Originally posted by MarkJerling I posted the video of that accident earlier in the thread. Unfortunately, she chose to cross a 45mph road at night, far away from any pedestrian crossing, in the dark and chose to do so right into the path of the Uber car. It's pretty hard to blame the technology when the Uber driver was supposed to be on the lookout for this sort of thing - but was not. The automatic braking system is (rightly or wrongly) disabled when there's a driver in the car. Uber and her family have, already, settled out of court. It was an unfortunate accident.
In 2017, 5,984 pedestrians died in the USA. About 60,000 were injured. That's around 180 pedestrians a day hurt or killed in the USA, almost all of them by ordinary motorists in ordinary cars. I very much doubt you can compare this 1/5984 deaths to a Ford Pinto situation.
If this was just any old run of the mill vehicle, I would absolutely agree with you. Having said that, this was just no ordinary vehicle. The National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB), the same folks who review aircraft crashes are examining this accident and have not released a report of its findings. It will probably be at lease a few more months.
According to this article, Uber drivers were familiar with this area with jaywalkers and others, where the autonomous systems detected the folks on the street and acted appropriately or the driver having to take over due to the vehicle's confusion.
There are a few things about this crash which is very concerning to me.
- "The automatic braking system is (rightly or wrongly) disabled when there's a driver in the car." - If I would have known that, I personally would have gone down to the state capital and lobbied against Uber being allowed to test their vehicles on the public streets. Humans are good operators, but lousy monitors. If in fact true, having the driver be solely responsible for braking is absurd. One of the reasons autonomous system are in the vehicles is to address specific situations like that. The LIDAR system should have detected the lady and taken appropriate action - automatically. The area of the accident is just across the bridge from ASU (Arizona State University) - where you have students and folks there in the area doing stupid things all the time. This is not the area in which to be testing experimental technology at night. Given the above information - this was just an accident waiting to happen.
- I'm very aware of autonomous vehicles. That's as much as I can and will ever say - given the various non disclosure agreements (NDAs), neatly filed in the cabinet right next to me. I'm enjoying my retirement way too much to have it abruptly interrupted.
- After nearly 50 years of embedded real time system experience - this particular situation with the technology on the vehicle should have been easy to handle.
- Automated Collision Avoidance Systems - are a recent but reasonably mature technology currently available on vehicles in production from Ford, Chevrolet, Honda, Volkswagen, Nissan, Chrysler, etc. to name a few, and it's affordable. There is absolutely no reason for an Uber vehicle not to have this capability. These systems are designed to prevent just this type of accident. The 2016 Chevrolet Malibu has the available Front Pedestrian Alert Technology that detects and can brake. Why would anyone expect anything less from Uber if they are permitted to be testing on the public streets.
I would indeed like to read the NTSB report on this. And, I am still of the opinion that this can be compared to the Ford Pinto. To me, at this time, it appears to be a matter of poor system design. Just my opinion.