Uber Driver Was Streaming Hulu Just Before Fatal Self-Driving Car Crash, Says Police (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tempe, Arizona, police have released a massive report on the fatal Uber vehicle crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in March. The report provides more evidence that driver Rafaela Vasquez was distracted in the seconds before the crash. "This crash would not have occurred if Vasquez would have been monitoring the vehicle and roadway conditions and was not distracted,'' the report concludes. Police obtained records from Hulu suggesting that Vasquez was watching "The Voice," a singing talent competition that airs on NBC, just before the crash. Hulu's records showed she began watching the program at 9:16pm. Streaming of the show ended at 9:59pm, which "coincides with the approximate time of the collision," according to the police report.

Comments

Re:I remember a lot of people defending Uber

[Actually, I do RTFA]

t it was the driver "testing" the auto pilot that was the weak link here

In a very foreseeable way. If Uber couldn't figure out they shouldn't allow unsupervised employees to carry an small entertainment device into a situation where there were rare but impactful actions/attention required, I put more blame on Uber.

After all, an employee having an accident is one thing. An employee consistently making choices without consequences for a while, and those choices causing the accident, is a failure of supervision.

Everyone is at fault here

[SumDog]

The person should have been doing her job. At the same time, Uber hires people telling them it's a self driving vehicle, removes the 2 driver-per-car to reduce costs, and then tests disabling safety features because, "Hey it's okay. We have a human in case something goes wrong."

Fuck everything about this. Uber is equally at fault here. Sure she could have prevented the accident if she had been doing her god damn job. Uber could have prevented the accident if they didn't recklessly disable their own lidar and auto-brake algorithms to test their (failed) computer vision system AT NIGHT!

This girl made a mistake, one that will haunt her for the rest of her life. A girl on a bicycle is dead. There is plenty of blame to go around. But at a minimum, given Uber's track record, they should not be allowed to put these pieces of shit on the road.

Telsa has had a car crash into a truck and another into a barrier with their lane assist (they should be forced to rename that from "auto-pilot. It's not fucking auto-pilot). These systems give people a false sense of security and make people less aware, less active drivers. We are a good 15 year minimum from true autonomous vehicles and it's a fucking hard problem space.

Even with how expensive it is to expand rail, we could probably expand rail at a fraction of the price of self driving tech. Singapore and London already have self driving trains. Let's make transportation better for everyone in America first and catch up to the rest of the world before we work on complicated stuff that's only good for its cool factor:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/

Re: I remember a lot of people defending Uber

[saloomy]

Until someone puts out a law saying companies can force employees to turn in / turn off their cell phones. Then the same people will be crying foul for giving employers that power.