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

Posted by BeauHD on from the end-of-the-road dept.

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.

5 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Do you remember the good old days by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    1. Re:Do you remember the good old days by itsdapead · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?")

      --
      In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
    2. Re:Do you remember the good old days by novakyu · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:... intentionally disabling safety systems... by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  3. Re:By intentionally disabling safety systems... by stephanruby · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.