Pedestrian Attacks Self-driving Car in the Mission (curbed.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Cruise AV, a self-driving car company owned by General Motors, reports that earlier this month an unidentified man in the Mission flung himself onto one of the company's autonomous vehicles while it was conducting a road test. According to a report filed with the California DMV (all companies testing self-driving cars on California public streets are required to make public reports any time an accident happens), the close encounter of the vehicular kind happened at 9:27 p.m. as the car was waiting to make a turn and "stopped at a green light in between crosswalks of Valencia Street and 16th Street, waiting for pedestrians to cross." The car's human driver says that a pedestrian then unexpectedly ran into the street against the traffic signal and "shouting....struck the left side of the Cruise AV's rear bumper and hatch with his entire body." The driver adds, "There were no injuries, but the Cruise AV sustained some damage to its rear light." No witnesses called the police.

Comments

What?

[dbrueck]

What's the Mission?

Re:What?

[Rakarra]

much of SF believes the rest of the world revolves around their epicenter. The idea that people would not know what "The mission" was probably would not even dawn on people like story author.

Maybe, but the story was written for a San Francisco publication that has a San Francisco audience. IE, the article writer's expectation that the website readers would know what "The Mission" is is not unfounded. The submitter of the Slashdot article, however, simply cut and paste the first paragraph of the article and used that as the submission. Not necessarily a bad way to share a story, but when taking a niche article and spreading it to a wider geographic audience than it was originally intended for, it helps to add a little context on top. I wouldn't blame the original publication for that.

We see this all the time on Slashdot when someone submits an article without context, assuming others have a baseline amount of knowledge about what they're talking about.

Good thing the car doesn't have AI...

[Kjella]

...or it'd run him over in self-defense.

Self-driving car with a human driver

[PopeRatzo]

Cruise AV, a self-driving car company owned by General Motors, reports that earlier this month an unidentified man in the Mission flung himself onto one of the company's autonomous vehicles

But wait, there's more!

The car's human driver says...

OK, so there was a driver in this self-driving car.

It sounds to me like they ran over a guy, and somebody's trying to dodge a lawsuit by saying someone "threw themselves at the car". And if there was, as the self-driving car's driver says, "damage to a tail light", let me ask you this: If you went outside and threw your body at a car, do you think you could break a tail light?