As a lot of us have been saying—not ready for the roads, Uber’s fault. Now we know more to confirm. Maybe this will be enough to keep all driverless cars off roads and not use the public as guinea pigs for their experiments.
This case stinks and the engineering staff owe the public an explanation as to how the sensors operate, what they saw, and what software was tasked with the decision making as far as avoidance and brake. So far I would believe anything, but I am afraid what we will learn will be a sorry case of failure to test in realistic situations and even running with some aspects of the system disabled.
I could not believe that they said the lidar would have detected but was not tied into the decision to apply the brakes. What are they doing running a vehicle with this attitude and what was the human doing while engineers were making “improvements” to software. This is where the human should have been highly alert and have have full command of the vehicle override systems.
All I can say is this does not look good.
You’re arguing against the reduction of 35,000 deaths on the road every year, mostly caused by distracted or drunk driving.
This vehicle was equipped with Lidar. It should have seen the person. This is exactly the use-case that is supposed to highlight how much better this technology is over humans.
It completely failed. For this reason Uber has a problem here. Many people involved in the technology are very concerned with this specific instance. With the technology available this should not have happened.
The real question is when this technology is mature enough to reduce deaths on the road. Will they cause fatalities? Yes. Will they reduce deaths on the road? Yes.