Autonomous Uber kill vehicle (Dash Cam)

Sad, it was bound to happen at some point especially if the safety driver is falling asleep as shown here. I'm not sure why someone was walking their bike crossing the highway at night either though.
Maybe Uber needs to add more night sensors that can detect body heat or something more, not sure.
 
It looked more like the safety person was watching something or texting. As for sensors, they'd have to release more details of what was actually installed, but I would be very surprised / disappointed if they didn't have some sort of IR enhanced illumination.

KuoH

Sad, it was bound to happen at some point especially if the safety driver is falling asleep as shown here. I'm not sure why someone was walking their bike crossing the highway at night either though.
 
I would think the cars have plenty of detection technology, but maybe in this case the code said, you are on so and so road so pedestrian warnings / detections get less priority.
Hard to say, it may have been a firmware upgrade and 1 line of code that was supposed to be there was left out.
Also as a supervisor driver it must be damn hard to keep focus,,, maybe there should be 2 of those in test vehicles.
One can only hope the afflicted people get compensated in some way / degree.
And this will probably keep on happening in the time to come, and it must be damn hard for computers to take into account the stupid powers of humans.

Still i will venture to say as a pedestrian its your own job to make sure you are safe crossing a road, not least in a place like this.
Personally i do not trust any vehicle when i am walking, not even in a crosswalk where i have green light, doing anything else i feel are a tad on the naive side, not least since taking care of your own security only demand very little extra effort.
 
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Yup, the cyclist was wearing dark clothing, there did not appear to be any safety reflectors on the bike and she appeared to be walking at a slow speed NOT paying attention to vehicles.

KuoH

Still i will venture to say as a pedestrian its your own job to make sure you are safe crossing a road, not least in a place like this.
 
Reminds me of a fatality where car Vs cyclist , poorly lit B road , cyclist was wearing dark clothing and drunk .
 
Well, not easy to judge from a cam video.
It was dark (moonless night), pitch black and 1-2km after a roadsign indicating "end deer crossing" a deer (he did not pay eventually much attention to the sign) cross my road.
I barely saw it, but reviewing the footage (mobius 1) you don't see much.
In this UBER accident OF course it's too late while the bicycle rider cross, the only chance a driver could have caught it (might have been) way before just slowing down.

What I have noticed is that driving experience leads to accident prevention BEFORE the dangerous situation appears (you see a kid on the side of the road who appear not to have any intention to cross the road and you slow down anyway in order to prevent unexpected behaviours)
 
Here's where it happened (street view).

Did Uber intentionally downgrade the video quality? My three most recent dashcams (each a sub-$100 unit) over the last 4 years have all had markedly better night quality than what's shown in the Uber video. Yes, the pedestrian shouldn't have been in the middle of the road. But the pedestrian should've been visible to the cameras, and LIDAR, and radar. And the car shouldn't be driving so fast that it can't react in time to objects showing up at the end of the headlight beam.

If it can't react to something at the edge of its headlights, then how can it avoid a broken-down car? Or a deer? Or a cyclist toodling along slowly in the traffic lane? Or a kid chasing a ball into the street?

All that said, why the city has that big X-shaped sidewalk in the middle of the road is beyond me. I see there's a carpark under the freeway, but why connect the pathway to the road, if they don't expect people to use the path as an invitation to cross the road?
 
Maybe autonomous cars should be limited to daylight only driving for now at least in the beginning.
They are in an area licensed for testing autonomous cars, you have to test them at night as well as day to find out if they are safe to be licensed everywhere else at night. If you allow testing of autonomous cars in your neighbourhood then you should expect a few deaths while the systems are being developed.

Lidar can see at night without headlights, it should have seen the cyclist. Normal cameras might have seen it too late for that speed, maybe the car was going too fast for its abilities, but it should still have put the brakes on and lost half the speed thus causing some bruises instead of death, I can't see any sign of braking. A human driver would probably have seen the cyclist in the shadows where we cant see anything on the video and slowed then either braked or driven around.

As for the interior view, that is what we have to expect, no human is going to maintain 100% concentration on the road for long periods and be able to take over instantly when they are not controlling anything. Clearly he wasn't doing his job, but I don't think he should be blamed, what he failed to do should just be accepted as part of the test results.

Maybe it was one of these silent electric vehicles and the cyclist didn't hear it coming? We really need some minimum sound level regulations for vehicles.
 
I can't believe you wrote this! o_O
The testing will be declared a success if the autonomous cars can be shown to cause fewer deaths than human drivers would have. You can't expect zero deaths.

In this case the death looks totally avoidable, and I think the accident could have been avoided, maybe it was a development fault, but maybe the car was driving faster than was 100% safe because driving slower might have resulted in humans trying to overtake and that would have made an accident more likely rather than less. They have to make compromises, and I don't expect they will choose a compromise that results in zero deaths.

I think we are still a long way from autonomous cars leaving the testing phase, or being desirable. 99% autonomous is no good.
 
You can't expect zero deaths.

Not unless you remove humans totally from the equation.
Even in factories where robots and a large level of automatization have gone on a long time we often hear about a human getting in the way of these machines.
Thats why those are normally fenced in in those places.
 
I can't believe you wrote this! o_O

I"m ok with allowing testing in your neighborhood. :sneaky:

It does look like the driver is texting or watching something else.

I can't believe they don't have an interior cam that shows what the driver is doing, or not doing...fully. Seems like a serious omission...or cover up.
The 'safety' cams they put in the big trucks will show the drivers hands, face, etc.
 
Not unless you remove humans totally from the equation.
Even in factories where robots and a large level of automatization have gone on a long time we often hear about a human getting in the way of these machines.
Thats why those are normally fenced in in those places.
Maybe one day it will be a legal requirement for all cars to be autonomous so that they can't have any accidents, but are you going to make the bicycles autonomous too so that humans are totally removed from the equation?
 
The 2 will have to be separated by hardware i think, so there are no chance they will get near each other other than in a few designated places like intersections.
Will be hard to say what it all end up with, but i for one know that i will not enjoy driving my car on the road alongside cars with no human driver, i do think that alone will lead to stress and accidents in the future.

With the automated cars of the future unable to crash, i wonder if they will start cutting into the weight adding safety features of current car design to make future cars get better MPKWH. ( Miles Pr Kilowatt Hour )
When they dont crash why have such silly heavy and expensive safety features like in current cars. ?

Maybe the safety foam from demolition man
dm_013110_c43.jpg
 
...i for one know that i will not enjoy driving my car on the road alongside cars with no human driver, i do think that alone will lead to stress and accidents in the future.

With the automated cars of the future unable to crash, i wonder if they will start cutting into the weight adding safety features of current car design to make future cars get better MPKWH. ( Miles Pr Kilowatt Hour )
When they dont crash why have such silly heavy and expensive safety features like in current cars. ?
I suspect you might enjoy taking advantage of the fact that they will be guaranteed to give way to you since they must avoid accidents while you can take the risk! Even if you don't take advantage, many people will and the accident rate will not drop until there are almost no human drivers left.

As for weight, I see that average car weight has dropped a bit, but I suspect that is due to many people buying smaller cars like yours and not because cars have got lighter: https://bovagrai.info/auto/2017/en/2-registrations/2-5-average-car-height-width-and-weight/

If you want to improve MPKWH, the weight doesn't actually play a big part, at constant speed it makes almost no difference and with energy recovery systems it doesn't make much difference during acceleration either, of course more weight still = slow acceleration. But the fact that cars are now wider and taller is wasting a lot of energy through aerodynamic drag which can't be avoided. Cars should be made lower, and narrower again to save energy, if you need extra space then make the car longer since that improves the aerodynamics and saves energy. Always seems stupid when a Mini parks next to my older mid-size car and I have to look up at it because it is 1559mm tall compared to my ‎1370mm, even a Fiat 500 is 1488 and the current version of my car is 1,675mm, yet mine was normal height when it was designed, and that is a lot of extra air to have to push out of the way. Don't think I will upgrade my car to the latest version, 0-100km/h is an extra 4 seconds and apparently it uses more fuel, even though the weight is about the same - 16 years of progress!
 
You can't expect zero deaths.
What do you mean I can't? Of course I can! What kind of twisted mentality is that? What are we now, guinea pigs? :mad:
 
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