Uber Shutting Down Self-Driving Operations In Arizona After Fatal Crash (azcentral.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Arizona Republic: Uber is shutting down its self-driving car tests in Arizona, where one of the cars was involved in a fatal crash with a pedestrian in March, the company said Wednesday. The company notified about 300 Arizona workers in the self-driving program that they were being terminated just before 9 a.m. Wednesday. The shutdown should take several weeks. Test drivers for the autonomous cars have not worked since the accident in Tempe, but Uber said they continued to be paid. The company's self-driving trucks have also been shelved since the accident. Uber plans to restart testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh once federal investigators conclude their inquiry into the Tempe crash. The company also said it is having discussions with California leaders to restart testing.

Comments

By intentionally disabling safety systems...

[TWX]

...and then running the cars on public roads leading to the fatal collision, they should consider themselves lucky if any jurisdiction is willing to let them run again.

If I were a mayor or town manager I'd ban them. If the state overruled me, I'd request that my police department ensure that their vehicles do not pose a danger to the public, which would probably mean being pulled over all of the time and inspected for any violations by the commercial enforcement team. I doubt that the person behind the wheel has the ability to prove that safety systems are enabled, so that might mean a lot of vehicles get stopped, fail to prove safety, and get towed back to the shop with a fix-it ticket.

Re:By intentionally disabling safety systems...

[stephanruby]

If I were a mayor or town manager I'd ban them.

That's what San Francisco did before the Arizona accident. It specifically banned Uber back in December because its self-driving car ran a red light. See video (wait until the 10 seconds mark).

After that, Uber was allowed to test in California, just not in San Francisco. After the Arizona accident, Arizona, California, and one other State pulled Uber's permit to test cars on their public streets.

Now Uber can only do testing on its own private track with fake pedestrians and fake bicyclists, and I really doubt that it will ever be allowed to test its cars on the public roads in California again. Thankfully, there are 50 other self-driving car companies in the US. And in the San Francisco Bay Area, I now see 7 different types of self-driving cars which seem to multiplying in numbers, I just no longer see the Uber ones anymore.

So

[mewsenews]

Is their business model going to be kill someone in a criminally negligent fashion, pull up stakes and move to a different state? Will they run out of states or fix their technology first?

"criminally negligent fashion"

[gatfirls]

Was this proven? I hadn't heard anything other than the droves of internet people giving their armchair forensic and legal opinions.

... intentionally disabling safety systems...

[gatfirls]

This isn't your facebook feed, you can't just post that kind of stuff without some sort of proof to back up that claim.

Re:... intentionally disabling safety systems...

[Kjella]

This isn't your facebook feed, you can't just post that kind of stuff without some sort of proof to back up that claim.

I can't quite remember where I read it, but the car model has collision detection in the default configuration and would normally have performed an emergency brake when collision was imminent. All the "smart" features were disabled to run Uber's SDC software, though from what I understand this is standard practice so you don't have competing/conflicting automated systems. Nobody made a big deal of that part, it's just part of the explanation of how it could plow down that pedestrian without reacting at all - they disabled a primitive system that worked and replaced it with a sophisticated system that didn't and actually performed worse than out of the box.

Re:... intentionally disabling safety systems...

[viperidaenz]

They kind of said more than "it wasn't our system that failed", more along the lines of "our system would have applied the brakes 1 second before impact"
Which is much better than plowing through the person at 30+mph. Despite the video footage being terrible and much worse than would have been seen by the OEM camera.
At 30mph the XC90 can come to a complete stop in about 15m. Less than 1 second at that speed.

Intel Corp.’s Mobileye, which makes chips and sensors used in collision-avoidance systems and is a supplier to Aptiv, said Monday that it tested its own software after the crash by playing a video of the Uber incident on a television monitor. Mobileye said it was able to detect Herzberg one second before impact in its internal tests, despite the poor second-hand quality of the video relative to a direct connection to cameras equipped to the car.

Do you remember the good old days

[TeknoHog]

when the progress of science wasn't hindered by a few statistical accidents. The age of discoveries. The space race, when you could at least pretend mankind had its aim at the stars, even if it was mostly about political bickering between superpowers.

Now it's all about safety and well-being for everyone, no child left behind. If there's any of that sci-fi tech around we used to dream of, we might as well put ourselves in the stasis chamber and be comfortably numb for the rest of eternity.

Re:Do you remember the good old days

[itsdapead]

Except one of the much vaunted benefits of self-driving cars is they're going to be safer than human drivers...

Anyway, this wasn't a freak accident - the safety driver was watching their phone and not the road and, if you believe the video they released, then the car was driving too fast for the visibility conditions (the alternative is not to believe the video...)

Even in the good ol' 60s, if Apollo 11 had landed on a civilian's head because the Heroic Astronauts were busy Tweeting then Questions Would Have Been Asked (like, "what the hell is Tweeting?")

Re:Do you remember the good old days

[novakyu]

Yeah, the good old days when scientist like Marie Curie killed themselves with exposure to dangerous radiation, rather than the public (I mean, yes, there are "radium girls," but Curie discovered polonium, not radium).

P.S. To be actually serious, it's a good thing for autonomous cars that unscrupulous companies like Uber will be driven out of the business (if not "out of business" altogether). There are much more competent, ethical, and less-profit-crazy companies out there. They are the future of technology, not companies like Uber.

Re:Ugh

[AvitarX]

It depends on how this effects investing, since they aren't really making money, but this should reduce their burn rate significantly.

If a driver makes $12/hour (I feel I read that's what they make after accounting for other costs) it'll take at least 2 years for a self driving car to recoup the cost of a full time driver (a self driving car could in theory replace 2+ drivers though). That's assuming around 20k mark up for the car (which I suspect is low).

Sure, a company with a reliable self-driving base fleet may have some advantages in costs, but I'm not sure how much. In exchange, they will have a harder time attracting drivers for the busy times, insufficient coverage during those times, or have to eat the cost of unused capital during slow times.

Self driving cars will likely be the future, but until the tech (1) exists, and (2) is quite inexpensive it will have a hard time competing with a ride sharing company that doesn't spend that R and D money.

Uber and Lyft both are going to face a serious crunch soon though if the economy keeps as it is, it will be more and more expensive to get drivers as they have more pressure to break even. The increased rates will eat into their edge in cities with functional cab services, and relegate them to areas such as small/medium sized cities, suburbs, and non-Manhattan New York.

I'm sure there's money in that, but not enough to support their massive valuations, and they'll really need to start getting profitable fast to keep alive rather than selling a dream that they pretty much just shut themselves out of.

I hope ride sharing exists, they really filled a need in my area that was unmet by the cab industry (actually showing up when you called for a casual ride was a game changer here).