8y ago
    If the car was expected to have software that was foolproof, why hire and pay a driver at all?
Jaruzel 8y ago
A related BBC article[1] states: "A toxicology test carried out on Ms Herzberg after the accident returned positive results for methamphetamine and marijuana. She did not look before crossing the road in a poorly lit area and was wearing dark clothes, the NTSB report says. And the reflectors and lights on her bike were at right-angles to the Uber car's path." Even though, the self-driving software failed to recognise her, and also totally not excusing the lack of attention of the Uber driver, you cannot rule out that under normal circumstances with a non-automated car, the pedestrian would not have been hit. Although this is a sad event, the pedestrian does carry a certain amount of blame here. It also shows that the biggest blocker to effective self driving vehicles is people, not technology. --- [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44243118 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44243118
- emodendroket 8y ago
  What does it matter what drugs the woman hit by the car was on? It changes nothing about the case. Looking at the video it's clear that at least some evasive action could have been taken by an attentive driver; at the least it should have been possible to hit the pedestrian at a lower speed. This article claims the car had six seconds to react (although I'm not sure what sense that's based on) and that the crash was avoidable if the operator had been paying attention, according to police.
  - wilsonnb2 8y ago
    Because drugs have side effects, which may have contributed to why she put herself in the position to be hit by a car that she probably should have seen.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      But in this case we don't have to wonder about the circumstances; we know where the car and the pedestrian were and exactly what happened. Thus going into the toxicology report serves no real purpose other than unfairly casting aspersions on the person killed.
Molaxx 8y ago
So they'll drop it on the driver?! The whole setup was an accidental waiting to happen. Uber executives should be held responsible or this will happen again and again.
- FireBeyond 8y ago
  Right, Uber's position will be / is, simultaneously, one - "it's not our fault, that's why we had the human driver there", and two - "in order to cut costs, we used to have a human passenger there to record anomalies while driving - we axed that and require the human 'driver' to do so, whilst being responsible for the safety of the vehicle".
linsomniac 8y ago
Paying a "safety driver" to sit in the car seems like a small price to pay if it means this (minimum wage?) person takes the manslaughter charge instead of Uber.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  >> minimum wage? Lol. You can get a real non-robot driver for that price. The whole point is to get some sort of contractor non-employee to work below the minimum wage.
O1111OOO 8y ago
Another facet of this is how quickly people adopt new technologies - whether they're proven to be safe (or good) or not. Personally, I've evolved into not trusting technology, not trusting the people behind most of the technology being produced today. In contrast, this woman was so quickly at ease (I wonder what she was told beforehand, during her training) that she felt comfortable enough to watch TV. I also wonder, as this kind of tech progresses, how it will be sold to the public. Perhaps the same: "we take your security seriously"...
mcguire 8y ago
The NTSB preliminary report directly contradicts this article. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.as... On scene police reports are often unreliable. This is why the NTSB does not speculate before the investigation is completed.
Spivak 8y ago
Can we put this issue to bed once and for all? Humans are not sufficiently equipped to act as a 'backup driver' in emergency situations and any system which relies on such a thing for safety is inherently unsafe. Doesn't matter if you glue our hands to the steering wheel and hold our eyes open, if we're not doing anything 99% of the time we won't be ready to react with split second timing to recover from some failure.
tga 8y ago
Contrary to many here, I feel that it's perfectly reasonable to have a backup human driver if they are trained to act accordingly. The Japanese pointing-and-calling technique comes to mind as a good example of keeping drivers engaged: they would have to continuously, actively point at dangers and at the car's appropriate response. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LmdUz3rOQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LmdUz3rOQU (quite fascinating to watch) Combine this with short sessions (not driving around for hours with nothing to do), and I think the driver would have had a reasonable chance of preventing this accident.
- will4274 8y ago
  > I feel that it's perfectly reasonable to have a backup human driver if they are trained to act accordingly. Agreed. I think the right analogy is an airplane pilot. Operating an airplane and an autonomous car require special training and require professional operators. Replace car crash with plane crash. My judgement is predicted on - did Uber train their drivers? Did Uber evaluate their drivers before allowing them to operate on their own? What policies did Uber have in place for drivers? What punishment did drivers typically receive for violating policies? Did Uber occasionally review footage of the driver to verify driver compliance? It's hard to expect a layperson to pay attention for hours on end without input, but somebody appropriately trained should be able to do so.
hi41 8y ago
This incident reminds of a post Nicholas Carr wrote. We are offloading critical activities to automation but at critical times human expertise is needed to resolve dangerous situations. The driver put too much confidence in the automation and watched a TV show on her phone.
jacksmith21006 8y ago
Not really surprising. You can't be kind of driving. We really should not allow L2 and L3. Should be just L1 and then L4 and L5 where no driver is needed.
helmsb 8y ago
I had an Uber driver who was watching an extremely graphic and violent movie in his phone setup directly in his field of view. I had him drop me off early and reported it to Uber. Apparently it’s becoming more and more common talking to friends.

131 points by room271 8y ago

> The Tempe police report said the crash was "entirely avoidable" if the Uber operator, Rafaela Vasquez, had been watching the road while the car was operating autonomously. And thus should end the bewildering “but you couldn’t see her to the last minute and I don’t understand how bad cameras are in low light”

spuz 8y ago
Yes I don't understand why so much focus has been put on the failure of the technology rather than the failure of the back up driver. We all know that self-driving technology does not exist yet, that is why the back up driver is there. If you have driven at night you will know that a human can see much further than what is shown on the video footage of this incident and so it should be clear that the human back up driver was to blame. Unfortunately for her, the fact that she was not only not watching the road but distracted by a TV show makes any claim that she was not negligent very hard to defend.
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  As a general rule all of the failure of the technology complaints that have registered in my head from HN has to do with Uber intentionally turning off safety features and doing things in such a way that the driver might have assumed things were safer than they actually were and then have decided, idiotically as humans do (humans - such as myself I assure you - being idiots), that it was totally ok to do something stupid like text on a phone or watch tv. Just because one party is neglicent does not mean other parties are cleared of their neglicence.
- bkor 8y ago
  > Yes I don't understand why so much focus has been put on the failure of the technology rather than the failure of the back up driver. Waymo specifically monitors the driver plus checks their attention span before hiring them. There's various things which went wrong for this to happen. It's not just one cause.
- acdha 8y ago
  It’s because this is a really well understood problem with human attention. If you put people in a position where they’re supposed to watch for something which rarely happens, they’ll get bored and distracted. People who build systems for industrial production, monitoring, security, etc. have been dealing with the for a long time and it’s one of the selling points for self-driving technology since inattention causes many accidents per year. Responsible engineers deal with this in a number of ways, such as the test images TSA screeners see throughout the day, Waymo’s reported careful monitoring of the drivers, or redesigning the process so the human is continuously engaged. Uber engineers apparently say YOLO! and disable the car manufacturer’s own safety systems.
- finnthehuman 8y ago
  >Yes I don't understand why so much focus has been put on the failure of the technology rather than the failure of the back up driver. It was well known all along that humans are poorly equipped to remain actively engaged in situations that require split-second reactions, while exerting zero effort or control for hours on end. Air traffic is as safe as it is because the accident analysis always pushes past "pilot error" as the root cause. If one pilot can make the error, why won't another? Did the system set them up to fail? Even if it didn't, could the system be enhanced such that the failure (or class of failures) could be prevented? In the case of the human in Uber's self-driving car, they were set up for failure. And in such a well known way that makes any claim Uber was not negligent very hard to defend.
  - spuz 8y ago
    As far as Uber being negligent for putting an easily-distracted human in charge of a car that ostensibly (even if they claim otherwise) needs little attention, I totally agree they are negligent. The reason for that is I believe it's unreasonable to expect a human driver to pay 100% attention to the road while in a car that only requires 5% attention to the road. However, I also believe as well as telling the driver "pay attention to the road 100% of the time" she would have been told "Do not use your phone while driving" which I believe is a totally reasonable request and expectation. With this assumption and if the blame has to fall on only a single party then I think this news puts it squarely on the driver.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      Aren't they required to use their phones to record diagnostic data? It's a small step from there to messing around on the phone.
      - pas 8y ago
        What? Why don't they have their hands on the fucking steering wheel?
        8y ago
- mannykannot 8y ago
  As far as I am concerned, the issue has always been, and remains, that passive alertness - the assumption underlying the claim that partial autonomy is viable - does not work. All arguments about what drivers ought to do is irrelevant in the face of what they actually do.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  This is not an either-or situation. Both the driver and Uber are fully culpable for this vehicular homicide. Both of them have to be aware that any mistake on their part may result in somebody's death and act accordingly.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Probably PR spin/lobbying as the backup driver is just an excuse to beta test dangerous technology.
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  > If you have driven at night you will know that a human can see much further than what is shown on the video footage This is honestly what bothers me most. Firstly, I expect self driving to have massively more information at hand than humans do. I'm talking long range, 360deg sight. I expect multiple sensors to be recording at all time, analyzing. And finally, I expect a "black box" to be able to visualize all of this for cases like this. Visualizing is something I think needs to be black-box level standardized. It's what we need to hold them accountable, I think. We're dealing with proprietary implementations - so humans should be able to review black box "footage"[1] and decide if the scenario was handled better or worse than a human. There's going to be times where this system fails, and I'm not expecting perfection. Yet, humans in non-private positions need to be able to regulate how Uber and friends are behaving on the road. A short sighted grainy video that looks like it was from 1990 is not cutting it. Fully unacceptable in my view. [1]: I say footage loosely, because I imagine a lot of the scanned data is just that, data. So it needs to be rendered in a human friendly, visual manner, fully understandable by lawmakers.
- s2g 8y ago
  because people have been saying for years that the idea of a backup driver is absurd and dangerous because they won't pay attention for hours on end effectively.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
We have a scapegoat, move on now.

bitL 8y ago

Why manslaughter though? Wasn't the victim the real offender, crossing a road on unmarked spot without paying attention to oncoming traffic? It's a safety failure of a self-driving car tech surely, but the offense came from the victim. Especially given how some human drivers can't avoid similar situations either (see some videos of Chinese driving)...

soziawa 8y ago
As driver of the car you need to be able to stop the car at any time for any reason, otherwise you're not in control of your vehicle. By not being in control of your vehicle you accepted the fact that you might seriously harm someone. This is why it's manslaughter.
bkor 8y ago
> Wasn't the victim the real offender, crossing a road on unmarked spot without paying attention to oncoming traffic? If someone makes a mistake while in traffic I'm much more happy do not immediately die as a result. There's been a few instances such a thing could've happened to me.
carlmr 8y ago
An attentive driver could have at the very least mitigated what happened. Maybe even slowed down enough in order to not cause lethal harm. As a driver you're sent to driving school and you're operating a 2 ton death machine. If you're not in control of your vehicle for whatever reason (alcohol, drugs, phone) you're already at fault, even when you're not the only person to blame (Uber, the driver and the cyclist).
- bitL 8y ago
  Many drivers get into a state of shock when SHTF, i.e. they are going into an accident and suddenly are paralyzed or doing some boneheaded moves (like bikers turning more which has the opposite effect). You can see it on many videos from China when drivers just can't believe what has just happened and continue, likely in a state of a deep shock. Or when you are face-to-face with a deer on the road, lot of space on each side but you still hit the deer because you were mesmerized by it. You should always predict what could happen even if you are a pedestrian or a biker (oh, cars surely won't open doors while I am on a bike path, right?). Casually strolling through a road with traffic without caring about approaching cars is simply irresponsible. Ofc Uber driver was distracted, it was clear from the video. But I would put 80% blame on the victim.

soziawa 8y ago

> The Tempe police report said the crash was "entirely avoidable" if the Uber operator, Rafaela Vasquez, had been watching the road while the car was operating autonomously. Absolutely no surprises there. Everyone who has ever taken a picture in the dark should have known this after seeing the footage from the car.

uptown 8y ago
The videos shot in the same location by another camera give another version of how well-lit those roads are: 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-... Visibility looks considerably better than what the Uber video portrays.
- andyv 8y ago
  I live there, that road is well-lit. The Uber video is misleading.

msravi 8y ago

I'd suspect that it's harder to take over and avoid a colision in a self driving car, than a car that you're continuously in control of. You first have to recognize that the system is failing or about to fail. And that has to happen well in advance for you to take appropriate action. Doesn't seem like a reliable failover procedure, even if the person behind the wheel is paying attention.

narrowtux 8y ago
> You first have to recognize that the system is failing or about to fail For that to work, I'd like that cars that have features like this show you what they're seeing. Tesla does this a bit by showing all the cars it has detected in the dashboard. But it should go further and other car brands should do the same. Without that, you're right, you can not be sure if the car is going to react to something on its own.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  I honestly don't know where Tesla's head is. I'm surprised that when I turn on the turn signal to change lanes, and the car has detected something in my blind spot via sonar sensors, that it doesn't give me a tone or something. Let alone showing me video from one or both of that side's cameras. Tesla, in putting it's targets on self driving, has omitted a lot of low-hanging fruit that would make significant day-to-day difference to drivers right now.
  - jvreagan 8y ago
    Interesting. My 2013 BMW vibrates the steering wheel if it thinks I'm going to move sideways into something (and that includes fast moving cars coming from behind) or it beeps loudly if it thinks I'm going to hit something in front of my based on my speed and distance of the object in front. And its highly accurate IMHO. My take on self-driving is someone needs to hook up these signals to controls on the car - the "hard part" does a reliable job.
    - 8y ago

pjc50 8y ago

Proposed solution: it should be an offence for the manufacturer to describe a car as "self-driving" or "autonomous" if it is not capable of doing so entirely by itself. Systems which rely on the car driving 99% of the time and then throwing up its hands in order to make the human responsible for the crash are a ridiculous abdication of responsibility. This system would have to be described as "driver assist".

dzhiurgis 8y ago
Do you actually think a single line of description are going to change human behaviour?
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  YES!! Unfortunately people take marketing buzzwords at face value. Since the industry is not yet ready to release a true "autopilot" then they should not be using these words. People die so that Uber, Tesla and others can ab-use these words.\ Someone died that day because that "safety operator" was watching TV? Imagine how 'extra happy' the cyclist's family is right now.
  - acdha 8y ago
    We already have plenty of evidence that this is true, too: people have died using the Uber and Tesla systems while nobody has taken the Volvo safety system Uber disabled as absolving them of responsibility for driving, and those systems have been in the hands of drivers for a number of years by now. Not calling it an “autopilot” is a huge psychological queue that it's an emergency safety measure rather than something you should rely on.
- wastedhours 8y ago
  It wouldn't have helped in this case, being a test driver for the technology she should have been paying full attention, and the same goes for all of these development drivers - but for the general populace when they release a product, I'd say it would. "Autonomous" and "self-driving" (and "autopilot") are incredibly loaded terms, and manufacturers know it, and really do change the context of the interaction the customer can expect to have with the car. "Driving Assistants" help you drive, "self-driving" means, well, it drives itself, and no matter how many caveats you apply to it, you've just primed your audience with your headline. If the manufacturer expects you to be in control, then I really think they shouldn't knowingly sell it as something else. I like a good analogy and I've been struggling for one, but let's make a tenuous link to the World Cup: if I as a football team buy an "autonomous" or "self-saving" or "autogoalkeeper" goalkeeper, my expectation would be what I bought would stop balls going into the net by itself. My expectation would not be to have to position a back-up defender next to it at all times because it jumps in the wrong direction when presented with an attacker coming at a certain angle.

wepple 8y ago

Any vehicle that is not the highest level of autonomy (ie has no steering wheel, or no need for one) should have systems in place to verify that a human driver is alert, in charge of the vehicle, and able to respond immediately - eye focus cameras, steering wheel sensors, confirmation prompts, etc. Is there a valid reason this should be law?

megaman22 8y ago
Then what's the point? Might as well just drive a car the way we always have then, and avoid all this complicated crap.
- icebraining 8y ago
  The point is to improve the vehicle until it is at the highest level of autonomy.
  - megaman22 8y ago
    Well fine, but I'm gonna run old vehicles that havent been infected by this until then. Having to babysit the self driving car is a no starter
saalweachter 8y ago
Serious question, would you back-port the law to fully non-autonomous (subservient? dependent? allonomous?) vehicles? For the counter, why do you think the false positive/negative rate on the attention-sensing system would be better than the false positive/negative rate on the eg emergency brakes?

rayiner 8y ago

Uber should get charged with manslaughter. I don't say that lightly. This isn't an example of programmer error, where a alpha-version self-driving system failed. That would've been unfortunate, but not grossly negligent. Here, Uber put a "driver" in control of the car that by design wasn't able to avoid collisions with pedestrians. According to the NTSB, Uber disabled Uber's own emergency braking system (not just the built-in Volvo one) “to reduce potential for erratic behavior.”[1] That rises to gross, criminal negligence. It is no defense to say that Uber also told a human driver to be present. If Uber had directed a five year old to drive the SUV, with a back-up driver ready to take control, I think everyone would agree that qualifies as gross negligence notwithstanding the presence of the back-up driver. (To be clear, I think some risk in the name of progress is acceptable. But it's one thing to use testing on public roads to work out the kinks in the software. It's another to put vehicles on the road that you know cannot perform the basic, essential functions of driving.) [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-uber-arizona-ntsb-20180524-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-uber-arizona-nts... ("However, Uber also disabled its own emergency braking function whenever the test car was under driverless computer control, 'to reduce potential for erratic behavior.'").

icebraining 8y ago
I agree. The system was clearly not prepared for a real-world test. "Human jaywalks with bicycle" is not a one-in-a-million event. I'm not sure if this is legally possible, but frankly I think the humans made the decision to let it on the streets should be personally charged as well.
- reubenswartz 8y ago
  Yes, starting with the governor, who was very interested in bringing "self-driving" cars to the state without all the pesky regulation and testing. (There are plenty of examples of excessive regulation, but if there's one place where there should be some, it's when 2-3 ton autonomous vehicles are traveling down the road.)
- JPKab 8y ago
  If the car was expected to have software that was foolproof, why hire and pay a driver at all?

Jaruzel 8y ago

A related BBC article[1] states: "A toxicology test carried out on Ms Herzberg after the accident returned positive results for methamphetamine and marijuana. She did not look before crossing the road in a poorly lit area and was wearing dark clothes, the NTSB report says. And the reflectors and lights on her bike were at right-angles to the Uber car's path." Even though, the self-driving software failed to recognise her, and also totally not excusing the lack of attention of the Uber driver, you cannot rule out that under normal circumstances with a non-automated car, the pedestrian would not have been hit. Although this is a sad event, the pedestrian does carry a certain amount of blame here. It also shows that the biggest blocker to effective self driving vehicles is people, not technology. --- [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44243118 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44243118

emodendroket 8y ago
What does it matter what drugs the woman hit by the car was on? It changes nothing about the case. Looking at the video it's clear that at least some evasive action could have been taken by an attentive driver; at the least it should have been possible to hit the pedestrian at a lower speed. This article claims the car had six seconds to react (although I'm not sure what sense that's based on) and that the crash was avoidable if the operator had been paying attention, according to police.
- wilsonnb2 8y ago
  Because drugs have side effects, which may have contributed to why she put herself in the position to be hit by a car that she probably should have seen.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    But in this case we don't have to wonder about the circumstances; we know where the car and the pedestrian were and exactly what happened. Thus going into the toxicology report serves no real purpose other than unfairly casting aspersions on the person killed.

Molaxx 8y ago

So they'll drop it on the driver?! The whole setup was an accidental waiting to happen. Uber executives should be held responsible or this will happen again and again.

FireBeyond 8y ago
Right, Uber's position will be / is, simultaneously, one - "it's not our fault, that's why we had the human driver there", and two - "in order to cut costs, we used to have a human passenger there to record anomalies while driving - we axed that and require the human 'driver' to do so, whilst being responsible for the safety of the vehicle".

linsomniac 8y ago

Paying a "safety driver" to sit in the car seems like a small price to pay if it means this (minimum wage?) person takes the manslaughter charge instead of Uber.

sandworm101 8y ago
>> minimum wage? Lol. You can get a real non-robot driver for that price. The whole point is to get some sort of contractor non-employee to work below the minimum wage.

O1111OOO 8y ago

Another facet of this is how quickly people adopt new technologies - whether they're proven to be safe (or good) or not. Personally, I've evolved into not trusting technology, not trusting the people behind most of the technology being produced today. In contrast, this woman was so quickly at ease (I wonder what she was told beforehand, during her training) that she felt comfortable enough to watch TV. I also wonder, as this kind of tech progresses, how it will be sold to the public. Perhaps the same: "we take your security seriously"...

mcguire 8y ago

The NTSB preliminary report directly contradicts this article. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.as... On scene police reports are often unreliable. This is why the NTSB does not speculate before the investigation is completed.

Spivak 8y ago

Can we put this issue to bed once and for all? Humans are not sufficiently equipped to act as a 'backup driver' in emergency situations and any system which relies on such a thing for safety is inherently unsafe. Doesn't matter if you glue our hands to the steering wheel and hold our eyes open, if we're not doing anything 99% of the time we won't be ready to react with split second timing to recover from some failure.

tga 8y ago

Contrary to many here, I feel that it's perfectly reasonable to have a backup human driver if they are trained to act accordingly. The Japanese pointing-and-calling technique comes to mind as a good example of keeping drivers engaged: they would have to continuously, actively point at dangers and at the car's appropriate response. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LmdUz3rOQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LmdUz3rOQU (quite fascinating to watch) Combine this with short sessions (not driving around for hours with nothing to do), and I think the driver would have had a reasonable chance of preventing this accident.

will4274 8y ago
> I feel that it's perfectly reasonable to have a backup human driver if they are trained to act accordingly. Agreed. I think the right analogy is an airplane pilot. Operating an airplane and an autonomous car require special training and require professional operators. Replace car crash with plane crash. My judgement is predicted on - did Uber train their drivers? Did Uber evaluate their drivers before allowing them to operate on their own? What policies did Uber have in place for drivers? What punishment did drivers typically receive for violating policies? Did Uber occasionally review footage of the driver to verify driver compliance? It's hard to expect a layperson to pay attention for hours on end without input, but somebody appropriately trained should be able to do so.

hi41 8y ago

This incident reminds of a post Nicholas Carr wrote. We are offloading critical activities to automation but at critical times human expertise is needed to resolve dangerous situations. The driver put too much confidence in the automation and watched a TV show on her phone.

jacksmith21006 8y ago

Not really surprising. You can't be kind of driving. We really should not allow L2 and L3. Should be just L1 and then L4 and L5 where no driver is needed.

helmsb 8y ago

I had an Uber driver who was watching an extremely graphic and violent movie in his phone setup directly in his field of view. I had him drop me off early and reported it to Uber. Apparently it’s becoming more and more common talking to friends.