Driverless Cars/Trucks (1 Viewer)

[LoadLetterPaper]

Yes--it was the lady's fault that she j-walked--that doesn't mean that she deserve to get run over by a robot driven vehicle that was doing nothing but randomly driving for the sake of picking up test miles.   Even stupidity doesn't deserve a fate that bad. Not only that--the supposed "safer" type of driver that this thing was testing--did absolutely nothing to slow down or stop.   Yeah--her crossing the street was dumb--but it shouldn't have resulted in a completely meaningless death.  

Certainly did not deserve to die, or get run over, or hit. 

It was still her fault.

if a completely sober person ran her over, what would you say?

 

[LoadLetterPaper]

Christ, I work in Boston. Every day on my 1 mile walk to work from the train, I see people do the dumbest things, run out in front of cars. I myself do it all the time. People are dumb when it comes to messing with fate and the way they walk/cross the street. People are the problem.

 

[Vanilla Guerrilla]

When I start seeing these robot cars putting stickers on their door for every pedestrian they hit, I'll start worrying about A.I. like Elon Musk says I should.

 

[LoadLetterPaper]

When I start seeing these robot cars putting stickers on their door for every pedestrian they hit, I'll start worrying about A.I. like Elon Musk says I should.

Maximum Overdrive - for real this time!

 

[jvdesigns2002]

Certainly did not deserve to die, or get run over, or hit. 

It was still her fault.

if a completely sober person ran her over, what would you say?

I would say that it was an accident between two human beings who both had a right to be on the street that the accident occured. My guess is that many people that live in the communities where these things are being tested are either unaware that they are being tested there--or had no voice in deciding whether or not they wanted their communities to serve as guinea pigs for this potentially dangerous project.  I think that autonomous vehicles will be the wave of the future--but I certainly would not vote to have them tested near myself or my family.  That's my only point.  Technology advances though solving glitches.  We have not seen anywhere near the number of glitches required to make these things safe.  Unfortunately--when testing these things in the public domain--a glitch can be the loss of a life (lives).   People that don't want to be a part of this experiment should not have to be exposed to the dangers of it.  

 

[LoadLetterPaper]

No one has the right to be in the middle of a street where there is no lights or crosswalk.

 

[heckmanm]

Certainly did not deserve to die, or get run over, or hit. 

It was still her fault.

if a completely sober person ran her over, what would you say?

IIHS stats show about 6,000 pedestrians killed nationwide in 2016, presumably ALL of them by cars with actual people driving them.  Math works out to just under 2 people per billion vehicle miles driven.

I don't know that we'll ever get a sample size large enough to know the true rate for driverless cars.

 

[stbugs]

An interesting question is how safe will they have to be before they are universally accepted? Once they are safer than humans, delaying their adoption is costing lives. I'd rather save these lives sooner (on a net basis) than wait for a perfect driverless car.

Good question, but I’d think you’d agree that with sensors that don’t require light that the Uber car certainly wasn’t safe enough. As posted above, city driving is infinitely more dangerous and yet in this case a lady walking slowly across a road wasn’t detected at all. It didn’t look like it even slowed down. Safe driverless cats aren’t just using GPS and lane change warnings. There was something wrong when that car’s laser sensing wasn’t slowing down rapidly as it sensed the lady up ahead before she was in front of the car. The coding better be better to sense the movement and anticipate a collision. I’ll be honest, I’d feel safer with some of the other companies. Uber’s aren’t ready. 

 

[LoadLetterPaper]

IIHS stats show about 6,000 pedestrians killed nationwide in 2016, presumably ALL of them by cars with actual people driving them.  Math works out to just under 2 people per billion vehicle miles driven.

I don't know that we'll ever get a sample size large enough to know the true rate for driverless cars.

I don't want to open this can of worms, but I will.

If a person that was over the legal limit had run this person over, it's vehicular homicide, it a sober person does it, it's an accident.

Now I'm not talking someone that is loaded, I am talking someone that is right on the limit. 08

How is that even remotely fair?

 

[stbugs]

and yet you miss the point it was the pedestrian's fault

Maybe you don’t work in technology or software, but you are clearly missing the point. If that Uber car was ready for real prime time, i.e., not running over a lady walking slowly, then it would have easily detected the movement of the pedestrian and anticipated the collision. I don’t care if a sober human would have hit her or that she was an idiot. Both are absolutely true. What I care about is that should 100% be one of the easiest test cases of collision warning and car stopping. That scenario with laser sensors is no different than the car commercials we see with cars stopping when the driver cannot. Uber is at fault too for having a crappy detection system. Simple as that. 

 

[LoadLetterPaper]

Maybe you don’t work in technology or software, but you are clearly missing the point. If that Uber car was ready for real prime time, i.e., not running over a lady walking slowly, then it would have easily detected the movement of the pedestrian and anticipated the collision. I don’t care if a sober human would have hit her or that she was an idiot. Both are absolutely true. What I care about is that should 100% be one of the easiest test cases of collision warning and car stopping. That scenario with laser sensors is no different than the car commercials we see with cars stopping when the driver cannot. Uber is at fault too for having a crappy detection system. Simple as that. 

If a sober person ran the lady over, would you deem them "not ready for prime time"

 

[stbugs]

If a sober person ran the lady over, would you deem them "not ready for prime time"

Dude, deflecting to something that has no bearing at all isn’t a good response. People already drive, there’s no changing that. Again, hate to say it but you are missing the point. The Uber car isn’t ready for prime time. Do you realize that there isn’t one place making these cars and that all these companies buy them? Tesla, Google, etc. aren’t one company. There are software developers and engineers designing systems using sensors and code to decide what to do when and Uber failed. Can you honestly say that someone walking across the street is a scenario that a driverless car shouldn’t be able to handle? Should driverless cars be limited to be as good as human eyesight at night when their sensors work without light? You can try and play it off as a human would have hit her. We know that, she was stupid and I know I wouldn’t have gotten hit like that because I’m not a moron who doesn’t look. Who cares. That’s not the bar. Again, maybe you haven’t taken the same engineering courses or worked in software like I have. Not being condescending but I understand the technology and the accident that happened is a day 1 scenario that a driverless car should have been tested on before go live. The Uber car failed it miserably. 

 

[(HULK)]

Human drivers kill over 30,000 Americans every year.  I'd wager self driving cars are already safer.  Even if they're not perfect yet.

 

[LoadLetterPaper]

Human drivers kill over 30,000 Americans every year.  I'd wager self driving cars are already safer.  Even if they're not perfect yet.

Simple.

Ban humans

 

[Jobber]

No one has the right to be in the middle of a street where there is no lights or crosswalk.

And dressed like a ninja.

 

[roadkill1292]

Human drivers kill over 30,000 Americans every year.  I'd wager self driving cars are already safer.  Even if they're not perfect yet.

I just read yesterday that they (traffic fatalities) exceeded 40,000 last year for the first time in a decade, capping a two-year uptick. 

Which is about one death per every 75 million miles driven. Which sounds like a really good ratio and may indeed be. But we drive over 8 billion miles a day just here in the US. That many miles seems to justify a lot of R&D on automation.