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> The California DMV said in a separate release that Cruise driverless "vehicles are approved to operate on public roads between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. at a maximum
by TrainedMonkey 5y ago
> The California DMV said in a separate release that Cruise driverless "vehicles are approved to operate on public roads between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. at a maximum speed limit of 30 miles per hour."
At night only testing at super low speed. It's a good way to get started, but definitely not an autonomous taxi that title implies.
- Retric 5y ago30MPH isn’t super low speeds, it’s plenty fast for collisions to be dangerous.
- vkou 5y agoFor car-pedestrian, car-bicycle, and car-motorbike collisions, yes. For car-car collisions, not really. Yes, getting into a head-on 30-30 MPH collision is pretty bad, but you're more than likely going to walk away from it, especially if you're in the back seat.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- google234123 5y ago"Pitt et al. (1990) examined about 1,000 urban crashes with pedestrians younger than 20 years of age taken from NHTSA's Pedestrian Injury Causation Study (PICS) data. They found that, compared to crashes with vehicle travel speeds of 10 - 19 mph, the risk of serious injury (or death) was 2.1 for speeds of 20 - 29 mph, 7.2 for speeds of 30 - 39 mph, and 30.7 for speeds of 40 mph or more." https://one.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/hs809012.html https://one.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/hs809012.ht...
- appletrotter 5y agoReally not sure how valid this 30 year old study is anymore!
- bagels 5y agoI think that is a good point, as materials and pedestrian safety features of cars have changed. Seems unlikely the relationship between speed and severity would change too though.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoReporting would change too. People don't report crashes where there's no damage other than a hood and some grill plastic (such a crash may have broken a hip back in "the day"). This is even more true now that cars with nonzero amounts of pedestrian safety features have made it to the bottom of the market where people don't have the luxury of being able to mindlessly report everything to insurance and the guy who got hit and has only a minor injury looks at the situation and doesn't see a potential payday.
- zerocrates 5y agoPresumably from the title it's about a car hitting a pedestrian... I doubt there's been much significant innovation in that kind of safety since the 90s. Features to prevent/alert to collisions, sure, but I'd assume this is about hitting someone when going X speed; surely that's pretty similar now and then.
- darwinwhy 5y agoIn fact it's probably gotten worse with the growth in size of US cars. Larger cars kill pedestrians and cyclists at higher rates.
- renewiltord 5y agoThere were active changes to cars to reduce pedestrian harm. The most visible is probably the ban of pop up headlamps. Not taking a position on the study. Just felt like sharing.
- tialaramex 5y agoI actually bounced off a car with modern safety maybe 10 years ago or so, trashed a good jacket but I wasn't even shaken enough to bother getting looked over at an Urgent Care, I continued walking to lunch. Not a high speed collision of course, it was a quiet inner city street and I looked the wrong way (one way street, I looked where cars should be if it was a two way street, oops), but I suspect a 1970s car would have been markedly worse for a pedestrian. One key trick other than the pop-up headlamps going away, was a gap between the bodywork and harder internal surfaces. As I understand it that goes something like this: Think about a large steel panel such as a car bonnet (hood?), obviously it's no comfort blanket, smacking into that isn't a good idea, but it will bend and absorb lots of energy during impact. Now, think about an engine block, that's not going to bend at all. In a desire to give a more stream-lined look, older cars would mount that large panel almost touching the engine block and other large stiff elements, because why not. Well, dead pedestrians is why not. If you add a gap that gap absorbs lots of energy that otherwise is going to cause injuries to a pedestrian. I can't prove it, but I credit that for the difference between walking away with a damaged jacket and spending the rest of my working day in A&E being told I'm not dying so can't cut to the front of the queue, but I'm also not OK and so mustn't leave yet.
- mym1990 5y agoHave been a statistic in all of these buckets, can confirm that hitting things at faster speeds causes more injuries heh
- akira2501 5y ago1/6 of fatal accidents are vehicle vs. pedestrian. I don't have great data on motorcycles, but speed and or alcohol are the most common factors in those accidents as opposed to other vehicles.
- heavyset_go 5y agoFor reference, a fall from about 30ft would take about 1.4 seconds and you'd reach a velocity of 30mph.
- benatkin 5y agoChanges quite a bit with getting sideswiped while walking around the roadway, my #1 fear as a pedestrian. Looked up some statistics and this is more common than getting hit while crossing the street. Two more things to figure out though: - How often is an accident while walking along the roadway getting sideswiped, instead of just a full-on crash - The equivalent of being run over by a car doesn't happen when falling 30 feet. I wonder how much this accounts for getting hurt as a pedestrian. This is just what I thought of, it is also a threat to cars, but that would be offset more by the velocity of the car that got hit than it would be by the velocity of a pedestrian. (For example, a car that is going 25mph and gets rear-ended by a car going 30mph) Also there is often hitting the brakes before collision. So it will be slower sometimes.
- silisili 5y agoDo these cars have billboards or indicators of some kind? If not, they really should. In my town I wait for cars to stop before crossing, and make eye contact or get a friendly wave to let me know they see me. If a driverless car just stops, I don't feel comfortable walking in front of it if there's no indication that it sees me. How could that be solved?
- smilekzs 5y agoDrive.AI, before they went defunkt, had LED billboards not unlike what you described. It was a gimmick that didn't take off in the rest of the industry due to the universal presence of a safety driver.
- fitzie 5y agothey should have some sort of hazard like flash when they are stopped for an obstruction like humans in the roadway. that would also reduce the rear end situation where they are unreasonably stopped in traffic due to crappy software.
- KorematsuFredt 5y agoIf it is San Fransisco city than 30 MPH is not bad at all. I do not imagine other cars driving > 40mph.
- spike021 5y agoPeople have been crushed and killed just when their stopped car starts moving because it wasn't parked in gear or with their parking brake engaged. Speed being "slow" or "fast" here is unrelated.
- toufka 5y agoOf course speed is related to safety. See page 2 for the actual data: https://www.littlerock.gov/media/2484/the-relation-between-speed-and-crashes.pdf https://www.littlerock.gov/media/2484/the-relation-between-s...
- spike021 5y agoMy point, however, was that the parent poster didn't seem to think so.
- stooliepidgin 5y agoAnton Yelchin
- spike021 5y agoExactly who I was thinking of as a well-known example.
- grandmczeb 5y agoThe speed limit for most residential and commercial streets in SF is 25mph - something like 97% of all street segments in SF have a limit of 30mph or lower.
- m463 5y agoI think one interesting property about nighttime driving is that lots of objects and markers are high contrast. Lights of other cars, highway markings, what can be illuminated by headlights/etc (aside from folks crossing the street in non-reflective dark clothing) I think the worst time to drive - as a human - is right when the sun is coming up or going down, or under tree cover when you go into and out of shadow.
- dreamcompiler 5y agoSome recognition tasks might be easier at night but I expect that's not the reason permission was granted for those hours. It's almost certainly because there's less other traffic (and fewer pedestrians) at night.
- nielsbot 5y agoAren't they relying on LIDAR tho? Night/day all (roughly) same.
- cromka 5y agoI’d imagine they use both to improve accuracy.
- akira2501 5y ago> I think the worst time to drive - as a human - is right when the sun is coming up or going down, or under tree cover when you go into and out of shadow. Fatal accidents do indeed spike around these times, although they seem to be worse in the evenings than mornings, and more pronounced in southern states than northern ones.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]