Uber breaks self-driving car record: First robo-ride to kill a pedestrian A woman has died after she was hit by one of Uber's autonomous cars in the US. The taxi app maker said it is cooperating with the cops in the wake of the death. According to police, Uber's vehicle was driving itself, although it had a human pilot behind the wheel, when it hit a woman crossing the street in Tempe, Arizona. …
She (particularly her jeans) looked more than visible enough to me in the video the moment that the headlights were on her, and even before that, it seemed clear that something was in the road. An average adult driver would typically slow down upon seeing that some kind of large object was in the road, turned on their high-beams, then changed lanes and/or braked hard to avoid actually hitting it.
"The only way any car was going to avoid that incident is if the car has an infra-red night-vision system to see in the dark, which obviously Uber didn't spring for in the car's vision system."
They sprung for something even better: Lidar and RADAR. Although, neither seemed to work.
Agree with Oneman2Many on this - based on the dashcam footage this looks like an instance where a self driving car should have had a massive advantage over a human driver - that of being able to detect objects moving into the path of the car that could not be detected with the human eye, in this case due to darkness.
That said, the person crossing the road appears to have done so without observing the oncoming car.
In the video the pedestrian/cyclist-walker certainly does "appear from nowhere". That said, the video does seem to crush the blacks a bit. While in general, the high contrast of night driving does make for difficult imaging (and seeing), I wonder if you'd been there in person, the shadows would have seemed quite as dark as on the video?
While I suspect the camera gamma-curve could have been more appropriate, I also wonder whether the headlamp beams were overly-dipped, or could have had a better profile.
In the UK our headlamps spill a lot to the left (because we drive on the left) and would have picked out the pedestrian at the side of the road before they entered the line of traffic. In the States of course, their lights would be configured the other way.
It seems fairly clear that the woman with the bike made an error of judgement; it feels like the car should have been able to do some more though...
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These links put the incident in a very different light to the dark dashcam footage:
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4363673,-111.9425082,3a,75y,324.7h,86.2t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sseIHdIkV5FyYzACTGokvBg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
https://imgur.com/gallery/XQrAB
The road widens at this point, although you can't see that in the original dark dashcam footage.
The lady with the bike was crossing her fourth lane by the time she came to grief.
- From the pedestrians' perspective, it's a lot harder to time/judge how fast a car is coming when she left the kerb so much earlier. It was not a wise place to cross (and is forbidden by signs) - but the her error in judgement of timing is much finer / more forgivable than other reports or a view of the dashcam alone would suggest. As pedestrians, we've all made similar misjudgements a handful of times in our lives. The car would only have had to slow by 5-10 miles per hour a few 10's of yards earlier, and the lady would have made it across the road; it would have been close, but she'd've been ok.
- As far as the car's navigation cameras / systems are concerned she most definitely did not "step off the curb into the path of the car" - she'd already crossed 3 lanes, and should have clearly been identified, and identified as being on a collision course.
The car definitely should have been able to prevent this tragedy.
One self driving autonomous tin can kills one person, 20 million other cars controlled by humans kill 20 people. And I doubt the relatives of the deceased would consider it insignificant.
Go back to basic maths class.
Self driving cars are just a stupid idea that wont be ready for 20 years. Expect more innocent road user to get wiped out until they realise that a wetware component is a necessity or the public finally pipe up and say no more beta testing deaths.
Traveling by aircraft is statistically MUCH safer then by car, so where are the pilotless aircraft?
Would YOU get one?
It was her fault for jaywalking (there's a reason that's illegal), not the AV's. Hell she probably would have gotten hit anyway even with a human behind the wheel since those tend to be texting, getting a BJ, or otherwise not paying attention while driving. AV's will ultimately be better than human drivers, pedestrians just need to pay attention when near roads if they don't want killed by robot cars. Same reason it's illegal to walk on railroad tracks, a train won't and can't stop just because you are standing in it's way.
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