Posted on 03/19/2018 10:20:30 AM PDT by Reno89519
Uber is temporarily halting self-driving car tests in all locations after a deadly accident.
Programs in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Phoenix and Toronto will be paused after a woman was hit and killed overnight by an Uber self-driving car when walking across the street in Tempe, Arizona. It is likely the first pedestrian fatality caused by a self-driving car.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
personal injury lawyers are going to have a field day with self-driving cars, as well they should, given the extreme likelihood of continuous death and mayhem from this not-yet-ready-for-prime-time technology.
the great thing about this from a liability lawyer’s standpoint is that almost all accidents nowadays are caused by the drivers and NOT by faulty or unsafe auto design or manufacturing. Therefore, today’s main liability targets have been the bad drivers and their insurance companies, IF THEY ARE INSURED.
With driverless cars, there’s no possibility that the drivers can be at fault since there aren’t any, and therefore there’s a 100% chance that the manufacturers are at fault, and the manufacturers have DEEP pockets, unlike individual drivers, even the ones WITH insurance.
Quite quickly, driverless car makers will be sued out of existence unless states absolve them of their liability, at which point it becomes open season on the innocents by driverless car manufactures. In point of fact, the liability waiver would actually have to occur at the Federal level because of cars sold in a state that has liability waivers driving across the border to another state that has no liability waivers.
If she was walking the bike across the street she’d be a pedestrian. Guess the video from the car will show what the situation was.
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Oh, I'm certain that the car made a gps location entry, noting a bumpy spot in the road to later be reported to - somebody. Give the technology some time and I'm sure that these incidents will be dealt with by an autonomous rig that combines the functions of street sweeper, chipper-shredder and chemical toilet suction truck.
Shibumi could have made this thread...
Yesterday! ;p
Already been done...some cars have “auto pilot”. I won’t name-names :)
Ridiculous. If that was law, a driverless vehicle would be an attractive target for intentional collisions. Get an old beater, ram it into a driverless vehicle, claim a disabling injury, get paid, retire.
Not that the courts would countenance such "law" for a millisecond.
Latest numbers I saw of accidents per mile traveled, the driver-less cars far out-perform human driver cars.
Thanks for the input! So now that machine driving is on the road in uncontrolled environs unlike the 2007 challenge in mock city driving, where the avg speed for the finishers was 20 mph, we have them in traffic and training. They will be better than human drivers, soon. Moore’s law obviously applies to the onboard computers, and just like a computer can beat the best chess master humanity has and is getting better, faster smaller and cheaper, machines will do better at driving. We have a 1/2 to 3/4 sec response time. Machines are in cars that do it for you already and in newer cars for a few years. Higher end cars will parallel park for you. Now. A truck in Texas delivered a load of beer already. The future will happen, insurance companies will charge more for crappy human drivers, and lastly governments will outlaw human drivers to keep them from mucking up traffic. Of course if democrats are involved, they will introduce corruption to the cars, patterns and taxes and will spy on everyone’s location in addition. What a world?
DK
Cross street
until now.
but what’s the fatality ratio now? There can’t be more than a handful of those cars in the world.
Something is wrong with the algorithm that Uber is using because something unexpectedly entering the vehicle’s path is pretty much the first emergency event that self driving car engineers look at. The entire car has essentially been designed around preventing exactly this situation from occurring. Beyond this case there does need to be a more universal understanding of what safe driving operations and parameters actually are. Without a more rigorous mathematical framework for determining fault, liability really is going to be arbitrarily determined by the legal department, or state regulators, or engineers themselves.
My prediction:
The investigation will conclude that the dead pedestrian (or cyclist) was at fault.
Über will be held blameless, and the tests will resume.
One of the advantages of the autonomous vehicles is they have numerous cameras and sensors, all recording what happened.
What actually happened will come out, and it will not be in doubt.
I suspect your prediction will be correct.
Opponents of autonomous vehicles will not be shamed if they are shown to have misjudged this incident from the beginning.
They have a visceral hatred for the idea of autonomous vehicles, as I am sure the luddites had for powered looms.
It will be interesting to see what actually happened.
So far no indication of fault, nor that a human driver could have avoided the accident.
Will they test the fuel alcohol content to determine if drunk driving was a factor?
Witty conversation won’t take THAT much of an AI in the case of lots of people.
Unfortunately, I forgot to include a sarcasm tag in the post you responded to.
It won’t make a bit of difference what the cyclist actually did, right or wrong. There’s too much money involved for any judgement to go against Über.
There is what I would consider a precedent for this clearly "new" situation...and you are likely wrong.
I recall several cases where a sober driver ran a stoplight or pulled out into traffic & was hit/killed by an impaired driver. Same scenario for a sober pedestrian who was jaywalking. The impaired driver was convicted of vehicular homicide because he/she may have been normally able to process the situation more quickly & take evasive action but for the impairment.
Same rules apply...this vehicle has no ability to quickly process an unexpected situation & take evasive action. You lose.
http://fortune.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-car-crash/
“It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode [autonomous or human-driven] based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir told the paper, adding that the incident occurred roughly 100 yards from a crosswalk. “It is dangerous to cross roadways in the evening hour when well-illuminated managed crosswalks are available,” she said.
Though the vehicle was operating in autonomous mode, a driver was present in the front seat. But Moir said there appears to be little he could have done to intervene before the crash.
“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” Moir said. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”
According to the Chronicle, the preliminary investigation found the Uber car was driving at 38 mph in a 35 mph zone and did not attempt to brake. Herzberg is said to have abruptly walked from a center median into a lane with traffic. Police believe she may have been homeless.
Within a year or two, autonomous vehicles will be able to avoid this kind of crash. Humans won’t.
Neither would I. I am not looking forward to a future of “self-driving cars”.
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