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Uber's Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Uber's robotic vehicle project was not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz. The cars were having trouble driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs. And Uber's human drivers had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects. Waymo, formerly the self-driving car project of Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per "intervention" in Arizona (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times and two people familiar with the company's operations in the Phoenix area but not permitted to speak publicly about it. Yet Uber's test drivers were being asked to do more -- going on solo runs when they had worked in pairs. And there also was pressure to live up to a goal to offer a driverless car service by the end of the year and to impress top executives.
A human driver would have seen her and not hit her.
Victim was already crossing the road, in the adjacent lane, as the car approached. The condition was caused by a bad self driving car that should apparently never been on the road.
That the root cause was someone jaywalking doesn't change the fact that jaywalking happens and is a predictable event. It also suggests that the car is inadequately prepared for avoiding hazards. (It also doesn't change the fact that when you don't have crosswalks at reasonable intervals people will improvise.)
That's a baldface fucking lie, and you know it. Uber has come under massive criticism from day 1 for shamelessly and egregiously breaking livery and employment laws in nearly every jurisdiction in which they have established themselves.
Now their half-baked AI implementation has killed someone, and you want to beg off criticism of blatant criminality as merely political grandstanding? These mobsters deserve every ounce of criticism they get regardless of who is in office.
Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world. It is some weird concept spoken about in movies and TV shows from the US.
For example, in the UK we would call it 'crossing the road' and 'crossing the road' is not illegal (it is expected that pedestrians will use common sense). The idea that 'crossing the road' could be illegal is very strange to someone from the UK.
Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world. It is some weird concept spoken about in movies and TV shows from the US.
That's because it's an invented concept created by car companies to trick people into thinking that roads are only for cars and not for walking. No, seriously: the origin of the term comes from "jay drivers" and has to do with the fact that "jay" was 1900s American slang for effectively "idiot." Drivers of the time were frequently called "jay drivers" and were seen as a menace. After all, originally, there were very few cars (as they were expensive) and quite a lot of pedestrians and horses (as that's how people had moved around for millennia).
To combat this negative view of drivers, car companies invented "jay walker" and started heavily promoting it, trying to convince Americans that they were seriously stupid if they thought that roads were for people.
And, as you may be able to guess, they succeeded.
Germany has the same rule, I think. Came as a surprise to us from Norway, but we crossed so far from traffic nobody fined us or anything. But then Germany is notorious for having rules for everything and actually sticking to them. It's kinda nice and incredibly frustrating at the same time, depending on what side of the stick you're on.
In Germany it depends, but is is not illegal to cross the road. The law is:
(3) Wer zu Fuß geht, hat Fahrbahnen unter Beachtung des Fahrzeugverkehrs zügig auf dem kürzesten Weg quer zur Fahrtrichtung zu überschreiten. Wenn die Verkehrsdichte, Fahrgeschwindigkeit, Sichtverhältnisse oder der Verkehrsablauf es erfordern, ist eine Fahrbahn nur an Kreuzungen oder Einmündungen, an Lichtzeichenanlagen innerhalb von Markierungen, an Fußgängerquerungshilfen oder auf Fußgängerüberwegen (Zeichen 293) zu überschreiten. Wird die Fahrbahn an Kreuzungen oder Einmündungen überschritten, sind dort vorhandene Fußgängerüberwege oder Markierungen an Lichtzeichenanlagen stets zu benutzen.
-- https://www.gesetze-im-interne...
Translation:
Someone walking on foot has to cross roadways, while heeding vehicle traffic, speedily on the shortest path perpendicular to driving direction. If the density of traffic, speed of traffic, visibility conditions, or the flow of traffic require it, a roadway must only be crossed at road intersections, at traffic lights, on the inside of markings, or at pedestrian crosswalks. If crossing the roadway at road intersections, any available pedestrian crossings or markings at traffic lights must be used.
I.e., you cannot simply cross just anywhere on a high-level road with dense, fast traffic (think Autobahn) or in really bad visibility like dense fog. But a road like in the accident video, even if it's dark, is just fine if there is no dedicated crossing nearby
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Waymo claims 5600m between interventions. Maybe it's true, but until they are forced to release some data (say, via a fatality) I see no reason for believing a claim made by a company spokesperson.
It's public because California's regulations require it to be public. 352454 miles driven, 63 disengagements = once every 5600 miles. Read the report (pdf) yourself.
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