Uber Will Not Re-Apply For Self-Driving Car Permit In California (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber, after suspending its self-driving car operations in all markets following a fatal crash, has decided not to re-apply for its self-driving car permit in California. Uber's current permit in California expires March 31. "We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident," an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Given this, we decided to not reapply for a California permit with the understanding that our self-driving vehicles would not operate in the state in the immediate future."

Uber's decision not to reapply comes in tandem with a letter the DMV sent to Uber's head of public affairs, Austin Heyworth, today. The letter pertains to the fatal self-driving car crash that happened in Tempe, Arizona last week. "In addition to this decision to suspend testing throughout the country, Uber has indicated that it will not renew its current permit to test autonomous vehicles in California," DMV Deputy Director/Chief Counsel Brian Soublet wrote in the letter. "By the terms of its current permit, Uber's authority to test autonomous vehicles on California public roads will end on March 31, 2018." This comes following Arizona's decision to block Uber's self-driving cars in its city.

Comments

No kidding

[Izuzan]

With the reported problems their self driving car had im ammazed it was allowed off a test track. Barely averaging 13 miles before needing human intervention is piss poor, and not functioning properly while next to a large object (like a transport).

Yeah. Definitely should not have been off a test track.

Re:No kidding

[stabiesoft]

Exactly this. If I were teaching someone to drive and I needed to intervene every 13 miles to avoid an accident, well, no license for you. 13 miles is like every 1/2 hour in suburban traffic. How can it be that bad and they think it was usable? I do understand, it is coming from the sw industry where generally sw is shipped and the customer does the testing. But hey, they met the schedule and shipped the car out on time.

Re:No kidding

[hazardPPP]

Can I have some citation on this. It isn't that I don't believe you, I just hadn't heard that particular statistic before and would like to understand the details on such information.

The statistic is from a NYT article (there was a Slashdot story about it a few days ago), that is, from leaked internal Uber company data obtained by the NYT.

Also, not all self-driving cars are the same. Google's tend to have a good safety record thus far, Uber seems to try and piggy back on this (like they tried to "piggy back" on Google's technology, too...) to assure everyone that testing self-driving cars is safe, while refusing to release their own testing data. The information obtained by the NYT suggests the performance of the Uber cars is terrible in comparison to Google.

Uber deserves no trust and no benefit of the doubt, I mean they were kicked out of California because they didn't apply for a $150 licence for autonomous car testing. If they can't be bothered to fill out some paperwork, I wonder where else they are cutting corners.

Re:No kidding

[Uberbah]

And OF COURSE "the guy monitoring the automated car didn't know she was crossing" (or was it a girl, I thought guy when I saw the video but I've heard it reported that was a female). HE/SHE WAS LOOKING AT HIS/HER FUCKING PHONE!

As you would be, if you were driving for hours and hours without having to do anything, and on a road with little traffic. The hating on the human minder is entirely misplaced.

Re:No kidding

[jellomizer]

Ok I got it and read it.
So here is some information that seems that should be explained further

"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, 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."

Now this far more important part of the article. It isn't self driving car technology as the technology currently stands, but Ubers implementation of it, and it failure to prevent it from going out when they haven't perfected it at the level the competitors are achieving. And attempting to stop people from alerting the public about it.

This should be considered a shame on you to Uber, and not be scared of autonomous automobiles, as ones that are properly implemented have a rather good safety record. (Still 5600 miles isn't that great for a release, it should probably be over 100,000 miles)

Re:Well, Duh!

[hazardPPP]

I suppose in your non-nanny non-fascist non-shithole hypothetical state, driver licenses are not required? Let's just let a 10 year old, or a blind person, or a person with dementia (etc...) drive, because if we don't, that would be fascism.

At this point, allowing Uber's autonomous cars to drive around is something akin to that.

Re:Without self-driving Uber is dead

[Oswald McWeany]

Without self-driving cars Uber is dead.

I'm not convinced that that is a bad thing. Uber is like a parasite. They put taxi drivers out of work, and after cost for car maintenance/depreciation is considered- you actually make negative money driving for Uber (it's not a smart business proposition for the driver- people don't think it through long term). All the while Uber has been doing some pretty unethical things.

There are few companies I WANT to see fail more than Uber.

Stinky

[tungstencoil]

I smell a (public relations/marketing) rat. Uber has sunk serious cash into self-driving vehicles, with a vision of a future where there are no drivers and no vehicle ownership. The public at large will simple dial up (automated) transport services from their mobile - transport services Uber will provide. I can't imagine one (admittedly tragic) setback is all it takes to cause them to abandon it.

They are (disingenuously, I suspect) attempting to appear humane, cautious, and considerate... to mitigate the "we stomp on laws! we stomp on people! we harass! progress at any cost!" image that they have. When the dust settles, they'll - at best - issue a "we're super duper happy we took this pause to focus on safety blah blah".

Writing applications that impact public safety (as someone else pointed out, Therac anyone?) is an entirely different ballgame than "app development". Anyone rationally believe that Uber has the governance, structure, and discipline in place to create self-driving systems? What about airplane critical systems? Radiology?

Transportation is no joke. Realtime systems are not 'just another kind of app'. It's a very different approach, discipline, and willingness to follow a particular governance, a particular path. Nothing I've read about Uber, nothing they've ever said publicly, and nothing the three engineers I've known to work for them indicates that they - at all - acknowledge that. They believe they're somehow super-special, somehow smarter than the thousands of people who've come before them, working on critical systems, who utilized such safeguards and discipline.

NopeNopeNope.

Re:Uber will just test them in California anyway.

[hazardPPP]

It's about money, California will do anything to protect it's stream of revenue to dump into any libtard project moonbeam chooses, that's why Uber needs a permit.

Uhm, no, it's not about money, it's about safety.

An autonomous vehicle testing permit has an annual fee of $3600 and includes 10 test vehicles. Additional batches of 10 vehicles can be added at $50 a batch.

Currently there are about 50 companies testing about 300 cars total. 50 licences mean 500 cars if everyone is testing 10 cars. This is not the case (since there are less than 500 cars on the road), and you have some companies (e.g. Waymo) testing way more than 10, while others are probably testing one or two. So that's 50*3600 = $180,000 in application fees + a few hundred, maybe thousand, dollars more from the companies testing more than 10 vehicles.

This is hardly some sort of windfall for the government of California. The money probably doesn't cover the cost of developing the legislation, processing the applications, and monitoring the results.

Re:Uber will just test them in California anyway.

[hazardPPP]

Given Uber's history of flouting taxi and labor laws just about anywhere they operate...

...Uber should not be allowed to do anything that can jeopardize the safety of people, period. Flouting taxi regulations doesn't kill anyone. Flouting car safety regulations does. If Uber were a car company, they'd sell you something that fails a crash test and tell you'll be fine, who needs crash tests?

Re:Uber will just test them in California anyway.

[Kierthos]

So they have a paper trail showing that it was supposed to be a self-driving car?

Some of these self-driving cars still have a steering wheel and other controls so the passenger in the driver's seat can take control if necessary. Let's say one of those cars gets in an accident. Do you expect the officer on the scene to immediately recognize it's a self-driving car?

Worse situation

[DrYak]

The situation is actually worse than with Therac-25.

Back then it was standard type of software, (a classical imperative program written in assembler, that is supposed to do a series of determined steps), where further analysis could find bugs (mostly due to bad practices that could help arise race conditions, overflows, etc.) you can clearly show that the software didn't work as planned.

Nowadays, with autonomous cars, its entirely different, mostly relying on modern-day AI with deep neural nets.

I'm exaggerating (though not necessarily that much, in the specific case of Nvidia's platform) :
but basically you have on one side a bunch of sensor inputs (camera, radar, lidar, sonar)
on the other side you have a bunch of controls (steering wheel, brakes, gaz pedal)
and in the middle you have a giant AI black box with "here magic happens" written on it (but it could as well be hallucinating sheeps).

There's no clear software bug here. In fact the software run exactly as expected : it correctly ran the neural net.
It's what the neural decided to do out of sensors data that is problematic.
It's not as much a software bug as a general design oversight.
With problematic black boxes whose logic is hard to model and understand in an exact logic fashion (DNN aren't a long list of logic rules like "if condition A and B are detected then apply decision C").

Of course in practice that's a big simplification (except, again, for Nvidia's platform). In practice a good design should include also hard logic that looks at some simpler safeguards (a big object in front detected by sensors should cause direct slowing down/braking not waiting to see what weird decision the neural net might come up with). So there is actual "classical imperative program" somewhere that needs fixing.

But you get the general gist of the direction things are going with AI : we're reaching the point where it's hard to understand what going under hood, because what goes under the hood is closer to "intuition" than "hard logic".

Re:Without self-driving Uber is dead

[Uberbah]

I still remember dumpster-like cabs, waiting for more than an hour for one to arrive, and sightseeing detours that were common before Uber.

All of which you can get with spades with Uber as well. The hate on taxis always seems to be based on anecdotes, confirmation bias, and ignoring the fact that Uber is burning through billions in cash every year. If you were running a taxi business, how easy would you find it to compete with an unlicensed competitor that can afford to lose money for a decade or more? And what do you think will happen to Uber's prices if they manage to drive taxi companies out of business?

Re: Uber will just test them in California anyway.

[Type44Q]

To give them a little credit... they did buy up Carnegie Mellon's entire fucking robotics lab.