California Police Ticket A Self-Driving Car (cbslocal.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Ichijo writes: A self-driving car was slapped with a ticket after police said it got too close to a pedestrian on a San Francisco street.

The self-driving car owned by San Francisco-based Cruise was pulled over for not yielding to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Cruise says its data shows the person was far away enough from the vehicle and the car did nothing wrong.... According to data collected by Cruise, the pedestrian was 10.8 feet away from the car when, while the car was in self-driving mode, it began to continue down Harrison at 14th St."

The person in the crosswalk was not injured.

Comments

Story missing important details

[93 Escort Wagon]

Specifically: How does a cop pull over a self-driving car? I mean, exactly how does that happen logistically?

Re:Story missing important details

[Frobnicator]

That's actually one of many identified potential problems of self-driving cars: Attackers pull the vehicle over with blinking lights then go after the occupant with whatever attack they want.

Hacking is another major concern. These folks have published a bunch of attacks on more traditional cars with fancy computer parts. Accelerators, brakes, changing gears (they only did the safe gear changes in their demos), and cranked the steering while traveling at highway speeds. With fully autonomous vehicles every component is available for a digital attack.

Then you've got physical issues. Medical problems with the driver, remotely delivering a bomb, intentionally disabling sensors at a critical moment, and so many more.

Another major side effect will be the drop in organ transplants since car crashes account for about 1/5 of all organ donations, which has been discussed in depth on /. several times.

Plus This classic shown in XKCD.

10.8 feet

[b0s0z0ku]

10.8 feet is one second away at 7 mph. Too damn close -- company deserves a ticket.

Re:10.8 feet

[rossz]

When driving in San Francisco, it's damn near impossible to NOT get that close to pedestrians. They ignore traffic signals, they don't bother to use crosswalks, they'll walk right into traffic and expect YOU to slam on your brakes or try to violate the laws of physics.

Re:Cops gotta make that ticket quota!

[AuMatar]

Seeing how insane cyclists tend to be, I'd be all for that. The most dangerous drivers on the road in the city are the bikers.

Re:Cops gotta make that ticket quota!

[Anonymous Coward]

I could make that same argument for a car. I just stupid to be a blind rule-following robot and stop at every red light when you are moving 5-10 mph and can plainly see no cross traffic.

The issue most of us have with cyclists is that there is a significant number of them that really want maximum penalties applied to cars, but don't want the rules to apply to them at all.

Re: Cops gotta make that ticket quota!

[chaboud]

Cyclists in San Francisco regularly run four way stops, causing panic braking, and I had to swerve to avoid a trio riding the wrong way on a divided street (Dolores) on Thursday.

San Francisco cyclists regularly put the burden for their survival on other users of the road (pedestrians, drivers, other cyclists). There absolutely should be more ticketed cyclists in San Francisco, but it should not be driven by a revenue motive.

I say this as a cyclist, skater, pedestrian, and driver.

Re:The actual cross-walk rules

[Jeremi]

The actually rules have nothing to do with distance: [link to drive handbook]

I'm not sure those are "the actual rules"; they are part of a driver handbook, which is to say, they are a common-sense guide to how to be safe driver.

All well and good, but if this matter were to go to court, I think they would be looking at what the laws say rather than one the DMV driver's handbook says, and there would be a lot less common sense involved and a lot more legalese :/