I-Like-To-Bike

Exactly! Knowing this and still ponificating about Uber's lack of any responsibility/liability for the results of their technical and/or management failures in putting this not-ready-for-prime-time vehicle on the public road is rather weird.

https://www.wsj.com/video/experts-br...889B921C5.html

Daniel4

No question about that. But moose, deer, squirrels and turtles cross roads and highways too. All those examples you list are legitimate. But in the end, a human driven vehicle does not have a backup system so if you're fiddling with the radio you still have to pay attention to the road. The law is too lenient in this regard.

Here's a case where the driver was acquitted from killing a pedestrian because he was trying to get a bottle of water out from under his feet.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4412121

Summing it up, a person's life is worth less than a bottle of water.

The Uber car's detection system failed. That has to be investigated and fixed. The back up failed. We know why. There has to be something else to ensure the back up pays total attention.

Rollfast

So in just over 50 years we've gone from My Mother The Car to My Car's a....

Or, Christine Would Be Proud.

What a Fractured Fairy Tale.

Hoopdriver

The concept of backup driver is reasonable only if you anticipate that the car will perform perfectly in all circumstances. There is no way that a person sitting in the driver's seat mile after mile with nothing to do but observe and react will not suffer from mental fatigue. This means that invariably they will not be good observers and their ability to react will be worse. They were put in the car to give everybody a false sense of comfort.

I-Like-To-Bike

Yes that's it the Mother of All Self Driving Cars will get all those sh-er's like Moochie Pedestrian, and Buddy Bicyclist. They have it coming to 'em for getting in the way of Uber Dreams of profits!

Note Language may be NSFW
Back then:

Christine Lives on!

scott967

I agree about criminal negligence. However, I believe you have a common law duty of care. You can't just plow into someone because you have the "right of way", at least not if a "reasonable person" in that situation would attempt to mitigate the foreseeable harm.

scott s.
.

I-Like-To-Bike

Presumably the NHTSA investigators will be examining (and be able to prove) what the Uber car was programmed to do when faced with a choice of attempting to take evasive action or continuing on without deviation when approaching a person crossing the road in front of it. The Uber AV very well may have been programmed to "choose" to hit the pedestrian rather than try to avoid the collision. Or maybe it wasn't programmed at all to deal safely with jaywalkers. Another possibility is that it had no mechanism for alerting the safety backup driver when the AV systems are malfunctioning and require immediate disengagement from AV mode.

All those scenarios would indicate negligence on Uber's part IMO.

350htrr

Exactly. I would think the designer's had 100% confidence, in the car doing everything 99.99% "right" and... that is a win, since human drivers are less competent. That is the hurdle AV have to get over, still ending up killing/injuring people, BUT... NOT as many. 99.99% is not perfect, thus, some people will always say they should not be on the road, until perfected. TOTALLY ignoring the human drivers failures, and that the AV is already "better" than the average human driver...

Leisesturm

If the hardware and software of AV's is now supposed to target and track off-road objects and use predictive analysis to determine how and when they might interact with normal and legal vehicle movement we have a problem. We don't expect humans to do that. Well the law doesn't expect humans to do that. Why don't we save the AV industry a huge amount of money and time and just shut them all down right now if that is what we expect. I'm predicting that the law will side with the AV in this case no matter how much it upsets certain readers of this forum. These are the same people who think people who drink to incapacitation in public spaces should be rescued from any opportunists and escorted home and put to bed by total strangers.

fietsbob

restrict them to 1 lane, the electronic sensors can make them bumper to bumper like a train with private compartments ..

which was what the trains were , going to Hogwarts... but you cannot walk down the corridor and talk to anyone else.

Rollfast

It never cases to amaze me that those who seem the most into driverless cars always claim how bad human drivers are and that they should be totally replaced.

It's a bit of a fantasy, reinforced by one's own paranoia. Sit here long enough hearing horror stories and you will believe the entire world drives badly.

Wait a minute, if I go any further with that theory the whole thread will get moved to P&R

Rollfast

They have a shuttle van for that in the next town, the bars avoid liability.

Rollfast

Christine was a great horror film. Boy loves car, car loves evil.

Road Fan

I agree, but only in the case of an automated driving system that is a monitored by a supervising safety driver, or is a lower level of autonomy for which driver monitoring and responsibility are assumed.

For the hyped (if not imminent) generation of fully autonomous vehicles, the human occupants are not in the equation. In this case the driving system is "responsible," and the burden is on the engineering team that created and implemented it to have done everything correctly, and for that achievement to be provably correct.

350htrr

I think you missed the whole point... I am not going to do the math, but. 40,000 people dying every year, and lets say 30,000 people dying every year... I suspect that 10,000 less people dying every year WILL, have an impact on society... and... how it will develop as far as transportation goes. JMO. Oh, and that doesn't even include the 100,000 or what ever people injured every year.

CliffordK

One of the issues with the safety driver is that Uber apparently recently chose to drop from two drivers to one driver. That means that the human driver has less to break up the monotony, and tasks are divided between monitoring the road and monitoring the computer system (and personal tasks?).

If Uber, in fact, has critical issues requiring human intervention every 13 miles, then giving the human backup drivers split attention tasks would seem to be inappropriate.

On the other hand, apparently the Google/Waymo cars go a few thousand miles without intervention, and thus they may no longer feel the need for two drivers.

So, the "driver" may not be to blame as much as the management decision to give the driver split attention tasks.

Did Uber report the "interventions" to the State of Arizona, and was the two to one change approved by the state? Or was there even any state oversight?

I-Like-To-Bike

i believe the state of AZ does no oversight of what the AV promoters are doing on the public roads in the state, and in fact has no clue as to what they have been doing, are doing or plan to do.

CliffordK

I wonder if that will change before the Uber AV's get back on the road.

Of course, the investigating officer that just looked at the video... claimed she jumped in front of the car and tried to close the case makes one wonder if Uber is more important than the people's safety.

It was just a cyclist, or homeless woman... or otherwise just an undesirable after all. Not a wealthy retired person.

Road Fan

Homeless or not, I wonder if the car had its headlamps aimed high enough?

The driver seems to me to have spent a lot of her time in that vid not attentive to the road. We should have seen her eyes looking just above the camera and generally in the camera direction, and scanning left and right. Use of the Volvo night vision system would have been good to ensure the driver could know when the AV algorigthm missed something. Kontact is correct, it's possible nothing could have saved Ms. Hertzberg, but a vehicle with the purpose and threat this one has needed to have some special features for the driver as well as for the automated sensing system.

Could the pedestrian hear the car? Was it an EV?

Road Fan

AV system with adequate sensors detects and tracks the motions of a dozen kids? Yes if they are not hiding or occluded. AV system also can analyze those tracked motions to determine "that kid is gonna bolt out to get that ball!" I really do not think so.

Road Fan

I think it has a lot to do with AV design and engineering, and the engineering of the role and tasks of the monitor driver. See my post #396 in this thread.

Rollfast

Nobody sees to remember the division errors of the early Pentiums. Everyone has forgotten Spectre and Meltdown...etcetera.

Computers are not God. They are only as good as whatever Coding Schmoes got together over beers and thought them up.

KD5NRH

1) She wasn't an off road object. She had been crossing the road for 40+ feet of her relatively slow travel by the time of impact, and was likely already in the road when the LiDAR first detected her.
2) Even remotely reasonable defensive driving does include scanning for potential interfering objects. Otherwise driver's ed wouldn't mention scanning at all.

This wasn't exactly a kid, nor was she chasing a ball. This was a woman moving in a slow and apparently fairly predictable manner. If the AV sensor can't track one slow moving object and determine that it will likely encroach on the vehicle's lane soon, what's the point of having a 360 degree LiDAR scan in the first place?

Rollfast

Everyone dies. I was watching You Tube and saw a video of a guy dying on live TV lipsynching his band's latest song.


It's admirable, but not realistic to think that somehow cars that drive themselves will solve that problem.


Quit focusing on the negative aspects so much. You aren't going to solve them on a bicycle site.

KraneXL

I think we're completely forgetting about the role here of the pedestrian. What was she doing at the time of the accidents? Didn't she notice the car approaching? Was she distracted? Was she completely oblivious to the approaching auto? I'm always on my guard and looking directly at the driver whenever I cross the street. Even when I have the crossing light and/or the right-of-way.