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.

Comments

Re: Nice company

[bill_mcgonigle]

Their mutual rating system actually does do just that. Get used to the gig economy - your 19th century factory model is going away.

This++

[Anonymous Coward]

The video the police released, did it come directly from the car or did it come from Uber engineers extracting it from the car?

Because it's seriously shit, like its been put through a bokeh or vignette filter to darken the outside.

Uber will probably walk away from this blaming the driver, but you can't have the driver as a safety for the car, because the driver does not know what decisions the car has made till the effects are known.

Re:Self driving car hype

[fluffernutter]

I think that's obvious, but it doesn't change the fact that self driving should be held to a standard where they can accommodate people doing stupid things, otherwise the whole line about saving lines is just blowing smoke. Defensive driving is a 'thing' for good reason and very little of it changes if a computer is driving. If you see something curious, you slow down. Simple?

Re: Pressured to proceed despite poor test results

[hey!]

Someone is dead because of a faulty development process, which in turn is the result of a toxic business climate.

I suspect this happens more often than we know; it's just seldom that you can connect the dots so readily.