9 ms·

Driverless Cruise car collides with SF fire truck, injuring passenger

77 points by mikhael 3y ago

StrictDabbler 3y ago
This is a technical use of the word "collides". The Cruise car failed to yield, continued at a green light, and was struck by the fire truck. So presumably it did not detect the truck. It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all. A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology. Unfortunately it requires careful coordination between many different entities so it hasn't happened. Edit: Rarely have I had a comment so misinterpreted. I am not excusing Cruise in any way. This is a major design failure for the entire industry. For clarity, automated cars should be required to have a rock-solid radio-based system that is aware of the position of any nearby emergency vehicle. All emergency vehicles should have a transponder to signal their location to automated cars. There's no reason to be relying on visual detection of flashing lights for a fire truck. A fire truck costs most of a million dollars and a transponder is not an expensive requirement. There should be a standard for radio frequency announcement before automated cars are rolled out and there is not.
- delfinom 3y ago
  >A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology. Doesn't take much audio processing to detect blaring sirens.
  - skullone 3y ago
    May not cover this scenario, but lots of emergency vehicles don't use sirens at night. The thought is, the bright flashing lights is plenty - and if the road isn't busy, why wake all the neighborhoods up on a routine service call.
  - gzer0 3y ago
    Curious, your thoughts on those that are deaf and driving?
    - loeg 3y ago
      The deaf use devices with a microphone that translates sirens into a visual signal. It is not burdensome to ask self-driving cars to have microphones.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    If the sirens are at your back, you don't want that robocar to stop and hamper the traffic but to choose a side on the road/street to either park or continue its course until there is room to be passed by the emergency vehicule. Blaring sirens can be easy to detect, doesn't mean the reaction should always be the same. [1] preferably same as other vehicules which are possibly blocking traffic for emergency vehicles.
    - TulliusCicero 3y ago
      Directionality should also be easy to detect. Should just need a handful of mics around the car and some basic audio processing.
      - prmoustache 3y ago
        What I meant is that detection is one thing, taking good decisions is another.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Sirens are designed to have an easily discernible doppler effect; a siren coming at you sounds different from a siren going away, which sounds different than a siren keeping pace with you. And furthermore, a siren behind you sounds different from a siren in front of you. Human drivers generally manage all of this fine. If computers can't, then they aren't ready to drive.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      > Blaring sirens can be easy to detect, doesn't mean the reaction should always be the same. It's ML, so I imagine a decision like this isn't hardcoded to begin with.
- relyks 3y ago
  It is not sad. Detecting emergency vehicles should be part of the operating protocol. It's an essential feature for AVs... Tech companies are asking us, everyday consumers, to trust our lives with these machines
- jjulius 3y ago
  >This is a technical use of the word "collides". >... and was struck by the fire truck. That's literally two things colliding, this isn't a "Well, OK, 'teeeeechnically', sure," situation at all. >It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all. >A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. Flashing lights mean different things depending on the light, the vehicle, and the situation - a construction vehicle with orange flashing lights is different from a police cruiser hauling ass up behind you, for instance. Drivers are responsible for discerning these differences, what makes automated cars different?
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Idk. If you say “two objects collided” that to me implies a mutual head on collision. You wouldn’t say an object at rest collided with something else.
    - jjulius 3y ago
      >Idk. If you say "two objects collided" that to me implies a mutual head on collision. The commonly used phrase for such a scenario is "head-on collision", while "collision" just means objects coming together with a solid impact - could be one object moving, could be both. >You wouldn't say anything object at rest collided with something else. No, but you'd say that the car collided with the tree rather than the tree and the car collided. In this specific instance, both cars were moving, and they collided with each other.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        I still disagree. Moving is not sufficient. If both are moving in the same direction and one hits you in the back, you would not say they collided with each other. we define collisions by whether the velocity facing side of the object hits the object.
        SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > . So presumably it did not detect the truck. Additionnally, the truck driver did not detect that the cruise car was failing to yeld. Having the lights on and priority over traffic light doesn't mean emergency drivers have and can run the traffic lights without due care.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    > Additionnally, the truck driver did not detect that the cruise car was failing to yeld. It is amazing how much of driving involves understanding how other drivers will move. Which means, to an extent, predicting their state of mind and assuming that it is rational. When a driver does not follow these assumptions (e.g. a drunk driver swerving. e.g. an vehicle failing to yield to a blatantly obvious fire truck), bad things will happen. And it is typically the fault of that unpredictable driver. This is not the system that one would design from the ground up for automated vehicles to use. But if such vehicle are on the existing roads, it is the system that they must use.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 3y ago
  > It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all. No it's not. Emergency vehicles have priority. Every other driver is licensed to use the road system if they defer to the right of way of emergency vehicles. That is a privilege that can be revoked. > A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. And costly. Instead of putting the cost burden on public institutions and emergency services, perhaps this should be incumbent upon the driverless car corporations. Additionally, these systems will fail and the driverless cars will need to detect these vehicles though additional means. > It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology. This is a hard problem. There are so many things that require solving. > Unfortunately it requires careful coordination between many different entities so it hasn't happened. And money. Lots of money.
- Leszek 3y ago
  A system that tells you the location of (actively flashing) police cars sounds somewhat abusable.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    perhaps some signal that is only viewable locally, not globally. The equivalent of the siren and lights on an emergency vehicle. Wait... Oh.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  > It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all. I hope that this is a joke. "must detect and yield to emergency vehicles the way to an emergency scene" is a known, basic driving task that human drivers do. These vehicles are intentionally loud, bright and easy to detect. Are you saying that automated vehicles cannot be expected to do known, basic driving tasks on easy-to-detect obstacles?
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  No that's silly, sorry. How do you see that actually panning out? Convince every fire and police department to retrofit every vehicle in their fleet before you have SDC's in the area? What if you want to launch to consumers in general, do you need to convince every police and fire department in the whole country? Humans can detect emergency vehicles coming by the sound of the sirens. It's definitely possible for machines to do the same.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  > A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. That may be technically achievable, but the very nature of emergency vehicle responses makes relying on such a system impractical and even undesirable. First responder vehicles already have an audible and visible signal for other road users to be aware that something is on the road which must have absolute priority, may break some or all of the rules, may move in unexpected ways, and may need to actively negotiate with other road users to ensure it can get past. Emergency responders should not need to rely on technologically fallible automated positioning systems just to ensure others don't get in their way. It is self-driving cars who must adapt to the unpredictability of emergencies and unforseen events that may happen on the road, and not emergency vehicles who must become predictable and consistent in their responses to adapt to the limitations of self-driving cars.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. That system exists. That system is the flashing lights! What do you think they're for, decoration? They exist to signal!
deleted 3y ago
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justrealist 3y ago
Interesting that 100% of the instances I've seen are Cruise. Has anyone actually seen a Waymo vehicle in a significant collision?
- Filligree 3y ago
  Yes! I've seen a Waymo car totalled by a collision. It got rear-ended by a truck at a stoplight.
  - justrealist 3y ago
    Ok well I should have been more precise, but I think people got the subtext.
    - Filligree 3y ago
      In fairness the car followed the traffic laws. It should have known better than to do that.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  's/significant collision/significant collision in which it was at fault/'
- mcrae 3y ago
  Waymo seems to have much better PR than Cruise. For example, a Waymo killed someone's dog recently which hasn't been mentioned here at all: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/waymo-car-kills-dog-self-driving-robotaxi-san-francisco https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/waymo-car-ki...
NullHypothesist 3y ago
Why is it always Cruise in these incidents? From afar, it seems that Waymo is generally safer & more methodical in their rollout while Cruise keeps announcing new cities before they've quite solved things. I get that they need to be bold if they're going to try to compete, but is it worth injuring people and creating negative press for the industry? ...Ultimately I'd love to see multiple players in this market, but I feel like Cruise has jumped the gun a bit here, and I am afraid there will be wider backlash.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I've ridden both and Cruise just sucks. Riding in their car is terrifying.
  - spankalee 3y ago
    Full, disclosure: I work at Google but... I rode in a Waymo and a Cruise in the same week recently, and terrifying is exactly how I would describe the Cruise ride. It often couldn't find it's lane and kept making abrupt swerves and corrections in the road. It would hesitate all the time, then seem to try to make it for it by gunning it forward when it made up its mind. Then five our so Cruises at an intersection near Market St couldn't figure out how to get through the light more than one car at a time, backing the whole street up. People were pissed. My friend who had the Cruise app thought it was normal and kind of fun :/ The Waymo ride, on the other had, was kind of boring. The worst part was it circled the block picking me up because it didn't see a good spot to stop right away (and I think I moved a bit from the pin). Other than that it was a very smooth ride, it showed me on a screen where all other cars and pedestrians it knew of were, it gave pedestrians enough room, it even handled a two-lane street where there were stopped cars blocking each way and it had to zig-zag across the double yellow, and yield to cars from the other direction doing the same. I will not be riding in a Cruise again for a while, and I'm kind of scared to be on the street with them.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      I'm imagining sitting in the passenger seat of a Cruise car and getting involved in a road rage incident directed at the empty driver's seat.
hyperhello 3y ago
This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins. Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer. We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents.
- monkaiju 3y ago
  Couldnt agree more, well said
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  While Go is theoretically calculable with infinite processing power, that is not the lever with which the best algorithms have claimed dominance over others.
- ghughes 3y ago
  The problem here is that Cruise launched prematurely, not that automated driving is intractable.
  - potatolicious 3y ago
    Agree it's not intractable (nearly any problem is tractable if you give yourself a long enough time horizon), but "premature" seems almost like an understatement? And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets. The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!
    - jeffbee 3y ago
      Anybody who thinks escaping a natural disaster in a car is a good idea will probably die trying. The people who died in the Oakland firestorm died in their cars. Car traffic suffers from a catastrophe where throughput falls to zero in the face of even slight overload.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
It seems this is one of the situations where just focusing on the immediate area around you is faulty. An emergency vehicle with lights on has the right of way through an intersection even if the lights don’t match. However, you would probably need longer range cameras and object detection to identify an emergency vehicle with lights approaching the intersection.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pricechild 3y ago
  > An emergency vehicle with lights on has the right of way through an intersection even if the lights don’t match. Is this true in the US? It sounds surprising to me. Here in the UK they don't get "right of way" by my understanding of the highway code. When approaching a junction they intend to pass through on red, you'll see vehicles slow to a crawl, quadruple check everyone is "giving way" (not the same as having right of way) before crossing. Edit: "Rule 219" is the most I know about, and it explicitly warns: > Do not brake harshly on approach to a junction or roundabout, as a following vehicle may not have the same view as you.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Being cautious does not mean you don’t have right of way. I highly doubt emergency vehicles in the UK lack right of way.
    - pricechild 3y ago
      I've already done the hard work and pointed the discussion at "Rule 219". Here's a handy link: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/road-users-requiring-extra-care-204-to-225 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/road-users-requ... I would love to know why your understanding is different?
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
ARandomerDude 3y ago
Sounds like it’s been a bad week. Tuesday a Cruise car drove into wet cement and got stuck. https://www.businessinsider.com/driverless-cruise-car-stuck-wet-concrete-san-francisco-av-robotaxi-2023-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/driverless-cruise-car-stuck-...
- gonzo41 3y ago
  That's not great, but crashing into a fire truck has the potential to injure other people who need firefighters. Maybe it's time to pump the breaks on self driving cars.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Are they more likely to be hit by a fire truck than other drivers? I see plenty of drivers on the road fail to yield to emergency vehicles.
    - phatfish 3y ago
      There are also "plenty" more drivers on the road than the Cruise self driving fleet.
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        Right, my question is obviously using the number of miles driven as a denominator.
    - bewaretheirs 3y ago
      NHTSA is investigating whether Tesla's "autopilot" system has trouble detecting emergency vehicles with their lights flashing (and thus is more likely to hit them). Cruise might have a similar perception problem. See for instance: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INOA-PE21020-1893.PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INOA-PE21020-1893.PDF "Since January 2018, the Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) has identified eleven crashes in which Tesla models of various configurations have encountered first responder scenes and subsequently struck one or more vehicles involved with those scenes. The incidents are listed at the end of this summary by date, city, and state." "Most incidents took place after dark and the crash scenes encountered included scene control measures such as first responder vehicle lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board, and road cones. The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes. "
coolspot 3y ago
> One passenger (…) was treated and has non-severe injuries. Injury attorneys will make those injuries cost couple millions.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Probably have to sign liability waivers before getting into one of those, no?
  - kayodelycaon 3y ago
    Liability waivers are far from bullet proof. Gross negligence will invalidate it. For example, if your rollercoaster kills someone. A judge can decide claims that were made publicly by the company will override the actual contract. (Or decide they didn't specify the risk clearly enough.) Tesla solves that by explicitly giving the driver the responsibility to maintain control of the vehicle. That doesn't apply here.
    - barbazoo 3y ago
      Interesting, thanks for clarifying.
skullone 3y ago
AI is becoming more and more human every day! Though, honestly, at least these driverless cars are backed by billion dollar companies, and can pay for the damages. I've seen plenty of less than savory people in junky cars nearly hit emergency vehicles, and they would've never had insurance to cover the damages.
atbpaca 3y ago
maybe it's time to add ears to driverless cars? It could have heard the siren and stop until it went away.
candiddevmike 3y ago
This is what happens when you don't solve a CAPTCHA correctly. People get hurt.
achandlerwhite 3y ago
How many driver-full cars collide with fire trucks each year?
- russdill 3y ago
  https://www.fama.org/forum_articles/emergency-responder-collisions-the-unknown-epidemic/ https://www.fama.org/forum_articles/emergency-responder-coll... "In 2017 alone, more than 15,000 fire department vehicles were involved in collisions nationwide."
- fipar 3y ago
  I got curious and this is what I found: https://blog.gitnux.com/fire-truck-accident-statistics https://blog.gitnux.com/fire-truck-accident-statistics If this is to be trusted: "Only around 2% of all reported motor vehicle accidents involve a fire truck." It seems not that many, but this too was (for now) just one case, so I don't think we can conclude anything. The biggest question from me though is that of liability. I'm kind of ok with driverless vehicles provided there's a human being that's liable if the vehicle kills someone, as happens with driver-full vehicles. And liable means may be found guilty of manslaughter and go to jail, not pays a fine.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    Fire trucks are far less than 2% of vehicles, though...
petee 3y ago
Do these cars have microphones listening for cues like sirens?
- bufferoverflow 3y ago
  You don't need hearing to drive. Deaf people drive.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    It's helpful, though. As a cyclist I get a lot of cues from hearing. Humans in cars are basically deaf.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    Yes but there are laws regarding using hearing if you have it (iirc?). Ie I want to say headphones are illegal here if you’re driving.
  - petee 3y ago
    Obviously, and nobody said that. But it would be silly for machine to not implement it when it is possible. And it could have alerted this car to the fire truck even before it came into camera view. On a real street, a deaf driver would have looked, seen a fire truck and stopped. People who could hear would have slowed even before the intersection. The other day I avoided getting hit by a car that pulled an illegal u-turn, by yelling it got their attention.
dreamcompiler 3y ago
It's amazing to me that driverless cars seem to have so much trouble with emergency vehicles. They already know how to avoid other cars; seems like another car that's very big, very red, and very blinky would be even easier to avoid.
jeffbee 3y ago
It has seemed to me throughout this year with the contentious CPUC ruling that Waymo has made a huge strategic error by not denouncing Cruise. They should have totally thrown Cruise under a bus, but it's too late now. The press and the government simply conflate them as "Cruise and Waymo" or "the AV industry".
philip1209 3y ago
I know the trope "Americans spent millions inventing a pen that works in space, and Russians just brought a pencil" isn't entirely accurate. But, I can't help but get similar vibes as Americans spend billions developing self-driving cars, and as the rest of the developed world just builds trains.
- bufferoverflow 3y ago
  Trains and cars aren't the same thing. A train won't help you going shopping (if you buy lots of food like we do). A train won't help you pick up your kid from school. A train won't help you pick up a piece of furniture off FB marketplace. A train won't help you, in general, going anywhere train tracks don't exist, or going door to door.
  - Mordisquitos 3y ago
    Those are of course true at face value, but (other than the furniture example) they highlight the deeper problem with American urbanism. A train is not necessarily a substitute for a car. For example, I have never needed a train to go food-shopping, because in all 7 different locations in which I have lived I have always lived at most a 10-minute-walk away from a supermarket (often significantly less). This was in different towns and cities in Spain, France and the UK. Regarding going to school, my parents never needed to drive me to school. That's because I lived 5/10 minutes walking distance from my primary school and my high school (to which some of my classmates came by train, metro or bus). This was in Madrid. And when I need to go door-to-door with no direct route, I virtually always have a trivial train/metro/bus combination available which at rush hour is faster than a car. This is in a town outside of Barcelona. I'm not saying that all America's cities (let alone its suburbs) just need more public transport and less restrictive zoning as a magical solution. The overall residential density and cultural expectations are what they are. However, the very reason that this solution appears unfeasible is part of a self-reinforcing spiral that makes even minor gradual improvements less likely to be effective, thus less likely to be implemented, thus making other minor improvements less likely to be effective... and so it goes.
    - 3y ago
creer 3y ago
Strange because around there SF fire trucks are super cautious: many human drivers ignore them and keep driving. And there are often random humans in dark clothing shuffling around in the middle of the streets. This is not an area where fire truck charge through. It would take some effort for a human driver to get hit by a fire truck.
dopamean 3y ago
I know this is purely anecdotal but Cruise cars have begun testing in my neighborhood in Austin (they've been in the city for months already) and in two separate incidents on two nights this week I've seen one completely roll through a stop sign. In the first it seemed to know there was a stop sign because it was going along at the speed limit, slowed down like it was going to stop, and then just didn't stop. I was driving through the intersection and I had to move into the opposite lane to avoid the Cruise car. The next night I was just out for a walk and observed the same behavior at a different intersection. I've had several unpleasant run-ins with these cars over the last few months. Not sure how to feel about it all.
- testbjjl 3y ago
  You feel these cars are not safe but for some reason abandon your observations to be open minded or objective. It’s crazy how far the public utility commission is willing to jeopardize public safety in the interest of autonomous experimentation.
  - minwcnt5 3y ago
    People are focusing too much on the CPUC decision. That was only about whether they can charge for rides or not. Even if the CPUC had rejected their application, all these incidents would still have occurred. It's the DMV that is responsible for whether the cars are allowed on the road, and they rubber stamped it a long time ago. My theory is that Cruise piggybacked on Waymo having a strong record and a public service running in Arizona already, and the DMV in classical government incompetence just assumed that if it works at a small scale it works just as well at a larger scale.
    - testbjjl 3y ago
      > People are focusing too much on the CPUC decision The CPUC commission decision was to allow this as though no was an impossibility.
  - dopamean 3y ago
    I'm not abandoning my observations. I'm just not willing to 100% say that something is worse than the status quo when I haven't really objectively analyzed either of case. It could be that far more human drivers roll through these stop signs in my neighborhood than I think. So is it bad that the Cruise cars did it? Absolutely. However, imo, if they do it significantly less than human drivers maybe it's better somehow? Idk. I'm not sure how to compare these things. I do know for sure that I'm not really comfortable with Cruise cars on the road but that may not be a rational feeling. I really just dont have enough information to know.
Poudlardo 3y ago
I hope this car will go to jail for some time
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Past time to mark emergency vehicles with beacons, and force e-cars to respect them. This seems an important pain point to address early.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Why is it everyone else's responsibility to accommodate automated cars?
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    Kind of the exact opposite of what I was getting at. Anyway, automated cars are inevitable. Making them respect the law, avoid emergency vehicles, stay out of restricted areas and so on is fundamental to coexisting. We can complain about how they can't do it right, or we can make it dead simple (and inexpensive) to get it right. Then fine them like crazy if they fail. The idea is to make it safe for everybody. Not to assign blame.
    - pg_1234 3y ago
      Actually we don't have to make it simple. We just fine them like crazy if they fail. AND make sure the company has no waiver against passenger lawsuits. Then you just let the market decide - get it right or go bankrupt.
      - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
        ...because? It would be wrong to reduce accidents and improve road safety?
yayitswei 3y ago
I wonder how big of a fix it is to respect emergency vehicles. Like, is it tweaking a few weights? Or is massive retraining necessary?
laverya 3y ago
Okay, but this isn't a Cruise car colliding with a SF fire truck - it's a fire truck colliding with the car! Now, it's still not good that they didn't yield to the fire truck properly. But that's a very different level of fuckup than "ran into a fire truck".

77 points by mikhael 3y ago

This is a technical use of the word "collides". The Cruise car failed to yield, continued at a green light, and was struck by the fire truck. So presumably it did not detect the truck. It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all. A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology. Unfortunately it requires careful coordination between many different entities so it hasn't happened. Edit: Rarely have I had a comment so misinterpreted. I am not excusing Cruise in any way. This is a major design failure for the entire industry. For clarity, automated cars should be required to have a rock-solid radio-based system that is aware of the position of any nearby emergency vehicle. All emergency vehicles should have a transponder to signal their location to automated cars. There's no reason to be relying on visual detection of flashing lights for a fire truck. A fire truck costs most of a million dollars and a transponder is not an expensive requirement. There should be a standard for radio frequency announcement before automated cars are rolled out and there is not.

delfinom 3y ago
>A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology. Doesn't take much audio processing to detect blaring sirens.
- skullone 3y ago
  May not cover this scenario, but lots of emergency vehicles don't use sirens at night. The thought is, the bright flashing lights is plenty - and if the road isn't busy, why wake all the neighborhoods up on a routine service call.
- gzer0 3y ago
  Curious, your thoughts on those that are deaf and driving?
  - loeg 3y ago
    The deaf use devices with a microphone that translates sirens into a visual signal. It is not burdensome to ask self-driving cars to have microphones.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  If the sirens are at your back, you don't want that robocar to stop and hamper the traffic but to choose a side on the road/street to either park or continue its course until there is room to be passed by the emergency vehicule. Blaring sirens can be easy to detect, doesn't mean the reaction should always be the same. [1] preferably same as other vehicules which are possibly blocking traffic for emergency vehicles.
  - TulliusCicero 3y ago
    Directionality should also be easy to detect. Should just need a handful of mics around the car and some basic audio processing.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      What I meant is that detection is one thing, taking good decisions is another.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Sirens are designed to have an easily discernible doppler effect; a siren coming at you sounds different from a siren going away, which sounds different than a siren keeping pace with you. And furthermore, a siren behind you sounds different from a siren in front of you. Human drivers generally manage all of this fine. If computers can't, then they aren't ready to drive.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    > Blaring sirens can be easy to detect, doesn't mean the reaction should always be the same. It's ML, so I imagine a decision like this isn't hardcoded to begin with.
relyks 3y ago
It is not sad. Detecting emergency vehicles should be part of the operating protocol. It's an essential feature for AVs... Tech companies are asking us, everyday consumers, to trust our lives with these machines
jjulius 3y ago
>This is a technical use of the word "collides". >... and was struck by the fire truck. That's literally two things colliding, this isn't a "Well, OK, 'teeeeechnically', sure," situation at all. >It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all. >A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. Flashing lights mean different things depending on the light, the vehicle, and the situation - a construction vehicle with orange flashing lights is different from a police cruiser hauling ass up behind you, for instance. Drivers are responsible for discerning these differences, what makes automated cars different?
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Idk. If you say “two objects collided” that to me implies a mutual head on collision. You wouldn’t say an object at rest collided with something else.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    >Idk. If you say "two objects collided" that to me implies a mutual head on collision. The commonly used phrase for such a scenario is "head-on collision", while "collision" just means objects coming together with a solid impact - could be one object moving, could be both. >You wouldn't say anything object at rest collided with something else. No, but you'd say that the car collided with the tree rather than the tree and the car collided. In this specific instance, both cars were moving, and they collided with each other.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      I still disagree. Moving is not sufficient. If both are moving in the same direction and one hits you in the back, you would not say they collided with each other. we define collisions by whether the velocity facing side of the object hits the object.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
prmoustache 3y ago
> . So presumably it did not detect the truck. Additionnally, the truck driver did not detect that the cruise car was failing to yeld. Having the lights on and priority over traffic light doesn't mean emergency drivers have and can run the traffic lights without due care.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  > Additionnally, the truck driver did not detect that the cruise car was failing to yeld. It is amazing how much of driving involves understanding how other drivers will move. Which means, to an extent, predicting their state of mind and assuming that it is rational. When a driver does not follow these assumptions (e.g. a drunk driver swerving. e.g. an vehicle failing to yield to a blatantly obvious fire truck), bad things will happen. And it is typically the fault of that unpredictable driver. This is not the system that one would design from the ground up for automated vehicles to use. But if such vehicle are on the existing roads, it is the system that they must use.
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echelon 3y ago
> It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all. No it's not. Emergency vehicles have priority. Every other driver is licensed to use the road system if they defer to the right of way of emergency vehicles. That is a privilege that can be revoked. > A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. And costly. Instead of putting the cost burden on public institutions and emergency services, perhaps this should be incumbent upon the driverless car corporations. Additionally, these systems will fail and the driverless cars will need to detect these vehicles though additional means. > It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology. This is a hard problem. There are so many things that require solving. > Unfortunately it requires careful coordination between many different entities so it hasn't happened. And money. Lots of money.
Leszek 3y ago
A system that tells you the location of (actively flashing) police cars sounds somewhat abusable.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  perhaps some signal that is only viewable locally, not globally. The equivalent of the siren and lights on an emergency vehicle. Wait... Oh.
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
> It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all. I hope that this is a joke. "must detect and yield to emergency vehicles the way to an emergency scene" is a known, basic driving task that human drivers do. These vehicles are intentionally loud, bright and easy to detect. Are you saying that automated vehicles cannot be expected to do known, basic driving tasks on easy-to-detect obstacles?
TulliusCicero 3y ago
No that's silly, sorry. How do you see that actually panning out? Convince every fire and police department to retrofit every vehicle in their fleet before you have SDC's in the area? What if you want to launch to consumers in general, do you need to convince every police and fire department in the whole country? Humans can detect emergency vehicles coming by the sound of the sirens. It's definitely possible for machines to do the same.
Mordisquitos 3y ago
> A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. That may be technically achievable, but the very nature of emergency vehicle responses makes relying on such a system impractical and even undesirable. First responder vehicles already have an audible and visible signal for other road users to be aware that something is on the road which must have absolute priority, may break some or all of the rules, may move in unexpected ways, and may need to actively negotiate with other road users to ensure it can get past. Emergency responders should not need to rely on technologically fallible automated positioning systems just to ensure others don't get in their way. It is self-driving cars who must adapt to the unpredictability of emergencies and unforseen events that may happen on the road, and not emergency vehicles who must become predictable and consistent in their responses to adapt to the limitations of self-driving cars.
mcpackieh 3y ago
> A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. That system exists. That system is the flashing lights! What do you think they're for, decoration? They exist to signal!

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justrealist 3y ago

Interesting that 100% of the instances I've seen are Cruise. Has anyone actually seen a Waymo vehicle in a significant collision?

Filligree 3y ago
Yes! I've seen a Waymo car totalled by a collision. It got rear-ended by a truck at a stoplight.
- justrealist 3y ago
  Ok well I should have been more precise, but I think people got the subtext.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    In fairness the car followed the traffic laws. It should have known better than to do that.
bell-cot 3y ago
's/significant collision/significant collision in which it was at fault/'
mcrae 3y ago
Waymo seems to have much better PR than Cruise. For example, a Waymo killed someone's dog recently which hasn't been mentioned here at all: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/waymo-car-kills-dog-self-driving-robotaxi-san-francisco https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/waymo-car-ki...

NullHypothesist 3y ago

Why is it always Cruise in these incidents? From afar, it seems that Waymo is generally safer & more methodical in their rollout while Cruise keeps announcing new cities before they've quite solved things. I get that they need to be bold if they're going to try to compete, but is it worth injuring people and creating negative press for the industry? ...Ultimately I'd love to see multiple players in this market, but I feel like Cruise has jumped the gun a bit here, and I am afraid there will be wider backlash.

jeffbee 3y ago
I've ridden both and Cruise just sucks. Riding in their car is terrifying.
- spankalee 3y ago
  Full, disclosure: I work at Google but... I rode in a Waymo and a Cruise in the same week recently, and terrifying is exactly how I would describe the Cruise ride. It often couldn't find it's lane and kept making abrupt swerves and corrections in the road. It would hesitate all the time, then seem to try to make it for it by gunning it forward when it made up its mind. Then five our so Cruises at an intersection near Market St couldn't figure out how to get through the light more than one car at a time, backing the whole street up. People were pissed. My friend who had the Cruise app thought it was normal and kind of fun :/ The Waymo ride, on the other had, was kind of boring. The worst part was it circled the block picking me up because it didn't see a good spot to stop right away (and I think I moved a bit from the pin). Other than that it was a very smooth ride, it showed me on a screen where all other cars and pedestrians it knew of were, it gave pedestrians enough room, it even handled a two-lane street where there were stopped cars blocking each way and it had to zig-zag across the double yellow, and yield to cars from the other direction doing the same. I will not be riding in a Cruise again for a while, and I'm kind of scared to be on the street with them.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    I'm imagining sitting in the passenger seat of a Cruise car and getting involved in a road rage incident directed at the empty driver's seat.

hyperhello 3y ago

This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins. Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer. We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents.

monkaiju 3y ago
Couldnt agree more, well said
jncfhnb 3y ago
While Go is theoretically calculable with infinite processing power, that is not the lever with which the best algorithms have claimed dominance over others.
ghughes 3y ago
The problem here is that Cruise launched prematurely, not that automated driving is intractable.
- potatolicious 3y ago
  Agree it's not intractable (nearly any problem is tractable if you give yourself a long enough time horizon), but "premature" seems almost like an understatement? And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets. The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    Anybody who thinks escaping a natural disaster in a car is a good idea will probably die trying. The people who died in the Oakland firestorm died in their cars. Car traffic suffers from a catastrophe where throughput falls to zero in the face of even slight overload.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

It seems this is one of the situations where just focusing on the immediate area around you is faulty. An emergency vehicle with lights on has the right of way through an intersection even if the lights don’t match. However, you would probably need longer range cameras and object detection to identify an emergency vehicle with lights approaching the intersection.

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pricechild 3y ago
> An emergency vehicle with lights on has the right of way through an intersection even if the lights don’t match. Is this true in the US? It sounds surprising to me. Here in the UK they don't get "right of way" by my understanding of the highway code. When approaching a junction they intend to pass through on red, you'll see vehicles slow to a crawl, quadruple check everyone is "giving way" (not the same as having right of way) before crossing. Edit: "Rule 219" is the most I know about, and it explicitly warns: > Do not brake harshly on approach to a junction or roundabout, as a following vehicle may not have the same view as you.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Being cautious does not mean you don’t have right of way. I highly doubt emergency vehicles in the UK lack right of way.
  - pricechild 3y ago
    I've already done the hard work and pointed the discussion at "Rule 219". Here's a handy link: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/road-users-requiring-extra-care-204-to-225 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/road-users-requ... I would love to know why your understanding is different?
    - jncfhnb 3y ago

ARandomerDude 3y ago

Sounds like it’s been a bad week. Tuesday a Cruise car drove into wet cement and got stuck. https://www.businessinsider.com/driverless-cruise-car-stuck-wet-concrete-san-francisco-av-robotaxi-2023-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/driverless-cruise-car-stuck-...

gonzo41 3y ago
That's not great, but crashing into a fire truck has the potential to injure other people who need firefighters. Maybe it's time to pump the breaks on self driving cars.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Are they more likely to be hit by a fire truck than other drivers? I see plenty of drivers on the road fail to yield to emergency vehicles.
  - phatfish 3y ago
    There are also "plenty" more drivers on the road than the Cruise self driving fleet.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      Right, my question is obviously using the number of miles driven as a denominator.
  - bewaretheirs 3y ago
    NHTSA is investigating whether Tesla's "autopilot" system has trouble detecting emergency vehicles with their lights flashing (and thus is more likely to hit them). Cruise might have a similar perception problem. See for instance: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INOA-PE21020-1893.PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INOA-PE21020-1893.PDF "Since January 2018, the Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) has identified eleven crashes in which Tesla models of various configurations have encountered first responder scenes and subsequently struck one or more vehicles involved with those scenes. The incidents are listed at the end of this summary by date, city, and state." "Most incidents took place after dark and the crash scenes encountered included scene control measures such as first responder vehicle lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board, and road cones. The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes. "

coolspot 3y ago

> One passenger (…) was treated and has non-severe injuries. Injury attorneys will make those injuries cost couple millions.

barbazoo 3y ago
Probably have to sign liability waivers before getting into one of those, no?
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Liability waivers are far from bullet proof. Gross negligence will invalidate it. For example, if your rollercoaster kills someone. A judge can decide claims that were made publicly by the company will override the actual contract. (Or decide they didn't specify the risk clearly enough.) Tesla solves that by explicitly giving the driver the responsibility to maintain control of the vehicle. That doesn't apply here.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    Interesting, thanks for clarifying.

skullone 3y ago

AI is becoming more and more human every day! Though, honestly, at least these driverless cars are backed by billion dollar companies, and can pay for the damages. I've seen plenty of less than savory people in junky cars nearly hit emergency vehicles, and they would've never had insurance to cover the damages.

atbpaca 3y ago

maybe it's time to add ears to driverless cars? It could have heard the siren and stop until it went away.

candiddevmike 3y ago

This is what happens when you don't solve a CAPTCHA correctly. People get hurt.

achandlerwhite 3y ago

How many driver-full cars collide with fire trucks each year?

russdill 3y ago
https://www.fama.org/forum_articles/emergency-responder-collisions-the-unknown-epidemic/ https://www.fama.org/forum_articles/emergency-responder-coll... "In 2017 alone, more than 15,000 fire department vehicles were involved in collisions nationwide."
fipar 3y ago
I got curious and this is what I found: https://blog.gitnux.com/fire-truck-accident-statistics https://blog.gitnux.com/fire-truck-accident-statistics If this is to be trusted: "Only around 2% of all reported motor vehicle accidents involve a fire truck." It seems not that many, but this too was (for now) just one case, so I don't think we can conclude anything. The biggest question from me though is that of liability. I'm kind of ok with driverless vehicles provided there's a human being that's liable if the vehicle kills someone, as happens with driver-full vehicles. And liable means may be found guilty of manslaughter and go to jail, not pays a fine.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  Fire trucks are far less than 2% of vehicles, though...

petee 3y ago

Do these cars have microphones listening for cues like sirens?

bufferoverflow 3y ago
You don't need hearing to drive. Deaf people drive.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  It's helpful, though. As a cyclist I get a lot of cues from hearing. Humans in cars are basically deaf.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  Yes but there are laws regarding using hearing if you have it (iirc?). Ie I want to say headphones are illegal here if you’re driving.
- petee 3y ago
  Obviously, and nobody said that. But it would be silly for machine to not implement it when it is possible. And it could have alerted this car to the fire truck even before it came into camera view. On a real street, a deaf driver would have looked, seen a fire truck and stopped. People who could hear would have slowed even before the intersection. The other day I avoided getting hit by a car that pulled an illegal u-turn, by yelling it got their attention.

dreamcompiler 3y ago

It's amazing to me that driverless cars seem to have so much trouble with emergency vehicles. They already know how to avoid other cars; seems like another car that's very big, very red, and very blinky would be even easier to avoid.

jeffbee 3y ago

It has seemed to me throughout this year with the contentious CPUC ruling that Waymo has made a huge strategic error by not denouncing Cruise. They should have totally thrown Cruise under a bus, but it's too late now. The press and the government simply conflate them as "Cruise and Waymo" or "the AV industry".

philip1209 3y ago

I know the trope "Americans spent millions inventing a pen that works in space, and Russians just brought a pencil" isn't entirely accurate. But, I can't help but get similar vibes as Americans spend billions developing self-driving cars, and as the rest of the developed world just builds trains.

bufferoverflow 3y ago
Trains and cars aren't the same thing. A train won't help you going shopping (if you buy lots of food like we do). A train won't help you pick up your kid from school. A train won't help you pick up a piece of furniture off FB marketplace. A train won't help you, in general, going anywhere train tracks don't exist, or going door to door.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  Those are of course true at face value, but (other than the furniture example) they highlight the deeper problem with American urbanism. A train is not necessarily a substitute for a car. For example, I have never needed a train to go food-shopping, because in all 7 different locations in which I have lived I have always lived at most a 10-minute-walk away from a supermarket (often significantly less). This was in different towns and cities in Spain, France and the UK. Regarding going to school, my parents never needed to drive me to school. That's because I lived 5/10 minutes walking distance from my primary school and my high school (to which some of my classmates came by train, metro or bus). This was in Madrid. And when I need to go door-to-door with no direct route, I virtually always have a trivial train/metro/bus combination available which at rush hour is faster than a car. This is in a town outside of Barcelona. I'm not saying that all America's cities (let alone its suburbs) just need more public transport and less restrictive zoning as a magical solution. The overall residential density and cultural expectations are what they are. However, the very reason that this solution appears unfeasible is part of a self-reinforcing spiral that makes even minor gradual improvements less likely to be effective, thus less likely to be implemented, thus making other minor improvements less likely to be effective... and so it goes.
  - 3y ago

creer 3y ago

Strange because around there SF fire trucks are super cautious: many human drivers ignore them and keep driving. And there are often random humans in dark clothing shuffling around in the middle of the streets. This is not an area where fire truck charge through. It would take some effort for a human driver to get hit by a fire truck.

dopamean 3y ago

I know this is purely anecdotal but Cruise cars have begun testing in my neighborhood in Austin (they've been in the city for months already) and in two separate incidents on two nights this week I've seen one completely roll through a stop sign. In the first it seemed to know there was a stop sign because it was going along at the speed limit, slowed down like it was going to stop, and then just didn't stop. I was driving through the intersection and I had to move into the opposite lane to avoid the Cruise car. The next night I was just out for a walk and observed the same behavior at a different intersection. I've had several unpleasant run-ins with these cars over the last few months. Not sure how to feel about it all.

testbjjl 3y ago
You feel these cars are not safe but for some reason abandon your observations to be open minded or objective. It’s crazy how far the public utility commission is willing to jeopardize public safety in the interest of autonomous experimentation.
- minwcnt5 3y ago
  People are focusing too much on the CPUC decision. That was only about whether they can charge for rides or not. Even if the CPUC had rejected their application, all these incidents would still have occurred. It's the DMV that is responsible for whether the cars are allowed on the road, and they rubber stamped it a long time ago. My theory is that Cruise piggybacked on Waymo having a strong record and a public service running in Arizona already, and the DMV in classical government incompetence just assumed that if it works at a small scale it works just as well at a larger scale.
  - testbjjl 3y ago
    > People are focusing too much on the CPUC decision The CPUC commission decision was to allow this as though no was an impossibility.
- dopamean 3y ago
  I'm not abandoning my observations. I'm just not willing to 100% say that something is worse than the status quo when I haven't really objectively analyzed either of case. It could be that far more human drivers roll through these stop signs in my neighborhood than I think. So is it bad that the Cruise cars did it? Absolutely. However, imo, if they do it significantly less than human drivers maybe it's better somehow? Idk. I'm not sure how to compare these things. I do know for sure that I'm not really comfortable with Cruise cars on the road but that may not be a rational feeling. I really just dont have enough information to know.

Poudlardo 3y ago

I hope this car will go to jail for some time

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Past time to mark emergency vehicles with beacons, and force e-cars to respect them. This seems an important pain point to address early.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
Why is it everyone else's responsibility to accommodate automated cars?
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Kind of the exact opposite of what I was getting at. Anyway, automated cars are inevitable. Making them respect the law, avoid emergency vehicles, stay out of restricted areas and so on is fundamental to coexisting. We can complain about how they can't do it right, or we can make it dead simple (and inexpensive) to get it right. Then fine them like crazy if they fail. The idea is to make it safe for everybody. Not to assign blame.
  - pg_1234 3y ago
    Actually we don't have to make it simple. We just fine them like crazy if they fail. AND make sure the company has no waiver against passenger lawsuits. Then you just let the market decide - get it right or go bankrupt.
    - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
      ...because? It would be wrong to reduce accidents and improve road safety?

yayitswei 3y ago

I wonder how big of a fix it is to respect emergency vehicles. Like, is it tweaking a few weights? Or is massive retraining necessary?

laverya 3y ago

Okay, but this isn't a Cruise car colliding with a SF fire truck - it's a fire truck colliding with the car! Now, it's still not good that they didn't yield to the fire truck properly. But that's a very different level of fuckup than "ran into a fire truck".