Posted on 03/19/2018 11:44:55 AM PDT by grundle
SAN FRANCISCO — A woman in Tempe, Ariz., has died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber, in what appears to be the first known death of a pedestrian struck by an autonomous vehicle on a public road.
The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk, the Tempe police said in a statement. The episode happened on Sunday around 10 p.m. The woman was not publicly identified.
Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Wait till they start mowing down kids on bikes. It will happen.
They’ll probably blame the AAA.
Get out your checkbook Uber, your stupid idea has now cost someone their life.
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How do you know Uber was at fault?
Do you prejudge all the human drivers who kill multiple pedestrians everyday?
Absolute idiocy to have self driving vehicles.
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Even if they save thousands of lives every year?
Last year there were 37,000 traffic deaths just in America.
Wait till they start mowing down kids on bikes. It will happen.
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Especially since human drivers have never hit a kid on a bike.
so 37,461 deaths out of 263 million cars is better than 1 death out of a couple hundred?! Self-driving ares are thousands of times more dangerous.
I recall a big stink years ago over by American University where a kid was rollerblading at night, dark clothes, and all. Was hit and killed. The driver was held accountable.
As I said in another reply, the proper measurement for comparison would be at fault accidents per miles driven.
But even that wouldn’t matter if the pedestrian is at fault. The article did say the pedestrian crossed the street outside of a crosswalk.
When the government investigated the Tesla accident a year and a half ago they found that the autopilot equipped cars had a 40% lower accident rate than Tesla cars without it.
NOT A PEDESTRIAN!!! Look at the pictures and the later reports—heck, look on the Drudge Report page where they show the update—the victim murdered by the self-driving Uber car was riding a bicycle and the bicycle is pictured next to the car, all twisted up.
And this WAS a bicyclist murdered by Uber self-driving car. Look at the pictures and you can see the smashed up bicycle. She was not a pedestrian.
Can you imagine one of these in the hands of Holder, Clinton & Barrack Inc.?
and so it begins ...
If someone walking darts in front of a vehicle, or a bicycle swerves suddenly in front of a vehicle, or someone walks out from behind a bus into traffic, it’s not going to matter if there’s a driver or not, laws of motion cannot be denied. It will take that 2,000 pound machine a certain distance to stop even with millisecond reflexes.
Was she wearing camouflage?
In the account I read on the Bing homepage, the article stated that she was walking the bike across the street.
How do you know she wasn’t riding or walking the bike outside of a crosswalk across the street?
I think the discussion as this moves forward will be interesting. Did the cite the Uber driver? Do they cite the company? They might argue that it was her fault, but at the end of the day it is a driverless (and inattentive standby driver) car that ran over a little old lady.
Does it matter? If she was on her bike, or with her bike on the road, she had the right-of-way. It is not legal to run down and kill bicyclists. Besides, maybe she was stopped to allow traffic to pass? Maybe she stopped to get off the road? Lots of possible speculation. Was she crossing the road? She’s dead so cannot answer. End of day, driverless car, inattentive driving assistant (what do you call the guy), and a dead bicyclist, smashed up bicycle, on road.
Yes. It is my understanding that even if someone is at fault (let's say the lady walking the bike was jaywalking), it is incumbent upon the driver to avoid hitting her if it is possible to do so. A human driver would probably have slammed on the brakes.
I knew someone who was ticketed after she was hit by a car that ran a red light. The office asked her if she checked to see if the intersection was clear before going through, and she foolishly (or truthfully) answered "no". The cop explained that it is still her responsibility to be sure that no one is coming, even though she had the right of way.
personal injury lawyers-it are going to have a field day with self-driving cars, as well it 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.
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