Uber Ordered To Take Its Self-Driving Cars Off Arizona Roads (nytimes.com)

After failing to meet an expectation that it would prioritize public safety as it tested its self-driving technology, Uber has been ordered to take its self-driving cars off Arizona roads (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). "The incident that took place on March 18 is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation," Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona wrote in a letter sent to Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive. "Arizona must take action now." The New York Times reports: Uber had already suspended all testing of its cars in Arizona, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Toronto. "We proactively suspended self-driving operations in all cities immediately following the tragic incident last week. We continue to help investigators in any way we can, and we'll keep a dialogue open with the governor's office to address any concerns they have," said Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman. The rebuke from the governor is a reversal from what has been an open-arms policy by the state, heralding its lack of regulation as an asset to lure autonomous vehicle testing -- and tech jobs. Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out from Google, and General Motors-owned Cruise are also testing cars in the state. Mr. Ducey said he was troubled by a video released from the Tempe Police Department that seemed to show that neither the Uber safety driver nor the autonomous vehicle detected the presence of a pedestrian in the road in the moments before the crash.

Comments

Re:Big mistake!

[AmiMoJo]

Level 3 is fine if there is plenty of warning to take over, say a minimum of 30 seconds. Time to put away your phone, pack away the sandwich and slip your shoes back on.

Unfortunately what we have is crap like this from Audi: https://youtu.be/WsiUwq_M8lE

Note the way it disengages suddenly and the guy has to instantly take over. That's dangerous and unacceptable.

Re: He's not driving

[burtosis]

Here is a real video of the same stretch of road using about a 3 dollar camera sensor found in a smartphone. Yes, pre 2000 a a sugar cube or smaller sized daytime video camera would have a crappy grainy picture when used at night. But in 2018 that dosent fly in a 40 dollar phone anymore, much less the main camera for a self driving car. It's to hide the fact Uber should be facing charges of vehicular homicide for incompetence and negligence.

So why the fuck didn't the car see the pedestrian?

[mark-t]

This is not a person who suddenly jumped out onto the road here.... while she was jaywalking, she was also *WALKING*... I've seen an overhead view of the section of road where the incident occurred, and there's no significant occlusions there; ordinarily, vision seems that it would be pretty good there in daylight conditions. It's my understanding that self-driving cars use lidar sensors, and should even be able to detect a person in an absence of any visible light at all, so the fact that it was night should be immaterial. Reasonably, the car should have seen that she was on the sidewalk long before she stepped out into the road, and the very *instant* that she started to go off of the sidewalk should have been detected by the car, and the car should immediately begin to slow down.

Yet, by all reports I've heard, the car did not even see this pedestrian at all, and had not even tried to slow down until after the collision. Why? What the fuck happened?