Uber has said essentially nothing about their crash, it's the cops who rushed out and got nearly everything wrong. Uber clearly had a serious technical failure, but there's been no PR spin from them.
I think it is possible that the Tempe police chief and mayor anticipated the incident could be a problem for them, especially given the secret agreement that later came out, and chose to try to spin the story on their own account. It is not hard to imagine that, in that frame of mind, they might be receptive to someone from Uber saying "clearly this was unavoidable", but I have no way of knowing whether any such conversation took place.
Then there is the question of whether the Uber-supplied video accurately represents the lighting conditions at the time... This may seem unduly conspiratorial, but I gave both Uber and the Tempe administration the benefit of the doubt until it became clear that the initial reports were innaccurate and less complete than they could have been.
It seems like the dash cam video released is very misleading there's been a couple people who've driven through the same area at night and it is well lit. [0] From the Uber cam it seems like the light is still on because there's a bright glow about where streetlights are in the other videos. It's kind of shocking just how bad the dash cam of the incident actually is unless the lights were recently (because there's still the glow) off for some reason before dawn (poorly implemented scheduling maybe?).
The difference between the Uber dash cam [1] and the one posted to youtube is stark [2]. It's certainly darker where she comes from but no where near impossible. Source the ArsTechnica article [3]
It's of tremendous importance from the perspective of public perception of who's at fault.
If the average observer watching the published video arrives at a conclusion of "well I would have hit that person too, she appeared out of nowhere in front of the car", it obviously matters.
It does seem that there is a problem with the vehicle's lidar or the associated software, so does it not strike you as strange that the story being pushed claimed that the victim "came out of the shadows", which is a misleading irrelevance if lidar is the primary sensing technology? Especially as the unrealistically dark video does not even seem to fit that story.
No you're right, the police happily pointed out that the woman was homeless and seemed to blame the victim. Why would they do that?
Because A.R.S says that pedestrians have a duty to yield outside of crosswalks and they normally make the police's accident report available shortly after any accident.
I know because I was over there not very long ago trying to get one for someone else. It's just off of Mill Ave., not very far south of where this accident happened.
Because A.R.S says that pedestrians have a duty to yield outside of crosswalks and they normally make the police's accident report available shortly after any accident.
Regardless, it is normal to wait until an investigation is complete before you start making statements. Making premature statements actually makes the results of any investigation look suspect. Pretty dumb move.
Oh, and even if the woman is at fault that does not mean it is open season on pedestrians that happen to end up on the road.
Unless they're doing something special I haven't read about, that was the investigation by police. They don't spend a long time on every accident in my experience. What happened in our case was the driver turning left was cited for failure to yield. Case closed, next.
And I think a lot of people here don't have much experience driving these roads at night. More lights don't really help, there are too many lights on some level, you can see stoplights and such a good mile away, and pedestrians are moving shadows at night.
I had to train myself to notice them more after some weird experiences like the strange, uncoordinated bicyclist driving circles in the middle of a road for no reason in the middle of the night.
I'm sure there are things Uber and the safety driver could've done better, but I fully believe they really didn't notice them. That's right near an overpass and moving between lit and shadowed places also screws with your vision.
And FWIW, I've driven extensively here at night and I know that stretch of Mill Ave. rather well. I used to drive from Mill Ave to Van Buran, going through Papago park.
The police made those statements while the body was still warm, I highly doubt they could have properly investigated this particular accident in that time. It mostly looked like they were actively looking to pin the blame on the pedestrian somehow.
Note that as a part of the responsibility for a 2 ton piece of steel you get the expectation that you will do your best to keep the other traffic participants alive even when they break the rules, especially when they are more vulnerable than you are.
They saw a video that showed that she failed to yield and found a body that wasn't anywhere near a crosswalk. There was nothing more for them to investigate at that point, because the other points weren't relevant. So they were very likely done with their investigation at that point.
It was a horrific accident and there's pretty much always something someone could have done better, but as far as traffic laws go, it was her responsibility to make sure it was safe to cross. I get that you disagree with that and I can see where you're coming from, but the law says the duty was on her side.
Uber could, and should, do better than this. I believe the NTSB can (and should) demand that of them and everyone else, in fact. But the cops don't even enter into that. They're pretty much just going to figure out which traffic laws were broken and who had right of way.
There's a fair point that maybe they should be able to, I don't know, inspect the LIDAR sensors or something, but I don't think anything like that will be practical for at least a decade or two. To my knowledge, that should be up to the NTSB for now.
Not being near a crosswalk actually means in most places that you are allowed to cross there. You will obviously have to yield for other traffic but pedestrians crossing the road are an expected thing, wherever you drive. The vehicle braking or not braking would be one input into deciding whether the driver was under the influence and could shift liability from the pedestrian to the driver to some extent.
In lots of places a sobriety/drug test is mandatory after an accident with severe injuries or fatalities.
And if the driver were to be found not to have braked at all - or even to accelerate - the driver could very well lose their license. Even when you have the right of way you still have to behave like a responsible driver would.
If inspecting the full digital record by the police is not feasible then I would argue self driving cars have no business being on the road at all. After all, we require normal drivers to be witnesses to accidents as well, and we expect them to cooperate in tests to determine whether or not they were able to control their vehicle, especially in fatal accidents.
In this case one of the participants is dead and the other one is silicon so the only evidence taken is the same as if all participants had died and that's not true, at least one of them had a lot of evidence to give, and given the novel nature of the incident there was a very good reason to actually evaluate that evidence.
Being 'automated' should not be an automatic get-out-of-jail card with respect to your liability and your proven ability to control a vehicle, at least the same standards that apply to regular drivers should apply to automation.
I suspect they did check the human for inebriation, but I saw no indication the driver was drunk, so I expect that didn't matter. I honestly don't think they would have cited a human driver in this circumstance unless they left the scene of the accident or were drunk.
I think the problem people have here is that this was treated exactly like a normal accident and maybe they shouldn't have. But we have the NTSB to examine the engineering of the car, that's not something the cops are equipped to do.
The police did their check and released their report once it was done, which is a very standard practice. It can't have taken them that long--the police station where you get accident reports is on the other side of the Mill Ave. bridge from the accident.
Comments
Uber has said essentially nothing about their crash, it's the cops who rushed out and got nearly everything wrong. Uber clearly had a serious technical failure, but there's been no PR spin from them.
I think it is possible that the Tempe police chief and mayor anticipated the incident could be a problem for them, especially given the secret agreement that later came out, and chose to try to spin the story on their own account. It is not hard to imagine that, in that frame of mind, they might be receptive to someone from Uber saying "clearly this was unavoidable", but I have no way of knowing whether any such conversation took place.
Then there is the question of whether the Uber-supplied video accurately represents the lighting conditions at the time... This may seem unduly conspiratorial, but I gave both Uber and the Tempe administration the benefit of the doubt until it became clear that the initial reports were innaccurate and less complete than they could have been.
It seems like the dash cam video released is very misleading there's been a couple people who've driven through the same area at night and it is well lit. [0] From the Uber cam it seems like the light is still on because there's a bright glow about where streetlights are in the other videos. It's kind of shocking just how bad the dash cam of the incident actually is unless the lights were recently (because there's still the glow) off for some reason before dawn (poorly implemented scheduling maybe?).
The difference between the Uber dash cam [1] and the one posted to youtube is stark [2]. It's certainly darker where she comes from but no where near impossible. Source the ArsTechnica article [3]
[0] https://youtu.be/CRW0q8i3u6E?t=32
[1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Scree...
[2] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/kaufm...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
Why would that matter? The issue here is that the LIDAR system failed to detect the pedestrian.
It's of tremendous importance from the perspective of public perception of who's at fault.
If the average observer watching the published video arrives at a conclusion of "well I would have hit that person too, she appeared out of nowhere in front of the car", it obviously matters.
It's not important at all. There's a bug in Uber's software. That's what we should be talking about.
It does seem that there is a problem with the vehicle's lidar or the associated software, so does it not strike you as strange that the story being pushed claimed that the victim "came out of the shadows", which is a misleading irrelevance if lidar is the primary sensing technology? Especially as the unrealistically dark video does not even seem to fit that story.
Yes. That's why I am posting in this thread.
Sorry, I misunderstood your point.
No you're right, the police happily pointed out that the woman was homeless and seemed to blame the victim. Why would they do that?
It's reasonable to assume it's to keep Uber happy.
Because A.R.S says that pedestrians have a duty to yield outside of crosswalks and they normally make the police's accident report available shortly after any accident.
I know because I was over there not very long ago trying to get one for someone else. It's just off of Mill Ave., not very far south of where this accident happened.
Regardless, it is normal to wait until an investigation is complete before you start making statements. Making premature statements actually makes the results of any investigation look suspect. Pretty dumb move.
Oh, and even if the woman is at fault that does not mean it is open season on pedestrians that happen to end up on the road.
Unless they're doing something special I haven't read about, that was the investigation by police. They don't spend a long time on every accident in my experience. What happened in our case was the driver turning left was cited for failure to yield. Case closed, next.
And I think a lot of people here don't have much experience driving these roads at night. More lights don't really help, there are too many lights on some level, you can see stoplights and such a good mile away, and pedestrians are moving shadows at night.
I had to train myself to notice them more after some weird experiences like the strange, uncoordinated bicyclist driving circles in the middle of a road for no reason in the middle of the night.
I'm sure there are things Uber and the safety driver could've done better, but I fully believe they really didn't notice them. That's right near an overpass and moving between lit and shadowed places also screws with your vision.
And FWIW, I've driven extensively here at night and I know that stretch of Mill Ave. rather well. I used to drive from Mill Ave to Van Buran, going through Papago park.
The police made those statements while the body was still warm, I highly doubt they could have properly investigated this particular accident in that time. It mostly looked like they were actively looking to pin the blame on the pedestrian somehow.
Note that as a part of the responsibility for a 2 ton piece of steel you get the expectation that you will do your best to keep the other traffic participants alive even when they break the rules, especially when they are more vulnerable than you are.
They saw a video that showed that she failed to yield and found a body that wasn't anywhere near a crosswalk. There was nothing more for them to investigate at that point, because the other points weren't relevant. So they were very likely done with their investigation at that point.
It was a horrific accident and there's pretty much always something someone could have done better, but as far as traffic laws go, it was her responsibility to make sure it was safe to cross. I get that you disagree with that and I can see where you're coming from, but the law says the duty was on her side.
Uber could, and should, do better than this. I believe the NTSB can (and should) demand that of them and everyone else, in fact. But the cops don't even enter into that. They're pretty much just going to figure out which traffic laws were broken and who had right of way.
There's a fair point that maybe they should be able to, I don't know, inspect the LIDAR sensors or something, but I don't think anything like that will be practical for at least a decade or two. To my knowledge, that should be up to the NTSB for now.
Not being near a crosswalk actually means in most places that you are allowed to cross there. You will obviously have to yield for other traffic but pedestrians crossing the road are an expected thing, wherever you drive. The vehicle braking or not braking would be one input into deciding whether the driver was under the influence and could shift liability from the pedestrian to the driver to some extent.
In lots of places a sobriety/drug test is mandatory after an accident with severe injuries or fatalities.
And if the driver were to be found not to have braked at all - or even to accelerate - the driver could very well lose their license. Even when you have the right of way you still have to behave like a responsible driver would.
If inspecting the full digital record by the police is not feasible then I would argue self driving cars have no business being on the road at all. After all, we require normal drivers to be witnesses to accidents as well, and we expect them to cooperate in tests to determine whether or not they were able to control their vehicle, especially in fatal accidents.
In this case one of the participants is dead and the other one is silicon so the only evidence taken is the same as if all participants had died and that's not true, at least one of them had a lot of evidence to give, and given the novel nature of the incident there was a very good reason to actually evaluate that evidence.
Being 'automated' should not be an automatic get-out-of-jail card with respect to your liability and your proven ability to control a vehicle, at least the same standards that apply to regular drivers should apply to automation.
I suspect they did check the human for inebriation, but I saw no indication the driver was drunk, so I expect that didn't matter. I honestly don't think they would have cited a human driver in this circumstance unless they left the scene of the accident or were drunk.
I think the problem people have here is that this was treated exactly like a normal accident and maybe they shouldn't have. But we have the NTSB to examine the engineering of the car, that's not something the cops are equipped to do.
The police did their check and released their report once it was done, which is a very standard practice. It can't have taken them that long--the police station where you get accident reports is on the other side of the Mill Ave. bridge from the accident.
I'm not terribly sure its Uber. It actually looks like something to do with keeping the Governor happy. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/28/uber-ariz...