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Link to Cruise review of incident: https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-the-recent-sf-hit-and-run-incident/ https://getcruise.com/news/blo

• yieldcrv 3y ago
  > This is called achieving a minimal risk condition so pulling over after a collision, which resulted in dragging the human 20 feet is an interpretation of this regulation. sounds like California and Federal AVs regulations are equally not safe for the public's operations which is a good enough reason to revoke permits too, until they fix this together with the private industry
  • leni536 3y ago
    I don't think it's the job of the regulation to cover every possible corner case and to codify the exact behavior of AVs in law.
    • yieldcrv 3y ago
      in the universe of possibilities from my post, that also means removing the minimal risk regulation since it created more danger until they figure that out, this is a not-intolerable course of action. it doesn't need to be interpreted as punitive.
      • leni536 3y ago
        I wonder how the "minimal risk regulation" is worded right now.
    • ccooffee 3y ago
      From my limited understanding, web browsers were improved drastically by the creation of cross-vendor testing (e.g. Acid tests). I wonder if there is a way to do some sort of AV simulator testing that would allow us to test the different manufacturers on data collected from the others. AVs seem to all have different "mental models" of the external world, so it seems like we've got a lot of work before we can pipe data collected from this Cruise incident into a simulator and test Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc.
• gregsadetsky 3y ago
  Tragic all around. “The Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV. The AV biased rightward before braking aggressively, but still made contact with the pedestrian. The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. The driver of the Nissan Sentra fled the scene after the collision.”
• moneycantbuy 3y ago
  Currently, the human driver responsible for the incident is still at large I welcome our robot overlords.
  • batch12 3y ago
    I'll resist - and so we have balance.
  • pj_mukh 3y ago
    Amen. Really wish there was a way for tech (especially new AI tech) to wholesale abandon the city. Even just move south to the actual Silicon Valley. The city picking winners and losers like this is untenable
    • lamontcg 3y ago
      Cruise picked themselves as a loser by screwing up publicly and then trying to hide their problems.
      • pj_mukh 3y ago
        “Screwing up publicly” How else are they supposed to screw up? If the city needs more information from the cars, they should sue for it not indefinitely suspend operations. The city is looking to regulate all this like it regulates new housing (ie out of existence), there has to be consequences for it.
        • lamontcg 3y ago
          I don't know how to respond to this. If you screw up there needs to be consequences that bite. Suspending their operations is better than some meaningless fine and actually punishes them. If you can't see that, I can't help you.
          • pj_mukh 3y ago
            Note this is suspending operations indefinitely with no pathway back. No "take these steps and we'll consider re-instatement". Basically a death knell. Moreover, the city had requested the DMV do this to Waymo as well (the state DMV just declined). So yea, this is the city working to regulate driving, like it regulates housing and small business i.e. to the death while favoring incumbents that are far worse. Cruise operates fine in Austin and Phoenix. They could just move their operations to South San Francisco or further south and be better off. The city simply does not deserve the presence of tech, and for tech companies their presence in the city seems counter-effective
• deleted 3y ago
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• ralferoo 3y ago
  Reading this, it rather seems like the AV wasn't at fault in the accident itself and handled itself well. However, after coming to a complete stop, while the pedestrian was still on the ground in front of it, it then started again and drove into the pedestrian and continued for another 20 feet pushing the pedestrian along (and presumably under) the car. They say it did this to leave the car in a safe place, but this differs drastically from a normal driver who'd get out and look round the vehicle before moving it anywhere. I'd say the initial hit probably did a chunk of damage to the pedestrian, but quite likely not fatal unless their head hit the ground. But then being driven over and dragged 20 feet is going to be pretty scary and in all likelihood cause more serious injuries than the initial impact.
  • tropdrop 3y ago
    Not only dragged but actively pinned with the car stopped on top of her leg (warning – graphic photo [1]) until firefighters arrived. 1 - https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autonomous-vehicle-san-francisco-18403044.php#photo-24300416 https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autono...
  • KennyBlanken 3y ago
    > it then started again and drove into the pedestrian and continued for another 20 feet pushing the pedestrian along I like how you're parroting Cruise's spin on this: the pedestrian was "pushed along", not "run over and then dragged."
    • ralferoo 3y ago
      Given that I actually wrote "being driven over and dragged 20 feet" in my comment, what's your point exactly?
  • topspin 3y ago
    > but this differs drastically from a normal driver who'd get out and look round the vehicle before moving it anywhere That is an optimistic view of the likely behavior of your hypothetical driver. Hit and runs are commonplace. Dragging struck pedestrians around isn't all that uncommon either. Panicked motorists frequently make very bad decisions.
• tempsy 3y ago
  "A dark colored Nissan Sentra was stopped in the adjacent lane to the left of the AV. When the light turned green, the Nissan Sentra and the AV entered the intersection. Against a red light, a pedestrian entered the crosswalk on the opposite side of Market Street across from the vehicles, passed completely through the AV’s lane of travel, then stopped mid-crosswalk in front of the Nissan Sentra. The Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV." So there was this woman crossing a crosswalk in front of these two cars when she shouldn't have. I guess I don't understand why neither car stopped in front of the crosswalk when they saw this woman in the middle of the crosswalk (illegally). IMO it was a bit aggressive for Cruise to have seen this woman jaywalking and still crossed the crosswalk after detecting that the woman had just passed the car but still in the middle of the crosswalk.
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    I mean talk about an edge case, I doubt the software really considers "have pedestrians literally thrown at the car" situations all that much.
    • tempsy 3y ago
      That wasn't what I was referring to. This is in reference to a jaywalker. My point is both cars should have stopped when they saw a jaywalker crossing the street. It doesn't sound like the Cruise car stopped because it basically saw that the woman had just barely crossed to its left out of its path of travel. A more cautious driver would have slowed down at the very least or stopped completely.
    • mvdtnz 3y ago
      An obstruction in front of a vehicle is hardly an edge case.
    • minwcnt5 3y ago
      It should. Waymo appears to tests case similar to this: https://ltad.com/about/waymo-closed-course-facility.html https://ltad.com/about/waymo-closed-course-facility.html
• elteto 3y ago
  Presumably this is why the permit is being suspended: "The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet." First of all, I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large. I'm sure the Cruise car recorded the plate and they passed this to the police. Second, the corporate speak on the Cruise release is very good. Notice how it says "pulling the individual forward", in other words, the car dragged the person while it attempted to get out of the way. I guess nobody thought about that edge case. And they released a completely irrelevant simulation showing that if the other car had been an AV this wouldn't have happened. Yet, the real issue with the Cruise AV is that after a collision it just blindly tried to pull over and it dragged the person. The same thing would have happened if the person had simply collided with the car on their own.
  • dkarl 3y ago
    > I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large Ironic but completely expected. We have normalized and accepted the awfulness of human drivers to a degree that people just don't comprehend. Human would be terrible drivers even if you ignored the fact that many of them are chemically impaired, even if you ignored the fact that they are prone to rage and aggression. As we consider the safety of self-driving vehicles, there is going to be a disorienting amount of cognitive dissonance as we are forced to confront the awfulness of what we already accepted and have been living with for a century. There were over 42,000 deaths due to motor vehicle accidents in 2022. That means if we created self-driving cars that were twice as safe as humans, they might save 21,000 lives per year and also kill 21,000 people per year. That sounds insane, but it would be a sane way of improving an insane situation. Kibitzing about these individual incidents is a normal and inevitable human way to try to deal with the problem, but we need some way of measuring how deadly self-driving cars are in comparison to how deadly human drivers are. I never see that, so I wonder how we're going to know when we should loosen the reins on them? Are regulators actually doing their jobs, or are they just going to move inexorably forward while occasionally throwing bones to public outrage? The stakes here are huge, tens of thousands of deaths and horrific injuries per year, and we will unnecessarily kill lots of people if we deploy self-driving technology too fast or too slowly. The way this will probably work out in practice is regulators choosing the path of least resistance between uninformed public outrage and greed-driven industry pressure. What we should be asking for is a data-driven approach.
• LegitShady 3y ago
  >A Cruise AV named Panini This sort of nonsense where you take a serious statement and tell me the cutesy "name" of the autonomous vehicle really detracts from the seriousness of the issue. Also, the last paragraph where they try to talk about how their vehicle wouldn't have made the same mistake as the human driver, glosses over the actual issues the cruise car had which a human driver would have known not to do.
  • tczMUFlmoNk 3y ago
    I had the same thought about the name. They also didn't refer to the name again in the rest of the article, so it wasn't even setting up a convenient name to refer to the vehicle and distinguish it from other AVs; it was entirely superfluous.
    • bonestamp2 3y ago
      Ya, and since a Panini is a pressed sandwich, you'd think the PR people would immediately remove that since it's comparable to what the car did to the woman's leg.
    • ccooffee 3y ago
      "Cruise gives the cars cutesy names" is typical of fast turnaround journalism. The reporter doesn't have the time or resources to investigate the details to determine if this is indicative of a casual culture at Cruise. Instead, they can drop the easily verified vehicle name and let the readers fill-in-the-gaps. It doesn't exactly line up with CA DMV suspending the AV permit, but it adds so-called depth to the story. I wouldn't expect this offhanded fact in long-form, slower journalism. But I expect this from Reuters.
      • LegitShady 3y ago
        I didn't get it from "Fast turnaround journalism", I got it from Cruise's official statement, which was linked in the post I replied to. So basically nothing you said is relevant.
  • 3y ago
• hardcopy 3y ago
  > The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. Jesus Christ! Good riddance, I'm glad their permits are revoked. Can you imagine witnessing this and watching an autonomous vehicle slowly crushing and dragging someone underneath? That 20 ft must have felt like forever to witness. Let alone experience.
  • beau_g 3y ago
    If you think that's bad, just wait until you hear about some of the stuff human drivers do
    • andrewia 3y ago
      Yes, but the vast majority of human drivers will stop when they hit somebody, and when there's screaming under their car.
      • tsunamifury 3y ago
        Errrrr in this exact scenario the other car that hit the woman didn't stop...
        • pwnna 3y ago
          Yeah but we also would revoke their license..
  • oldgradstudent 3y ago
    They also somehow, cough, forgot, cough, to include this part in the video they've shown to reporters and the DMV.