Dashcam footage released Uber Volvo XC accident in AZ

[ghi]

...in autonomous mode !   self-driving 18 wheelers to hit the roads soon ;  time to buy horses and stay off the roads.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5529453/Video-shows-moment-pedestrian-killed-self-driving-Uber-car.html

[Delirium]

That is funny, because when cars were released these early drivers were also told to buy horses.

Self driving cars will become the norm, no one will be able to stop the tide of technology. However, I do wish additional sensors would be installed in roadways as part of an approach to make them safer.

[Skuzzy]

It will be a while before autonomous cars are the norm.

You want electric cars?  Or do you want autonomous cars?  Today, you cannot have both.  Well you can, but according to Bosch, who makes most of the autonomous sensor equipment, your useable driving range, in an electric car, will drop about 90% when fitted with everything to make it autonomous.

Personally, I see advantages of it on the open Interstates/Freeways, but in town and residential areas, no way.

If a car has to decide whether to hit a pole or run over a baby, it will run over the baby as the primary concern is the safety of the occupants and running over a baby will serve to protect the occupants of the car.  Cars lack moral judgement.

If I am driving, I hit the pole.  I am in a better position to survive that, than a baby is if I run over it.

[Maverick]

The car / truck can be autonomous but until you fix the people issue (other drivers and pedestrians) there will always be a tremendous number of unknown factors for the machinery to deal with. Machines and software are predictable, peepuls are stupid too much of the time. ANYONE who has studied traffic or had to direct traffic knows that first hand.

[Skuzzy]

The car failed, in this case.  The lady had to cross an open lane before entering the lane the car was traveling in.  There is no way that car should not have detected her.

It does not appear to make any changes at all, in speed or direction.

[pembquist]

I'm not going to watch the video as I have enough stuff I can't un-see already. What Skuzzy said about the pedestrian having to cross a lane before getting into the lane the car was in reminded me of the crosswalks here. The law here is that every corner crossing is a cross walk whether marked or not and the rules are the same as when a cross walk is marked with broad white stripes and flashing yellow caution signals. The rule is if a pedestrian steps out traffic has to stop. Unfortunately knowledge of this law is not consistent across drivers ranging from puzzlement to rage in the reactions of the drivers when pedestrians use even the emphatically marked cross walks in a way that causes the cars to have to stop. At least the autonomous cars aren't supposed to get angry that they have to follow the law, or will they?

[Skuzzy]

The safety driver also failed.

[Devil 505]

The safety driver also failed.

This is why I oppose autonomous vehicles. The system invites the "driver" to tune out.

[Mister Fork]

The safety driver also failed.

Looks like they were surfing on their phone or device - out of view of the internal camera on purpose...you can tell by watching the video and see them smiling for a moment because they were using a smart device. 

That said, I'm not sure the outcome would of been any different if they had been watching the road as they were alert and looking forward just prior to the accident. And had Volvo's own safety system been turned on, I'm not sure if the outcome would of been different.  I have a similar system on my Sube Forester (Eyesight) and it relies on visibility to brake.

In this case, the poor lady jay-walked across a fast multi-lane road at night - I'm not sure if anyone else had been driving the outcome would of been different.  The time from being visible in the vehicle lights to impact as just a tad under 1 second.  The average reaction rate for a 30 year old driver is 1 second.

[Skuzzy]

You cannot go by what you see in that video.  The camera may have poor low light support to begin with.

[100Coogn]

I wonder how these autonomous vehicles will deal with snow & ice.  We can get 6-8 inches if snow easily overnight, here in Michigan.
How are those sensors going to negate the edge of the road in that stuff?
I've been driving for 35 years here and every year can be an adventure in the winter.

Coogan

[Wiley]

I was under the impression the whole point of the autonomous systems was it was way better at detection and reaction than people, therefore a Kobayashi Maru scenario where you've got not choice but to hit *something* wouldn't occur.

Once they get it reasonably debugged, I'm sure they'll hit a point where they're statistically safer than people.  We'll just have to put up with the occasional incident where a human that was paying attention might've made another decision.

The thing is, very few people treat driving as a skill anymore so regardless of what a good driver would do, the average morning commute zombie is as likely to freeze or make the wrong choice as they are to make the right one.

I don't like the idea of putting my life completely in the hands of a software engineer just on principle, but I agree that seems to be the way we're headed.

As to the snow and ice, I really wonder about that too.  I recall one time driving a highway at 4 AM that had gotten about 2 inches of fresh snow overnight, and the plows hadn't been down it.  The ditches were full to be level with the road and there was one set of tracks that had gone down it.  I spent most of the 20 mile drive just praying that guy hadn't hit the ditch or I was going to be right behind him.

On an average plowed city street though I think the snow might actually help it delineate the road a little better.

Wiley.

[bustr]

Here in california black and dark coats\shirts are the norm year round. At night even on well lit roads and your lights on, at times it can get dicey seeing pedestrians. In cities you are habituated to looking for them becasue they are a constant in the environment. Once you leave urban areas, you don't expect to see a person walking across the road and this can have unfortunate consequences. It's how the brain works.

Looking at the video, the human passenger aside, I have to wonder if our eyes and brains process a bit differently than a digital camera shows under low light conditions. There was a left road fork that she came out of while being already on the road bed, not darting from one shoulder to the other. The dash cam appears to be kind of binary in showing dark and light areas versus our eyes and brain has more spectrum which the street light may have been enough for our peripheral vision to be tickled which works better in dark conditions to sense motion. That doesn't account for the passenger's reflexes or lack of in the equation. A younger more alert passenger may have still hit the pedestrian or rolled the car in a reflexive evasion panic killing both people. One will never know.

It appears the sensors are not scanning wide enough nor did they resolve the image outline of a combined human pushing a bicycle from its huge database of possible collision image outlines. And her reflective white shoes, the sensors may have thought they were a road bed painted reflection device for human drivers to see. The industry that is moving autonomous vehicles along had to accept things like this would happen during the formative years while the sensory equipment was being refined. Otherwise, they would never have started down this path to one day replacing human drivers with AI.

[Wiley]

That is funny, because when cars were released these early drivers were also told to buy horses.

Self driving cars will become the norm, no one will be able to stop the tide of technology. However, I do wish additional sensors would be installed in roadways as part of an approach to make them safer.

Personally I am not really keen on external sensors.  They seem to me like a target for vandals/hackers.  If they can't make it work self-contained in the vehicle, I don't think they should do it.

Wiley.

[zack1234]

Why will no one answer the flipper question every time this comes up?.

What is the point of driverless cars?.

And why dont they put railway track on the freeways?.