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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.
Testing is done for finding problems. They found one. Don't stop testing now!
Testing is also done (or should be done) in controlled environments until you get way past the alfa and beta stages. Putting the autonomous car on the road can be justified when the car doesn't need human supervision and it can deal with normal traffic conditions in day and night with the same performance as that of a human driver.
I seriously have no idea why autonomous cars in pre-alfa stage are on the roads.
Unfortunately most people are treating autonomous cars as software. And we know how software engineers think. Throw the alfa software to the public and fix mistakes afterwards. Oh and we're not responsabile for anything the software might do that brings down your house, empties your bank account etc....
I guess you're not aware that the governor of Arizona is a Republican? I don't know much about him, but I'd presume that means he leans conservative, not liberal. Self-driving cars are being tested in California as well, and now perhaps you see why you can't always trust a corporation to self-regulate in the absence of government oversight. This is, sadly, how government regulations tend to come about.
The pedestrian was technically in the wrong, but we've heard a lot of rumors recently that Uber's self-driving software was being pushed forward recklessly. And given the wonderful people at Uber and their stellar track record, this isn't exactly hard to believe. A competently programmed car with a properly functioning lider probably should have seen that woman on the bike and reacted to it by braking far earlier than it did.
Yes, deaths will inevitably occur, but let's at least try to make sure there are as few as possibly going forward. This is a good reminder that machines can be just as fallible as the humans who create them.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Flash a dim light on the windscreen at random intervals, and ensure the human responds. No mobile phone usage then. This sort of thing has been done for trains for ages (I'm not talking about dead man, but attention monitors.)
Uber did not care. And that video they released was dubious, someone else took a dash cam of the area and it was reasonably well lit, even if there was no Lidar.
Uber were totally negligent. And I suspect they did not pay that driver very much. Monitoring a test car should not be a minimum wage job.
What's your proposed model for testing an autonomous car driving amidst normal traffic conditions that does not include actually having it drive among normal road traffic?
Perhaps they should focus first on not killing pedestrians on an otherwise empty road, and worry about "normal traffic conditions" later.