8 ms·

Notes on Cruise's Pedestrian Accident

105 points by kaycebasques 3y ago

jstanley 3y ago
I found this part quite notable: > 10-02, 9:29pm: accident occurs > 10-03, 1:30am: AV back at Cruise facility I don't think the police would let an ordinary driver have their car back 4 hours after they ran over a pedestrian! I think they'd keep it for some time to aid their investigation. Is Cruise treated differently here, or am I just wrong? I'm also surprised they seem to be sharing video by starting a video call and then screen-sharing while it plays?? I'm struggling to come up with a better strategy for degrading the quality.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > I'm also surprised they seem to be sharing video by starting a video call and then screen-sharing while it plays?? I'm struggling to come up with a better strategy for degrading the quality. It's a very effective way to prevent the video from being spread through the entire Internet faster than anyone can reasonably act.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Usually subjects of investigation don't get to choose the mode in which they share evidence
    - nmeofthestate 3y ago
      That's true - without excusing Cruise, the investigators really dropped the ball by accepting that way of a video being shared with them.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Investigations should happen blameless, behind closed doors, not with stuff being spread all over the internet and armchair experts negatively impacting the investigation with completely unfounded speculations. That's at least the way aeronautic and European railway investigations happen, and for good reasons - you don't want people holding back evidence for fear of repercussions.
      - Vecr 3y ago
        In the US people on the Internet will have ATC recordings almost immediately. The government's accountable to the people, not the other way around.
- simondotau 3y ago
  Presumably the reasons why police want to retain a car in a investigation don't apply here. They know who (what) the driver was, and with the telemetry from the vehicle, they can know exactly what happened. They don't need to collect evidence to prove which human was behind the wheel. There's no point searching for drugs or alcohol. They don't need to dust for fingerprints. They don't need to confirm that damage to the vehicle corroborates eyewitness accounts about what collided where.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Still doesn't make any sense. NTSB doesn't let airline take custody of plane immediately. You want time to recover data, investigate the physical condition of the aircraft/vehicle, etc. How thorough of the job can the police do in the dark from 9:30pm-1:30am? This completely looks like a special snowflake exception that Cruise, given its behavior afterwards, should not have had... and at this point, should not be trusted to have again.
    - mcny 3y ago
      I think you hinted at the real reason but didn’t spell it out. There are no protocols to follow, lists of checkboxes to check, or “perpetrators” to harass in a self-driving car collision (I have to remind myself to avoid the word accident). At least that is my guess. It is important to remember I think that to the police officers this is just a day in their job they are clocking in and out. They are just following their instructions. It might be life changing for someone who got hit but the world just keeps spinning.
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        How do you check the basic mechanicals of the car at that hour? So that the driver (automated or human) cannot later claim "oh there was a mechanical failure" ? What's to stop Cruise or other bad actors to take possession of the car and then clip the brake lines to claim it was actually an OEM vanilla car mechanical fault and not their AV hardware/software? It's not that outlandish. You already have them doing a whole bunch of lies of omission and smoke screening their video evidence, enough so to trigger a wave of resignation/firings.
lynx23 3y ago
As a blind pedestrian, I am sincerely afraid of the future. The first time that I feel like innovation is putting me in danger.
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  Why? You'll get much cheaper taxi services + the cars around you will be much safer (and the laws will be changed so far fewer bad drivers will be allowed to drive).
  - lynx23 3y ago
    I would happily pay extra money for a human driver. Especially because I rely on their cooperation when getting in / out. A human taxi driver will call out to me when he stops, knowing that it isn't easy to destinguish him from other cars. And when getting out, I often ask the driver for the favour of showing me the door, when I drive to a place I dont know well. These are all things a robotaxi can not do for me. Which means the service quality will go down. I dont care about prices going down if the service is also diminished.
- aeonik 3y ago
  To ameliorate your fear, a practical and potentially effective solution may be wearing a retroreflector, or some sort of light-based signalling device that would make it much more clear that you should not be run over.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    This remedy was already valid for normal human drivers. I am more concerned about automatic drivers not honoring the "Vertrauensgrundsatz" (principle of trust) which is a traffic law from my area whic, to my knowledge, doesnt even have a counterpart in the US. Basically, drivers learn that there are two classes of pedestrians: "normal" pedestrians, and those which basically cant be trusted. IOW, drunk or blind people. If you run over one of those, the likelihood of it being your fault rises.
zie 3y ago
Thanks for doing this danluu.com. I hope our journalists go back to being useful about sharing facts again and not just marketing like they are doing now.
theshrike79 3y ago
Ah, this wasn't _Tom_ Cruise, but Cruise the company =)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
I think autonomous vehicles are exceptional occasion to apply similar practices to commercial airlines. The reason it could not be done with cars is the drivers. Drivers simply cannot be held to the same standard as commercial pilots or staff. Remove the driver from the equation and it might just be possible to replicate the process. That assumes regulation that will require "operators" to provide truthful reporting of accidents.
- ttcbj 3y ago
  I really like the admiralcloudberg blog, which provides extensive analysis of plane crashes and the NTSB investigation that follows. I hadn’t thought of it, but I think the idea of similar investigations for self-driving car accidents is a really great idea. Though, one recurrent theme of that blog is that blame and persecution are generally counterproductive to understanding the accident and improving safety.
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    Blame and persecution are not counterproductive, they are crucial to improving safety. It is called accountability and if nobody is accountable for anything then there is no actual motivation to get businesses and financial institutions to do anything about it. What is counterproductive is blaming and persecuting wrong things. The goal is to get companies to be accountable for being committed to taking this process seriously, providing honest information whenever it is needed and then to honestly implement the recommendations once the process is concluded. We know that technical bugs happen regardless of good intentions. So we should err on the side of being lenient. Where we should not be lenient about is simple negligence where all of the information was available and the decision was made regardless. For example, if the manufacturer knew that bolts were lying around and decided to save on the costs by being willingly blind to the fact. And where real persecution should strictly follow is hiding information and evidence that is obviously needed to improve safety.
    - hardcopy 3y ago
      > Blame and persecution are not counterproductive, they are crucial to improving safety. There's a good chapter on blame that you should read in this book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accidents/Jessie-Singer/9781982129682 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...
sandworm101 3y ago
This reminds me of the case discussed in the movie Bridge of Spies. There were multiple impacts. One side sees one accident, starting and the first impact and ending at the second. The other sees two distinct accidents, one impact and a second separate impact rather disconnected from the first. Crashes are messy. They are always up for interpretation. That is the reality of driving. Only in hindsight can we apply the arbitrary legal rules to allocate blame. The reality is almost always that everyone is at least partially at fault.
- logifail 3y ago
  > The reality is almost always that everyone is at least partially at fault That seems like quite an astonishing claim.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    But that is how it works out. In this situation the pedestrian apparently didnt follow one rule. The first car didnt follow another. And the second did something so odd that, if by a human driver, probably qualifies as negligence. Nobody has clean hands. The legal debate is about who has more or less blame, who has enough to be adjudicated reaponsable for which resulting injuries.
    - watwut 3y ago
      From legal standpoint, situation in which one driver is entirely at fault and another not at all is completely standard. Likewise ethically, morally or responsibility wise. The "everyone at fault" sometimes happen, but it is not clear at all whether it is majority of cases.
      - Andrex 3y ago
        "Fault" is probably too loaded a term. "Contributing to the crash / making the accident worse than it could have been" may be more accurate but longer winded.
alexey-salmin 3y ago
* 10:05am: Wood and VP of Global Government Affairs Prashanthi Raman have virtual meeting with Mayor of SF's transpo advisor. Wood shows full video, "reportedly with internet connectivity issues from his home computer"; neither Wood nor Raman brings up or discusses pullover or dragging * 10:30am: Virtual meeting with NHTSA. Wood shows full video, "again having internet connectivity issues causing video to freeze and/or black-out in key places including after initial impact" and again not bringing up or discussing pullover or dragging * 11:05am: Cruise regulatory, legal, and systems integrity employees have pre-meeting for DMV and California Highway Patrol (CHP) briefing; Cruise team doesn't discuss pullover and dragging * 11:30am: hybrid in-person and virtual meeting with DMV and CHP. Wood shows full video, again with internet connectivity issues and again not bringing up or discussing pullover or dragging Internet connection issues, can happen to anyone
- dpflan 3y ago
  Oh indeed, at least the presenter wasn’t stuck as a cat avatar. That would make the coincidental recurrence of connectivity issues even funnier, but shouldn’t the authorities have received a copy of the video, devoid of “internet connection” issues? Or was it not in legal position to demand the artifact and just have it shown over Zoom?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    They claim the NHTSA got one. However, if, ah, connectivity issues obscure the video of the Bad Thing in the meeting, and the Bad Thing is not mentioned in the meeting, then the chances of it being noticed even if a video was sent do decline.
    - dpflan 3y ago
      True, I would expect someone to review the footage in entirety without the presenter biasing the presentation.
      - rsynnott 3y ago
rsynnott 3y ago
I mean, the constant connectivity problems stretch credulity just a little.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  That occurred to me as well. Also, it seemed notable that the one meeting that was not marked by connectivity problems seemed like the one with the audience least likely to have regulatory implications (SFPD/SFFD).
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    I suppose, charitably, that was the last one, so maybe they'd gotten around to complaining to the telco by that point :)
    - FateOfNations 3y ago
      Somewhere it was mentioned that all these meetings were being conducted by different sets of Cruise team members… could have just been that the person presenting at those meetings didn't have the same connectivity issues.
- progbits 3y ago
  Yeah I don't buy that at all, sounds like made up excuse that is hard to disprove. But even if true, clearly the Cruise folks must have expected questions about the dragging and if none came should have wondered why. They witheld evidence, intentionally or not, but knowingly.
- gwern 3y ago
  If it was the same guy, why wouldn't he have constant connectivity problems if he has any problems? I know with my home Internet, when it's flaky, it's often flaky for days or weeks at a time. (The real question of course is why the video conferencing software was willing to drop video, why it wasn't uploaded as a file to a cloud server, why he didn't confirm they'd seen everything, and so on and so forth - but glitchy home connections are, and always have been, a fact of life.)
zelos 3y ago
> while a human might react to the collision at -2.9s and slow down or stop, "scene understanding" as a human might do it is non-existent in most or perhaps all AVs... That's a good point. If you see a pedestrian hit by a car anywhere near your car, you stop, right? If you see a pedestrian walk out into the road against the lights you at least slow down and/or cover the brake pedal because who knows what they're going to do?
- ddalex 3y ago
  I think this is a critical part of cracking self-driving cars - "scene understanding", or more accurately, identification AND MODELLING of all traffic participants. A tiger chasing a deer will identify and model what the deer will do, what the terrain is, and take appropriate decisions on how to best pursue; a good driver will do the same - e.g. understanding that a round object bouncing in the street of a residential neighborhood is a ball, and where a ball comes, a child will follow. I also think that this feedback loop of "Model the world, take action, observe, update model" is a key component of consciousness (whereas we model ourselves!) and key to AGI. I would not be surprised that AGI comes from a self-driving car development model.
  - nunez 3y ago
    I'm guessing this is one of the things that Tesla's Dojo supercomputer combined with the billions of miles collected from their fleet is trying to solve
    - ddalex 3y ago
      I'm guessing not; what NNs do is pattern matching. Basically they try to "remember" what should be done at in a given situation, but does not have continuous representation and modelling of other objects; not even "object permanence" - when a car disappears from their world, it's gone.
      - peterfirefly 3y ago
        Tesla's FSD does actually have a degree of object permanence. It would be a lot of worse if it didn't.
SilverBirch 3y ago
So much to dig through here. >Wood shows full video, "reportedly with internet connectivity issues from his home computer" There's one for the back to office lot. >wheels were moving at different speeds (because one wheel was spinning on pedestrian's leg) Eurgh. But in general, this is Cruise learning what traditional car companies already knew - you need to act with integrity. I don't see how senior executives at cruise could reasonably be allowed to continue to work in any safety critical industry after this.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Well, they need to act with integrity towards safety regulators, anyway. I wouldn’t say the auto industry, broadly, has the greatest reputation for integrity.
  - logifail 3y ago
    > I wouldn’t say the auto industry, broadly, has the greatest reputation for integrity Compared with whom? Boeing?
    - michaelt 3y ago
      Well, from the streetcar conspiracy [1] to the Ford Pinto [2] to Dieselgate [3] the auto industry isn't exactly famous for honesty. And there's also the climate change, and the ~40,000 deaths per year in car accidents in the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefit_analysis,_the_Pinto_Memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
    - chefandy 3y ago
      How about VW deliberately cheating emissions tests with their fuel injector code? You can be notably bad without being the worst.
- 3y ago
sumodm 3y ago
> 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. I wonder whether this flagged alarms in Cruise's systems when the pedestrian crossed in a potentially dangerous situation. These kind of 2nd and 3rd order conditions seems particularly hard to train for.
- 05 3y ago
  Is there anything here to train for? The initial collision wasn't in any way Cruise vehicle's fault; but the subsequent repositioning shows their procedures and sensor coverage are lacking. Oh, and their integrity.
  - skywhopper 3y ago
    Yes, if a pedestrian is crossing against the light in front of you, you slow down even if you don’t think you’ll hit them, even if they’re already past your lane. If the pedestrian stops on the street they are crossing against the light, you slow down, even if they aren’t in your path, especially if you are aware of the vehicles around you and know the pedestrian is in the path of another nearby vehicle. If you see the vehicle in the lane next to you speeding up when you’ve noticed the pedestrian is stopped in their lane of traffic, you slow down and maybe veer away if possible. If you see that the vehicle next to you has hit a pedestrian, you immediately hit the brakes rather than wait 2.4 seconds until you’ve determined you’re going to hit that pedestrian before you decide to hit your brakes. Those are all things an alert human driver should be ready and able to do. I would expect a quality AV system to do them better than a human, but in this case, none of those things appeared to happen. This AV decided “pedestrian is out of my lane, continue accelerating!” Only stopping when the pedestrian was right in front of the vehicle.
    - NavinF 3y ago
      > This AV decided “pedestrian is out of my lane, continue accelerating!” That's what human drivers do too. If you slowed down anticipating that a pedestrian's collision with some other car might fling their body in front of your car, you'd never make it to your destination. There's just too many crazy people in SF
littlestymaar 3y ago
> 10:05am: Wood and VP of Global Government Affairs Prashanthi Raman have virtual meeting with Mayor of SF's transpo advisor. Wood shows full video, "reportedly with internet connectivity issues from his home computer"; neither Wood nor Raman brings up or discusses pullover or dragging > 10:30am: Virtual meeting with NHTSA. Wood shows full video, "again having internet connectivity issues causing video to freeze and/or black-out in key places including after initial impact" and again not bringing up or discussing pullover or dragging Convenient “internet connectivity issues” indeed. Looks a lot like students willingly corrupting zip files when sending assignments in order to gain time when they couldn't finish…
- sdwr 3y ago
  Real "dog ate my homework" moment. Morally, it's more tasteful than outright denials at least.
bkandel 3y ago
> Although, as noted above, the instructions for the narrative section of the SGO report require submitters to “[p]rovide a written description of the pre-crash, crash, and post-crash details,” some Cruise interviewees expressed their belief that the requirements were narrower. In their view, the narrative called for a description of the collision itself, and thus did not include post-collision actions like the pullover maneuver and pedestrian dragging. speechless here
- tempaway12751 3y ago
  Stock options doing the thinking for them
nunez 3y ago
Did the driver of the Sentra ever get caught? And what are the odds that the ped who was hit got an extremely nice settlement from this? I can only imagine the flooding of emails and calls they got from injury lawyers after Forbes broke the story Also, based on how the Cruise AVs we saw in Houston perform, this was all but inevitable. They drove extremely erratically and casually drove down wrong way lanes several times.
NavinF 3y ago
This article takes quite a long time to get to the accident itself: > 10-02, 9:29pm: human-driven Nissan Sentra strikes pedestrian in crosswalk of 4-way intersection at 5th & Market in SF >Pedestrian entered crosswalk against a red light and "Do Not Walk" signal and then paused in Nissan's lane. Police report cited both driver and pedestrian for code violations and concluded that the driver was "most at fault" >The impact launched the pedestrian into the path of the Crusie AV >Cruise AV braked but still hit pedestrian >After coming to a complete stop, the AV moved to find a safe place to stop, known as a "'minimal risk condition' pullover maneuver (pullover maneuver) or 'secondary movement.'" >AV drove up to 7.7mph for 20 feet, dragging pedestrian with it >Nissan driver fled the scene (hit and run)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Vecr 3y ago
> Cruise incident response playbook outlines roles of Incident Commander, SLT, CMT as well as how to respond in the weeks after incident. Playbook was not followed, said to be "aborted" because "too manually intensive" What? Who ran risk management for this company? If you're facing program halt you keep running the plan until you run out of money to pay your employees, and then keep running it after if you can get volunteers. If these people actually cared about AVs and safety, or even the continued existence of their company, they would work to extract every single detail that could possibly help any AV or robotics/AI company in the future, up to a very high cost for themselves. Deeply unserious.

105 points by kaycebasques 3y ago

I found this part quite notable: > 10-02, 9:29pm: accident occurs > 10-03, 1:30am: AV back at Cruise facility I don't think the police would let an ordinary driver have their car back 4 hours after they ran over a pedestrian! I think they'd keep it for some time to aid their investigation. Is Cruise treated differently here, or am I just wrong? I'm also surprised they seem to be sharing video by starting a video call and then screen-sharing while it plays?? I'm struggling to come up with a better strategy for degrading the quality.

mschuster91 3y ago
> I'm also surprised they seem to be sharing video by starting a video call and then screen-sharing while it plays?? I'm struggling to come up with a better strategy for degrading the quality. It's a very effective way to prevent the video from being spread through the entire Internet faster than anyone can reasonably act.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Usually subjects of investigation don't get to choose the mode in which they share evidence
  - nmeofthestate 3y ago
    That's true - without excusing Cruise, the investigators really dropped the ball by accepting that way of a video being shared with them.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Investigations should happen blameless, behind closed doors, not with stuff being spread all over the internet and armchair experts negatively impacting the investigation with completely unfounded speculations. That's at least the way aeronautic and European railway investigations happen, and for good reasons - you don't want people holding back evidence for fear of repercussions.
    - Vecr 3y ago
      In the US people on the Internet will have ATC recordings almost immediately. The government's accountable to the people, not the other way around.
simondotau 3y ago
Presumably the reasons why police want to retain a car in a investigation don't apply here. They know who (what) the driver was, and with the telemetry from the vehicle, they can know exactly what happened. They don't need to collect evidence to prove which human was behind the wheel. There's no point searching for drugs or alcohol. They don't need to dust for fingerprints. They don't need to confirm that damage to the vehicle corroborates eyewitness accounts about what collided where.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Still doesn't make any sense. NTSB doesn't let airline take custody of plane immediately. You want time to recover data, investigate the physical condition of the aircraft/vehicle, etc. How thorough of the job can the police do in the dark from 9:30pm-1:30am? This completely looks like a special snowflake exception that Cruise, given its behavior afterwards, should not have had... and at this point, should not be trusted to have again.
  - mcny 3y ago
    I think you hinted at the real reason but didn’t spell it out. There are no protocols to follow, lists of checkboxes to check, or “perpetrators” to harass in a self-driving car collision (I have to remind myself to avoid the word accident). At least that is my guess. It is important to remember I think that to the police officers this is just a day in their job they are clocking in and out. They are just following their instructions. It might be life changing for someone who got hit but the world just keeps spinning.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      How do you check the basic mechanicals of the car at that hour? So that the driver (automated or human) cannot later claim "oh there was a mechanical failure" ? What's to stop Cruise or other bad actors to take possession of the car and then clip the brake lines to claim it was actually an OEM vanilla car mechanical fault and not their AV hardware/software? It's not that outlandish. You already have them doing a whole bunch of lies of omission and smoke screening their video evidence, enough so to trigger a wave of resignation/firings.

lynx23 3y ago

As a blind pedestrian, I am sincerely afraid of the future. The first time that I feel like innovation is putting me in danger.

peterfirefly 3y ago
Why? You'll get much cheaper taxi services + the cars around you will be much safer (and the laws will be changed so far fewer bad drivers will be allowed to drive).
- lynx23 3y ago
  I would happily pay extra money for a human driver. Especially because I rely on their cooperation when getting in / out. A human taxi driver will call out to me when he stops, knowing that it isn't easy to destinguish him from other cars. And when getting out, I often ask the driver for the favour of showing me the door, when I drive to a place I dont know well. These are all things a robotaxi can not do for me. Which means the service quality will go down. I dont care about prices going down if the service is also diminished.
aeonik 3y ago
To ameliorate your fear, a practical and potentially effective solution may be wearing a retroreflector, or some sort of light-based signalling device that would make it much more clear that you should not be run over.
- lynx23 3y ago
  This remedy was already valid for normal human drivers. I am more concerned about automatic drivers not honoring the "Vertrauensgrundsatz" (principle of trust) which is a traffic law from my area whic, to my knowledge, doesnt even have a counterpart in the US. Basically, drivers learn that there are two classes of pedestrians: "normal" pedestrians, and those which basically cant be trusted. IOW, drunk or blind people. If you run over one of those, the likelihood of it being your fault rises.

zie 3y ago

Thanks for doing this danluu.com. I hope our journalists go back to being useful about sharing facts again and not just marketing like they are doing now.

theshrike79 3y ago

Ah, this wasn't _Tom_ Cruise, but Cruise the company =)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

I think autonomous vehicles are exceptional occasion to apply similar practices to commercial airlines. The reason it could not be done with cars is the drivers. Drivers simply cannot be held to the same standard as commercial pilots or staff. Remove the driver from the equation and it might just be possible to replicate the process. That assumes regulation that will require "operators" to provide truthful reporting of accidents.

ttcbj 3y ago
I really like the admiralcloudberg blog, which provides extensive analysis of plane crashes and the NTSB investigation that follows. I hadn’t thought of it, but I think the idea of similar investigations for self-driving car accidents is a really great idea. Though, one recurrent theme of that blog is that blame and persecution are generally counterproductive to understanding the accident and improving safety.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  Blame and persecution are not counterproductive, they are crucial to improving safety. It is called accountability and if nobody is accountable for anything then there is no actual motivation to get businesses and financial institutions to do anything about it. What is counterproductive is blaming and persecuting wrong things. The goal is to get companies to be accountable for being committed to taking this process seriously, providing honest information whenever it is needed and then to honestly implement the recommendations once the process is concluded. We know that technical bugs happen regardless of good intentions. So we should err on the side of being lenient. Where we should not be lenient about is simple negligence where all of the information was available and the decision was made regardless. For example, if the manufacturer knew that bolts were lying around and decided to save on the costs by being willingly blind to the fact. And where real persecution should strictly follow is hiding information and evidence that is obviously needed to improve safety.
  - hardcopy 3y ago
    > Blame and persecution are not counterproductive, they are crucial to improving safety. There's a good chapter on blame that you should read in this book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accidents/Jessie-Singer/9781982129682 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...

sandworm101 3y ago

This reminds me of the case discussed in the movie Bridge of Spies. There were multiple impacts. One side sees one accident, starting and the first impact and ending at the second. The other sees two distinct accidents, one impact and a second separate impact rather disconnected from the first. Crashes are messy. They are always up for interpretation. That is the reality of driving. Only in hindsight can we apply the arbitrary legal rules to allocate blame. The reality is almost always that everyone is at least partially at fault.

logifail 3y ago
> The reality is almost always that everyone is at least partially at fault That seems like quite an astonishing claim.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  But that is how it works out. In this situation the pedestrian apparently didnt follow one rule. The first car didnt follow another. And the second did something so odd that, if by a human driver, probably qualifies as negligence. Nobody has clean hands. The legal debate is about who has more or less blame, who has enough to be adjudicated reaponsable for which resulting injuries.
  - watwut 3y ago
    From legal standpoint, situation in which one driver is entirely at fault and another not at all is completely standard. Likewise ethically, morally or responsibility wise. The "everyone at fault" sometimes happen, but it is not clear at all whether it is majority of cases.
    - Andrex 3y ago
      "Fault" is probably too loaded a term. "Contributing to the crash / making the accident worse than it could have been" may be more accurate but longer winded.

alexey-salmin 3y ago

* 10:05am: Wood and VP of Global Government Affairs Prashanthi Raman have virtual meeting with Mayor of SF's transpo advisor. Wood shows full video, "reportedly with internet connectivity issues from his home computer"; neither Wood nor Raman brings up or discusses pullover or dragging * 10:30am: Virtual meeting with NHTSA. Wood shows full video, "again having internet connectivity issues causing video to freeze and/or black-out in key places including after initial impact" and again not bringing up or discussing pullover or dragging * 11:05am: Cruise regulatory, legal, and systems integrity employees have pre-meeting for DMV and California Highway Patrol (CHP) briefing; Cruise team doesn't discuss pullover and dragging * 11:30am: hybrid in-person and virtual meeting with DMV and CHP. Wood shows full video, again with internet connectivity issues and again not bringing up or discussing pullover or dragging Internet connection issues, can happen to anyone

dpflan 3y ago
Oh indeed, at least the presenter wasn’t stuck as a cat avatar. That would make the coincidental recurrence of connectivity issues even funnier, but shouldn’t the authorities have received a copy of the video, devoid of “internet connection” issues? Or was it not in legal position to demand the artifact and just have it shown over Zoom?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  They claim the NHTSA got one. However, if, ah, connectivity issues obscure the video of the Bad Thing in the meeting, and the Bad Thing is not mentioned in the meeting, then the chances of it being noticed even if a video was sent do decline.
  - dpflan 3y ago
    True, I would expect someone to review the footage in entirety without the presenter biasing the presentation.
    - rsynnott 3y ago

rsynnott 3y ago

I mean, the constant connectivity problems stretch credulity just a little.

nocoiner 3y ago
That occurred to me as well. Also, it seemed notable that the one meeting that was not marked by connectivity problems seemed like the one with the audience least likely to have regulatory implications (SFPD/SFFD).
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I suppose, charitably, that was the last one, so maybe they'd gotten around to complaining to the telco by that point :)
  - FateOfNations 3y ago
    Somewhere it was mentioned that all these meetings were being conducted by different sets of Cruise team members… could have just been that the person presenting at those meetings didn't have the same connectivity issues.
progbits 3y ago
Yeah I don't buy that at all, sounds like made up excuse that is hard to disprove. But even if true, clearly the Cruise folks must have expected questions about the dragging and if none came should have wondered why. They witheld evidence, intentionally or not, but knowingly.
gwern 3y ago
If it was the same guy, why wouldn't he have constant connectivity problems if he has any problems? I know with my home Internet, when it's flaky, it's often flaky for days or weeks at a time. (The real question of course is why the video conferencing software was willing to drop video, why it wasn't uploaded as a file to a cloud server, why he didn't confirm they'd seen everything, and so on and so forth - but glitchy home connections are, and always have been, a fact of life.)

zelos 3y ago

> while a human might react to the collision at -2.9s and slow down or stop, "scene understanding" as a human might do it is non-existent in most or perhaps all AVs... That's a good point. If you see a pedestrian hit by a car anywhere near your car, you stop, right? If you see a pedestrian walk out into the road against the lights you at least slow down and/or cover the brake pedal because who knows what they're going to do?

ddalex 3y ago
I think this is a critical part of cracking self-driving cars - "scene understanding", or more accurately, identification AND MODELLING of all traffic participants. A tiger chasing a deer will identify and model what the deer will do, what the terrain is, and take appropriate decisions on how to best pursue; a good driver will do the same - e.g. understanding that a round object bouncing in the street of a residential neighborhood is a ball, and where a ball comes, a child will follow. I also think that this feedback loop of "Model the world, take action, observe, update model" is a key component of consciousness (whereas we model ourselves!) and key to AGI. I would not be surprised that AGI comes from a self-driving car development model.
- nunez 3y ago
  I'm guessing this is one of the things that Tesla's Dojo supercomputer combined with the billions of miles collected from their fleet is trying to solve
  - ddalex 3y ago
    I'm guessing not; what NNs do is pattern matching. Basically they try to "remember" what should be done at in a given situation, but does not have continuous representation and modelling of other objects; not even "object permanence" - when a car disappears from their world, it's gone.
    - peterfirefly 3y ago
      Tesla's FSD does actually have a degree of object permanence. It would be a lot of worse if it didn't.

SilverBirch 3y ago

So much to dig through here. >Wood shows full video, "reportedly with internet connectivity issues from his home computer" There's one for the back to office lot. >wheels were moving at different speeds (because one wheel was spinning on pedestrian's leg) Eurgh. But in general, this is Cruise learning what traditional car companies already knew - you need to act with integrity. I don't see how senior executives at cruise could reasonably be allowed to continue to work in any safety critical industry after this.

chefandy 3y ago
Well, they need to act with integrity towards safety regulators, anyway. I wouldn’t say the auto industry, broadly, has the greatest reputation for integrity.
- logifail 3y ago
  > I wouldn’t say the auto industry, broadly, has the greatest reputation for integrity Compared with whom? Boeing?
  - michaelt 3y ago
    Well, from the streetcar conspiracy [1] to the Ford Pinto [2] to Dieselgate [3] the auto industry isn't exactly famous for honesty. And there's also the climate change, and the ~40,000 deaths per year in car accidents in the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefit_analysis,_the_Pinto_Memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
  - chefandy 3y ago
    How about VW deliberately cheating emissions tests with their fuel injector code? You can be notably bad without being the worst.
3y ago

sumodm 3y ago

> 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. I wonder whether this flagged alarms in Cruise's systems when the pedestrian crossed in a potentially dangerous situation. These kind of 2nd and 3rd order conditions seems particularly hard to train for.

05 3y ago
Is there anything here to train for? The initial collision wasn't in any way Cruise vehicle's fault; but the subsequent repositioning shows their procedures and sensor coverage are lacking. Oh, and their integrity.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  Yes, if a pedestrian is crossing against the light in front of you, you slow down even if you don’t think you’ll hit them, even if they’re already past your lane. If the pedestrian stops on the street they are crossing against the light, you slow down, even if they aren’t in your path, especially if you are aware of the vehicles around you and know the pedestrian is in the path of another nearby vehicle. If you see the vehicle in the lane next to you speeding up when you’ve noticed the pedestrian is stopped in their lane of traffic, you slow down and maybe veer away if possible. If you see that the vehicle next to you has hit a pedestrian, you immediately hit the brakes rather than wait 2.4 seconds until you’ve determined you’re going to hit that pedestrian before you decide to hit your brakes. Those are all things an alert human driver should be ready and able to do. I would expect a quality AV system to do them better than a human, but in this case, none of those things appeared to happen. This AV decided “pedestrian is out of my lane, continue accelerating!” Only stopping when the pedestrian was right in front of the vehicle.
  - NavinF 3y ago
    > This AV decided “pedestrian is out of my lane, continue accelerating!” That's what human drivers do too. If you slowed down anticipating that a pedestrian's collision with some other car might fling their body in front of your car, you'd never make it to your destination. There's just too many crazy people in SF

littlestymaar 3y ago

> 10:05am: Wood and VP of Global Government Affairs Prashanthi Raman have virtual meeting with Mayor of SF's transpo advisor. Wood shows full video, "reportedly with internet connectivity issues from his home computer"; neither Wood nor Raman brings up or discusses pullover or dragging > 10:30am: Virtual meeting with NHTSA. Wood shows full video, "again having internet connectivity issues causing video to freeze and/or black-out in key places including after initial impact" and again not bringing up or discussing pullover or dragging Convenient “internet connectivity issues” indeed. Looks a lot like students willingly corrupting zip files when sending assignments in order to gain time when they couldn't finish…

sdwr 3y ago
Real "dog ate my homework" moment. Morally, it's more tasteful than outright denials at least.

bkandel 3y ago

> Although, as noted above, the instructions for the narrative section of the SGO report require submitters to “[p]rovide a written description of the pre-crash, crash, and post-crash details,” some Cruise interviewees expressed their belief that the requirements were narrower. In their view, the narrative called for a description of the collision itself, and thus did not include post-collision actions like the pullover maneuver and pedestrian dragging. speechless here

tempaway12751 3y ago
Stock options doing the thinking for them

nunez 3y ago

Did the driver of the Sentra ever get caught? And what are the odds that the ped who was hit got an extremely nice settlement from this? I can only imagine the flooding of emails and calls they got from injury lawyers after Forbes broke the story Also, based on how the Cruise AVs we saw in Houston perform, this was all but inevitable. They drove extremely erratically and casually drove down wrong way lanes several times.

NavinF 3y ago

This article takes quite a long time to get to the accident itself: > 10-02, 9:29pm: human-driven Nissan Sentra strikes pedestrian in crosswalk of 4-way intersection at 5th & Market in SF >Pedestrian entered crosswalk against a red light and "Do Not Walk" signal and then paused in Nissan's lane. Police report cited both driver and pedestrian for code violations and concluded that the driver was "most at fault" >The impact launched the pedestrian into the path of the Crusie AV >Cruise AV braked but still hit pedestrian >After coming to a complete stop, the AV moved to find a safe place to stop, known as a "'minimal risk condition' pullover maneuver (pullover maneuver) or 'secondary movement.'" >AV drove up to 7.7mph for 20 feet, dragging pedestrian with it >Nissan driver fled the scene (hit and run)

deleted 3y ago

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Vecr 3y ago

> Cruise incident response playbook outlines roles of Incident Commander, SLT, CMT as well as how to respond in the weeks after incident. Playbook was not followed, said to be "aborted" because "too manually intensive" What? Who ran risk management for this company? If you're facing program halt you keep running the plan until you run out of money to pay your employees, and then keep running it after if you can get volunteers. If these people actually cared about AVs and safety, or even the continued existence of their company, they would work to extract every single detail that could possibly help any AV or robotics/AI company in the future, up to a very high cost for themselves. Deeply unserious.