Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/tempepolice/status/976585098542833664?s=21 <comment><USER3> How did LIDAR and IR not catch that? That seems like a pretty serious problem.

It's clear from the video that a human driver actually would've had more trouble since the pedestrian showed up in the field of view right before the collision, yet that's in the visible spectrum.

When I argue for automated driving (as a casual observer), I tell people about exactly this sort of stuff (a computer can look in 20 places at the same time, a human can't. a computer can see in the dark, a human can't).

Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction.

<comment><USER4> _It 's clear from the video that a human driver actually would've had more trouble since the pedestrian showed up in the field of view right before the collision, yet that's in the visible spectrum._

That's not at all clear to me. I don't know too much about cameras, but it looks to me like the camera is making the scene appear much darker than it actually is.

In the video, you can see many street lights projecting down onto the ground, and the person was walking the the gap between two streetlights. The gap between street lights (and hence the person) was in the field of view of the camera the entire time; they just weren't "visible" in the camera because of the low lighting. I'm confident my eyes are good enough that I would have been able to see this person at night in these lighting conditions. (Whether I could have reacted in time is another question.) It seems to me like the camera just doesn't have the dynamic range needed for driving in these low light conditions, which is a major problem.

<comment><USER5> I have to agree. Just like a normal camera has issues in low-light, it is clear that this camera is diminishing exactly how light the road ahead was. While I can't say confidently that I would have been able to stop to prevent hitting them, watching the video in full screen does lead me to believe that I would have seen them and been able to apply the brakes at least enough to reduce the impact. Also, watching the video of the interior it is clear the driver was looking at his phone or doing something else just prior to the impact. This alone leaves me skeptical to just how much could have been done to prevent this accident.

<comment><USER6> This is pretty much the experience I have with my dash cam, a Yi. In its recorded video, its automatic exposure control make it look like everything outside of the headline cone is pitch black, but it is actually not. I have seen deer and possums by the side of the road, and debris etc, that did not show up when I later checked the video for the same period. There is enough spillover light from modern headlights that a human _whose eyes are dilated and adjusted to dark conditions_ will see a pedestrian standing on the median, stepping off it, crossing the inner lane towards the car's current lane. More than enough time to begin to brake and possibly swerve. I have dodged animals in a situation similar to this.

<comment><USER7> Yep that exposure control / sensor quality of the dash cam in the video was rubbish. My own Blackvues produce far, far better results than that. Just look at how _nothing_ is illuminated by street lights, this clearly has the effect of making the poor rider appear "out of nowhere". Also agree it appeared driver was on smart phone most of the time, thus not in control of the vehicle, and had thus no business being on the road as these are systems _UNDER TEST_.

If that's the best Uber can produce then they ought to hang their heads in shame. Unless it was doctored with... as I find it hard to believe they'd put such rubbish quality cameras in their trials.

<comment><USER8> Do you trust Uber to provide all the data, or would they selectively produce data favorable to them?

Do you trust Uber to provide unedited raw video, or would they process it to increase contrast, make it appear that nothing was visible in the dark areas of the frame, reduce the resolution, drop frames, etc.?

<comment><USER9> It's funny how the internal camera which shows how distracted the driver was has way better night vision than the external road camera...

<comment><USER10> The key here is _contrast_ ; plus a IR light at 2 feet works great, at 60 feet...not so much.

<comment><USER11> The internal camera (let's be honest and call it _the scapegoat camera_ , because that's the only practical use for human "safety drivers" when they are not permanently engaged) must take almost all its light from IR, because we don't see anything of the smartphone screen glare that the eye movement so clearly hints at.

<comment><USER12> I don't think the driver is looking at her smartphone. I think she's checking the car's monitor (as in a computer screen). Although to be fair, that should be showing the car's view of its surroundings so I don't know what's going on there.

Edit: Nevermind. Someone posted a picture of the car's interior, below and there's no computer screen.

<comment><USER13> Link?

<comment><USER12> Sorry - I can't find it. This thread has grown rather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I currently work full-time in the self-driving vehicle industry. I am part of a team that builds perception algorithms for autonomous navigation. I have been working exclusively with LiDAR systems for over 1.5 years.

Like a lot of folks here, my first question was: "How did the LiDAR not spot this?". I have been extremely interested in this and kept observing images and videos from Uber to understand what could be the issue.

To reliably sense a moving object is a challenging task. To understand/perceive that object (i.e., shape, size, classification, position estimate, etc.) is even more challenging. Take a look at this video (set the playback speed to 0.25): [https://youtu.be/WCkkhlxYNwE?t=191](https://youtu.be/WCkkhlxYNwE?t=191)

Observe the pedestrian on the sidewalk to the left. And keep a close eye on the laptop screen (held by the passenger on right) at the bottom right. Observe these two locations by moving back and forth +/\- 3 seconds. You'll notice that the height of the pedestrian varies quite a bit.

This variation in pedestrian height and bounding box happens at different locations within the same video. For example, at 3:45 mark, the height of human on right wearing brown hoodie, keeps varying. At 2:04 mark, the bounding box estimate for pedestrian on right side appears to be unreliable. At 1:39 mark, the estimate for the blue (Chrysler?) car turning right jumps quite a bit.

This makes me believe that their perception software isn't as robust to handle the exact scenario in which the accident occurred in Tempe, AZ.

I think we'll know more technical details in the upcoming days/weeks. These are merely my _observations_.

<comment><USER15> Alright, so given your observations, which I don't doubt, here's a question I have: why have a pilot on public roads?

If uber's software wasn't robust, why "test in production" when production could kill people?

<comment><USER16> Disclaimer: I am playing Devils Advocate and I don't necessarily subscribe to the following argument, but:

Surely it's a question of balancing against the long term benefit from widely adopted autonomous driving?

If self driving cars in their current state are at least close to as safe as human drivers, then you could argue that a short term small increase in casualty rate to help development rate is a reasonable cost. The earlier that proper autonomous driving is widely adopted, the better for overall safety.

More realistically, if we think that current autonomous driving prototypes are _approximately_ as safe as the average human, then it's definitely worthwhile - same casualty rate as current drivers (i.e. no cost), with the promise of a much reduced rate in the future.

Surely "zero accidents" isn't the threshold here (although it should be the goal)? Surely "improvement on current level of safety" is the threshold?

<comment><USER17> You can make the argument with the long-term benefits. But you cannot make it without proper statistically sound evidence about the CURRENT safety of the system that you intend to test, for the simple reason that the other traffic participants you potentially endanger are not asked if they accept any additional risk that you intend to expose them to. So you really need to be very close to the risk that they're exposed to right now anyway, which is approximately one fatal accident every 80 million miles driven by humans, under ANY AND ALL environmental conditions that people are driving under. That number is statistically sound, and you need to put another number on the other side of the equation that is equally sound and on a similar level. This is currently impossible to do, for the simple fact that no self-driving car manufacturer is even close to having multiple hundreds of millions of miles traveled in self-driving mode in conditions that are close enough to real roads in real cities with real people. Purely digital simulations don't count. What can potentially count in my eyes is real miles with real cars in "stage" environments, such as a copy of a small city, with other traffic participants that deliberately subject the car to difficult situations, erratic actions, et cetera, of which all of them must be okay with their exposure to potentially high-risk situations.

Of course that is absurdly expensive. But it's not impossible, and it's the only acceptable way of developing this high-potential but also highly dangerous technology up to a safety level at which you can legitimately make the argument that you are NOT exposing the public to any kind of unacceptable additional risk when you take the super-convenient and cheap route of using the public infrastructure for your testing. If you can't deal with these costs, just get the fuck out of this market. I'm also incapable of entering the pharmaceuticals development market, because even if I knew how to mix a promising new drug, I would not have the financial resources to pay for the extensive animal and clinical testing procedures necessary to get this drug safe enough for selling it to real humans. Or can I also just make the argument of "hey, it's for the good of humanity, it'll save lives in the long run and I gave it to my guinea pig which didn't die immediately, so statistically it's totally safe!" when I am caught mixing the drug into the dishes of random guests of a restaurant?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The description given before the video was released painted a picture in my mind that the woman was on the median and "suddenly" entered the roadway in front of the vehicle. I pictured someone darting across the road directly in front of the car, with no way to stop in time.

This video shows a completely different scenario. The woman started on the median, but the vehicle was in the #2 lane. She wasn't visible to the naked eye but she also wasn't darting into traffic and had to cross the #1 lane before even being in the path of the vehicle. A human driver certainly would have difficulty stopping in time, but why did the sensor package not pick her up? This doesn't appear to be the close call we were told it was. To me, this seems like exactly the scenario that autonomous driving vehicles are intended to prevent.

<comment><USER19> I think _this seems like exactly the scenario that autonomous driving vehicles are intended to prevent._ may be optimistic.

Lots of people are _hoping_ they will prevent such scenarios, the motivation for fielding them is more related to making lots of money.

<comment><USER20> I disagree, if you look at any of the Waymo videos you can see they have great recognition of every car, pedestrian, and obstacle within 100 meters of the car, and most of that data (point cloud lidar/radar at the very least) would work in pitch black without even headlights. Thus it's extremely reasonable to expect that autonomous vehicles will easily prevent scenarios like this.

Inclement conditions, defensive driving, etc. are much harder to work with but this should have been cake.

<comment><USER21> There was also a recent lawsuit where Uber pledged to not use any lidar tech and software from Waymo anymore. Maybe they had to deactivate Lidar.

<comment><USER22> LIDAR in question on this vehicle is an HDL-64, a commercial unit from Velodyne. Lawsuit is entirely unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Someone on Reddit posted a comparison of the same spot at night but with a good camera: [https://m.imgur.com/a/PM7uu](https://m.imgur.com/a/PM7uu) from a video at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0)

That paints the whole accident in a very different light from the video from Twitter. Would any human not notice someone crossing in the good camera screenshot?

<comment><USER24> Yep, also this HDR image of the scene at night: [https://imgur.com/gallery/XQrAB](https://imgur.com/gallery/XQrAB)

Really hope the cops didn't just look at the low-dynamic range dashcam video and decide it's case-closed here. I would not want one of these Uber cars on the streets with me.

<comment><USER25> NTSB is investigating the crash, so surely they'll conduct adequate forensics work.

<comment><USER26> I think Uber should be forced to share _all_ of the sensor data.

Historically, building and engineering codes advance in response to disasters. This mindset needs to be applied to robots that are going to be operating in public spaces. Incidents like this are an opportunity for all self-driving car developers to get better and there's a public safety interest in that happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pathetic and sad performance by the vehicle and "safety" driver. The woman does not "appear out of nowhere", she was in the roadway for some time. The woman was not wearing all black, had red hair, and her shoes were reflective. Even if we are to believe that their camera is this crappy, they still have the lidar, and it appears brakes were not applied. Even 500ms of braking * 0.8g = 9mph. That might have saved her life. Ultimately if Ubers car cannot see a pedestrian crossing the street at a walking pace at night and not hit him/her, it should not be operating at night.

<comment><USER28> What I don't understand is why the pedestrian didn't see or hear the car. She seems totally oblivious. Surely she would have seen the headlights. It is possible she had some sensory impairment, either visual or auditory.

<comment><USER29> This happens all the time at night where I live. People cross the road and you don't see them until you're quite close.

Cars are highly visible to pedestrians (due to headlights). I think pedestrians assume that they themselves are equally as visible to the car driver too - "I can see them, so they must be able to see me." is the subconscious line of thought I think.

Often though pedestrians get "lost" in the lights of oncoming vehicles or the brake lights of cars ahead, or are just in your blind spots.

The other thing is, I've noticed that people who have never learnt to drive often don't really appreciate how cars act and are not very good at estimating the distances involved. You've probably noticed this when crossing streets - some people take some eye-raising risks when crossing the road while others wait ... guess which ones are the drivers who are experienced with how cars/drivers act!

My guess here is the poor woman was stationary in the median thinking "Should I cross?" as the car was approaching. She probably then decided she had time to make it across before the Uber car got there so started to cross the street, perhaps assuming the vehicle was further away than it was, or would slow down since the "driver" would see her. We've all done this I am sure ... sometimes with time to spare, sometimes cutting it a bit close.

Perhaps if this was what happened, the Uber car "saw" her stationary in the median and disregarded her as a stationary road-side object and carried on until it was too late. IIRC these systems need to disregard static objects at the side of the road (e.g. signs, trees etc) otherwise they'd be slamming the brakes on all the time. Perhaps the initial movement she made into the road was disregarded as "sensor noise" (e.g. you can see objects "jumping around" a bit in this video from Uber: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCkkhlxYNwE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCkkhlxYNwE)) from what it thought was a static object, but that would not explain the apparent total non-reaction from the vehicle when she was clearly in the path.

I've driven a XC90 a few times - it has auto-lane keeping when using cruise control on the highway. Perhaps that was what was driving, not the Uber system.

Tragic stuff regardless of what happened.

<comment><USER30> I think your guess is dead on - it's what I had imagined the scenario was before I saw the video. I see this all the time, and the social contract between car and pedestrian is the car slows. Heck even half the time people do this they don't even look at the car - it's quite crazy - I never do that mostly because I make the assumption that I will be the unlucky shit that was hit when someone decided to bite down on a messy Carls Jr burger.

Regardless of how I do this, it's a pretty accepted contract and definitely still piles the fault on the SDV in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow, that self driving car is total crap if it can't pick up that obstacle. Doesn't get much more obvious than that. Slowly walking from the left lane into your lane on a fairly straight road.

I bet it was more visible to the human eye than on that video as well. You'd have to see someone crossing the road like that.

Of course the pedestrian wasn't doing the smartest thing but I believe a human driver would have at least hit the brakes had they been actually looking forward and paying attention.

I thought the actual advantage of self-driving cars is that they're always meant to be looking forward and paying attention. That doesn't appear to have happened in this case.

<comment><USER32> > You'd have to see someone crossing the road like that.

You could say the same thing about a car with headlights on coming towards you... From the little evidence we have it seems like the pedestrian, driver/monitor and the car all should have done better.

<comment><USER31> That pedestrian obviously didn't have good situational awareness, but are we happy to let self-driving cars mow down any unaware obstacle on the road? Broken-down cars/deer/children/roadworks?

Honestly, that video proves to me that this tech is nowhere near ready. That was the most obvious of obstacles and the car did not even slow down.

I believe a competent human would have at the very least slowed down in that situation, and likely stopped completely.

<comment><USER33> > that video proves to me that this tech is nowhere near ready.

It proves that Ubers tech is nowhere near ready. Based on all the stupid shit I see Uber engineers saying on Blind app, I have very little faith in their maturity, professionalism, and culture.

I would bet that Google is doing a better job than Uber is.

<comment><USER34> Thought you needed an Uber email address to join the Uber Blind app conversation?

<comment><USER35> He probably means the forums where anyone from any company can participate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> In my mind this accident is on Uber no matter how you interpret the video.

Scenario 1: Lets say the pedestrian was visible to the naked eye and sensors. The model and safety operator still didn't "see" her and act in time. Who to blame? Uber.

Scenario 2: The lighting and environment was in a condition where neither the model nor the safety operator could see the road more than 10 feet in front of the car, yet neither thought it to be irresponsible to go at full speed. Who to blame? Uber.

I believe that:

1\. The sensors should have detected the pedestrian from far away even if the lighting was bad at the time. I mean that's sort of the point with autonomous vehicles, that they are better at perceiving their surroundings and can make better decisions on how to act quicker than any human could.

2\. The safety operators are not engaged enough in their tasks to be effective. I think people underestimate how boring it must have a job where 99% of the time you should do absolutely nothing other than stare straight ahead and be ready for a situation like this. This problem is hard to solve. Maybe we should be training the model on closed tracks and only release on the real roads when it passes some sort of test where it is put through various scenarios. Like a driving instructor for AIs.

For those of you who think the pedestrian is to blame. I agree that the pedestrian might have made a bad decision by expecting the cars to brake, however these situations occur all the time. She didn't dart across the road or jump in front of the car suddenly. Yesterday I helped an elderly guy across 4 lanes of traffic which took about 1 minute. All you can do in that situation is to hope you are visible to the drivers and that they will stop before running you over.

<comment><USER37> This.

Many people comment that the lighting is poor and that a human might understand what's happening too late. This is debatable and misses the point: if visibility is bad, you (and it applies with full force to automated drivers) should reduce your speed accordingly, maybe with the exception of freeways where you are not expected to encounter pedestrians.

<comment><USER38> > maybe with the exception of freeways where you are not expected to encounter > pedestrians.

Freeways require you to reduce speed in those cases as well, possibly even more so. This is pretty well demonstrated by the pileups that occur every winter, and similar (if rarer) incidents caused by dense fog or similar. Pileups at freeway speeds are much worse than the 2, maybe 3 car crashes that occur on city streets.

Yes, there's no pedestrians, but one person hitting a pothole or large puddle and spinning out is all it takes to get a pileup if you're not careful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If there is something that isn't going to help the public perception of autonomous cars at all, it's releasing a compressed to shit capture of another video showing a single camera angle from dozens.

I would say it's a deliberate attempt to manipulate if I didn't also strongly believe ignorance on part of the police department has lead them to believe that autonomous cars could even exit a parking lot without data from many more than this one camera, not to mention the vastly more useful LIDAR on top.

(That's before you consider the video angles shown here are just for dashcam purposes. The real cameras for the autonomous driving are in the sensor array _on top of the roof_ )

<comment><USER40> Yeah. Does the Uber car really capture video at 480p and 15fps? Also only releasing the video conveniently ignores the fact that these cars have IR and LIDAR. The pedestrian is hard to see in this video essentially because it is dark and they are wearing dark clothing. Neither of these are at all obstacles to LIDAR and IR, and the video at least shows us that the road is clear of obstructions.

<comment><USER41> >Does the Uber car really capture video at 480p and 15fps?

Probably not, but it isn't like the inputs to the self-driving models really need to be better than that. Lower resolution helps your processing time a lot and there's little point in having an FPS higher than your processing time.

<comment><USER42> I'm sure at least the collision avoidance part of the system would need to poll at a much higher rate than 15fps. That's up to 67ms latency you're adding. With enough miles that delay could kill people.

<comment><USER41> Average human reaction speed is around 215ms. Not an apples-to-apples comparison because humans can react much faster to continuous situations (humans have a timing accuracy of around 9.5ms) while a machine-learning model is limited to only reacting once per frame, but still.

<comment><USER43> If you wan't to compare against human "sample rate", it'd be equivalent to at _least_ ~200 FPS (in order to get the same accuracy with a camera). Sure, the signal takes a moment to plumb its way through, but that's irrelevant to spotting objects.

If they're actually feeding data at 15 FPS into their ML model, then what the fuck were they expecting? Correlating movements at those framerates would be nigh-impossible.

Relying on ML for this is already comically irresponsible, but that'd just be ridiculous.

<comment><USER44> > If you wan't to compare against human "sample rate", it'd be equivalent to > at least ~200 FPS

Where does this figure come from?

<comment><USER43> My ass, mostly. I'm extrapolating based on monitor framerates and how accurately we can see the velocity of fast-moving objects, and that I can spot a timing difference of ~5ms reliably.

Human eyes are _almost_ comparable in terms of a framerate based on the neuron spiking rates, which are somewhere over 250-500Hz max. Obviously that's not directly comparable though, but it gives an idea of how well we can deal with moving objects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So now we all know- Elaine Herzberg did not run out in front of the car, as the police said, she was walking at a normal pace; she was not in the shadows- the camera footage is typically darker than human vision; and the reason why the first thing the driver knew of the crash was the sound of it is because she didn't have her eyes on the road.

And all the cars sensors, its superior perception of its environment and its superhuman reaction times were no use, without a human-level understanding of its environment to go with them. It couldn't tell that there was a person crossing the road in front of it and even if it did it didn't have a concept of what a person is and why it should try to avoid them, or in any case, it just didn't know what to do about it.

So can we now please roll back the off-the-charts hype about self-driving cars being safer than human drivers? It's abundantly clear that this is not yet the truth (not yet. _yet_ ). That's just not the state of the art, at this point. We're like the people jumping off towers with crazy "flying" apparatus, in the 18th century, because they were convinced they could fly that way.

Or maybe we should just stop pretending that what we really care about is safety and let's we just want to have cool tech toys to play with, no matter the consequences.

<comment><USER45> You're missing the (admittedly comfy) narrative that the other tech companies are being diligent and careful while Uber are a bunch of cowboys rushing alpha code out into public, who only change stuff when they get caught. The autocar fan's worst nightmare.

<comment><USER12> I noticed that trend in comments, yes. Unfortunatly, the real issue with what Uber or Waymo (or anyone else) are doing it's with the limitations inherent in the technology itself, specifically, machine learning for object recognition and identification and for the learning of complex beheaviours.

The limitation is -it's a bit technical, but basically, in principle, machine learning is possible under certain assumptions, as laid out by Valiant in his PAC-learning paper (A Theory of the Learnable), especially the assumption that a training sample will have the same distribution as unseen data. Under this condition, machine learning can be said to work and we can look at performance metrics and be happy they look good.

Well, except that the real world has no obligation to operate under our experimental assumptions, so once you deploy machine learning systems in the real world, their performance goes down, because you haven't seen nearly enough of the data you really need to see, in the lab.

And, if you attach such assumptions to safety-critical systems, then you're taking an unknown and unquantifiable risk. Or in other words, you're putting peoples' lives in danger.

And that's _everyone_ who uses machine learning to train cars to drive in real-world conditions. Not just Uber.

<comment><USER46> Yes, but that is not specific to machine learning. Humans have also learned to drive under the assumption that future observations will somewhat be alike what they have seen in the past. And yes, that is putting peoples' lives in danger.

But that has nothing to do with machine learning. It has to do with all control systems, human or machine.

<comment><USER12> The point is that machine learning algorithms' decisions always have some amount of error, and that this error goes way up in the real world.

The auto-car industry's marketing claims that self-driven vehicles are safer than humans just because computers have faster "reaction times" (they probably mean faster retrieval from memory).

But if your reaction is completely wrong it doesn't matter how fast you react. Reacting very fast with very high error will just cause a very fast accident- and make it harder for puny humans' reflexes to avoid it, to boot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There was almost a second where the woman was clearly visible and yet the car did not attempt to emergency break. I would not expect the vehicle to safely stop, but it could have definitely slowed down and reduce the energy of the collision.

This is not criticism against self-driving tech, I would not expect alert human driver to avoid collision either due to limited reaction time. With technology however, we should be able to do better than humans, particularly when it comes to reaction times. Clearly, there is still a some work to do.

<comment><USER48> Do we know the vehicle didn't brake? There's no audio to tell us anything, and a car takes "almost a second" to rock forward on its suspension when reacting to brake input too. FWIW, I think I might see the nose bobbing a bit just before the collision, but honestly can't tell.

I certainly don't think you can say "did not attempt to brake" based on the evidence at hand, basically.

<comment><USER49> > Do we know the vehicle didn't brake?

Because the nose of the car doesn't go down. Especially in an emergency braking situation the nose of the car will go significantly down, and you would see that in the video.

<comment><USER50> The video is cut before the impact. I don't think we can judge of what will happen in the last second that is missing.

<comment> shock-value There definitely isn't a full second missing before impact. Maybe a tenth of a second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This was the original story: "After the Uber collision, the car continued traveling at 38 miles per hour, according to the Tempe police chief"

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/for- self-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/for-self-driving- cars-seeing-everything-isn-t-always-enough)

In other words, the car _never_ detected the pedistrian and never slowed down on its own. This has nothing to do with _when_ it saw her. It clearly didn't, yet both camera and LIDAR should have been able to.

<comment><USER52> I feel bad for Waymo and all the guys taking the necessary safety precautions. This is going to set the industry back quite a bit. Thanks Uber, and RIP Elaine.

<comment><USER53> I don't. Yes, I think Waymo is probably taking very nearly all the necessary safety precautions. But how would we know? It's simply a matter of trust, which is not good enough. And as we see here, the problem isn't Waymo the problem is every other fly-by-night automated vehicle operator out there. We should all know how the sausage gets made in this industry and it is absolutely not through a process of meticulous rigor and studious observance of industry best practices. We all know that software systems get made via mountains of short-cuts and compromises amidst an environment of half-assed development practices.

The only way to fix this is to have regulations which actually enforce quality control. That means code audits, it means a lot more process and a lot more oversight, all of which is going to be a drag but which is necessary when developing systems on which so many lives could depend. If you look at the regulatory requirements for aviation software or even video poker machines they will really put into perspective how little is being done now with autonomous vehicles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> A number of comments here have touched on the fact that she was apparently homeless. I spent 5.7 years homeless. Well before that, I had a college class on homelessness and did an internship at a homeless shelter. I am author of the website the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide.

I've made a few comments in other discussions about some of the ways her status may have contributed to this tragedy. I'm just going to link to them with a short identifying blurb. Hopefully, taking them out of context won't make this go weird places.

Potential suicidal tendencies:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633727)

Potentially jaywalking dangerously and darted out of nowhere:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625242)

Possibly poor health contributed to her death:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625076)

I am leaving this here in part because "She was high or crazy" is a common stereotype about homelessness and it tends to not be a compassionate view. There are myriad ways her status could have contributed to the situation without her being either high or crazy. Yes, she could have also been one (or both) of those two things. But plenty of housed people get high or have mental health issues and we don't hand wave off their deaths as "they must have been high or crazy."

So, my hope is to be respectful of people whose feeling is her status could have contributed while putting out hopefully better information. Yes, her status may have contributed. But there is no reason to complete that line of thinking with "because homeless people are usually crazy and/or junkies."

There is a huge shortage of affordable housing in this country. A link backing that up is provided in one of my previous comments. These days, a lot of homeless people are just poor and can't afford rent, even while employed.

</comment><comment><USER55> Wow, I had thought it impossible for the Uber AV to be in the right lane, and for the victim to be crossing left-to-right, for the police to claim that the victim couldn't be seen until it was too late. But I didn't expect the road to be so dark, given what we saw in the accident photos (which might have been over-exposed?) and Google Maps, which showed a lot of street/sidewalk lighting.

In the moment that we can fully see her, she does look unambiguously like a person walking a bike across the road (reports say there were plastic bags on the bike, but they weren't obvious/obstructive in the camera view). Is the AV's LIDAR expected to detect this kind of thing, even if it's too dark for human eyes?

The video of the Uber driver doesn't look great for the driver. I mean she doesn't look particularly engaged -- but I suspect that's what _most of us_ would look like at the wheel. But she definitely seems to be looking downwards, right at the moment of impact.

Unless some other incriminating info is discovered, I hope that the driver isn't the sole focus of punishment (doesn't help that she's a convicted armed robber, albeit years ago). Being able to brake in time for the victim seems difficult even in most ideal and alert conditions. And I have to think human operators are going to suffer complacency when 95-99% of the time they never have to actually drive -- making that switch seems to be a situation ripe with problems.

I don't mean that Uber execs/testers/engineers (again, assuming there isn't other incriminating evidence) should be scapegoats. I hope the result involves regulations that add more transparency to reporting (especially in Arizona), and public debate about the expectations of AV and AI.

<comment><USER56> The dynamic range of small sensor digital cameras is so poor that it is impossible to judge whether or not she would have been visible to the naked eye based on the video.

<comment><USER55> That's a great point. I did think, looking at the video, that the street was unnaturally dark. The camera seems to be exposed for night lights and the headlights too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> As presented, this looks like a pretty classic "overdriving your headlights" situation.

Even though they're made of retroreflective material, only two lane divider dashes at a time can be seen in the video, indicating something like 50 feet of visibility. Stopping from 38 mph takes 70+ feet from the time the brakes are applied (and human reaction time adds quite a bit more). Things (people, animals, stopped cars, road hazards) appear in the road fairly routinely. If you can't stop inside the area you can see, you're operating your vehicle recklessly.

<comment><USER58> I think you are missing a key point here. Have you ever been on a street with streetlights and had difficulty seeing past two lane divider dashes? The point is that the camera footage is vastly under-indicating the amount of distance a human eye would have been able to see.

<comment><USER59> Furthermore, if there are street lights, and you go through an unlit area, you should be able to detect the presence of an obstacle because it will be obscuring the view of the road ahead.

Uber's technology clearly sucks, to the extent that I doubt they are even using Lidar. However, the woman driving the vehicle should be arrested for not being aware. If she had been looking at the road for more than a small fraction of the time she surely would have seen the person on the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is not what I expected at all. The original news reports based on the police comments made it seem like she was on the side of the road and then randomly darted out. That's not something I would really expect AV's to be able to cope with yet, if ever.

Instead what we see is a scenario that happens all the time: a pedestrian who is sleepy or perhaps with mental problems or on some substances...in any case not hyper alert...crossing a road without looking. It's not that busy at that time of night and I'm sure I have done the same thing. It's very discouraging and angering that these cars are being driven without the capability. I feel very disappointed. To me it's not super important whether an ordinary driver would've stopped: ordinary people drive drunk, exhausted and/or distracted all the time; but I hoped that AV's were already better than that.

</comment><comment><USER61> Okay, isn't this the kind of a situation where the machine was supposed to excel?

The dynamic range of the video is very low so it looks like the victim comes out of complete darkness but weren't all these sensors supposed to see the obstacle even in complete darkness?

BTW, please consider the low dynamic range of the video when commenting on the human's ability to avoid that accident. After driving in the dark for a while your eyes will adapt and you'll be able to see much more details in the shadows than a regular video camera can record.

</comment><comment><USER62> This seems like a simple case. I would have expected the driver assist in my 2017 Subaru to have reacted to something in the road. I'm surprised that the much more sophisticated self driving system did not.

<comment><USER63> I wonder if this was affected by the fact that the pedestrian was in another lane up until the very last second. Perhaps the car detected the pedestrian but failed to consider it an obstacle since it wasn't in its direct path. It could be unexpectedly difficult to account for pedestrian crossing speed if it caused automated cars to stop when a car in the next lane happened to "wobble" towards the automated car's lane.

<comment><USER64> I dunno, if it decided to ignore the pedestrian because she was in the other lane that's extremely troubling. The pedestrian was moving laterally across the road. If the car has detected that, it should infer that she might _become_ an obstacle very shortly.

Driving is all about predicting the future. Think of every time you've been able to tell that someone is going to change lanes even though their blinker is off, or slowed down when a ball bounces into the street because you know there's going to be a kid following it. If the car isn't capable of that, it's not ready for public streets.

<comment><USER65> What's most troubling is it doesn't even matter if the uber car thought the slow object in the other lane was a pedestrian, a car, a tree, whatever. Even if it thought the object was say, the most "normal" thing it could be, another car, this would still be a special situation requiring action. Without knowing the objects classification the estimated speed is enough to decide. Why would a car be stopped in the middle of a lane on a fast road? It should be treated as an obstacle that could grow to the side. After all it could be a police, tow, construction, or disabled vehicle, and a cop or tow worker might be about to walk to the side.

Actually many states now require by law that you get as far as possible from a lane with a disabled vehicle, as many human accidents have happened.

I am convinced uber has been basically pretending to do the mountains of careful and sophisticated crap waymo actually has gone to great lengths to do, and is just racing to put anything out so they can keep stringing investors along as far as they can before the jig is up. Well the jig is up now.

<comment><USER62> I think target fixation also contributes to accidents involving emergency vehicles on the shoulder.

Back to Uber, the number I hear is that they are striving to go better than 13 miles/intervention to prevent an incident. For Waymo this is over 5000 miles. I'm convinced too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Why are safety drivers not:

\- working in pairs, so there is social pressure, conversation, and two pairs of eyes to increase alertness and safety?

\- doing shifts of 30 - 45 minutes at most [1] (although they could potentially swap back and forth with a co-driver)

\- issued a dumb-phone for emergencies and searched for entertainment devices (it's good enough for Amazon warehouse staff)

\- being monitored by the driver-facing camera, with training and termination for drivers who can't hack it

\- monitored automatically for attention using eye tracking or other methods, with the car safely stopping if lack of attention is detected

\- required to take over on a random, regular basis for a short period to keep them engaged and attentive (and obviously, the car keeps driving if they don't take over, but they are marked down)

Due to the boredom, it is an extremely demanding job, but the way it is being done is clearly not good enough.

[1] I can't find anything published about how long the shifts are, but I'm guessing they are longer.

<comment> ng-user All of those suggestions will increases cost and decrease profit, there's no law mandating any of those so why would they go above and beyond for 'safety' reasons?

I understand it's the ethical decision but at the end of the day for-profit companies are only interested in one thing: maximizing profits.

<comment><USER67> Robin_Message basically says a lot of what I was thinking, but you also need to consider what maximises profits in the long term (and self driving cars are a long term project) - is it doing the minimum now to reduce costs, or is it taking all reasonable precautions to avoid the public perception building that self-driving cars are unsafe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> The video makes it look like the woman popped out of the shadows and makes it look like this was unavoidable. But that's not what a person would really see. People's eyes have great dynamic range. Take this picture for example (not mine):

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*OQtewILwLl-EssbWY...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*OQtewILwLl-EssbWYKF6sA.jpeg)

What you'd see in real life is much closer to the edited version on the right, while unedited pictures (the version on the left or the uber video released) would make it seem like you can't see shit. A driver paying attention probably would have seen this person from far away. At the very least, the video doesn't convince me this was unavoidable.

</comment><comment><USER69> Why is the car driving at full speed if it can't see the road ahead? Does the car know that visibility is low? What other sensors are they using? Did the car notice the pedestrian once they were fully lit up?

This video raises so many questions. I think we're going to be revisiting this incident over and over again in papers, reports and eventually textbooks.

<comment><USER70> >Why is the car driving at full speed if it can't see the road ahead?

This is the best question to ask.

Why? Because going through all the comments, there seem to be 2 trains of thought:

1) LIDAR should have seen it. (car's fault).

2) It's the pedestrian's fault.

Neither of these questions matter. Because the real question is like you said: if the car couldn't have seen it, then why drive at full (or actually above legal) speed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Move fast and break things. Fake it till you make it. Drink the koolaid. All hail Silicon Valley. Blah.

The ugly truth is, when looking at the high-end camera photos of the accident spot, a human driver had a 50-50 chance of avoiding this accident. This car didn't even react. But that's not the worst thing. The worst thing is that the infrared or heatcam tech is fairly advanced and would have seen this person even in pitch black. But it seems Uber chose to do "testing on production" and released an experiment onto the roads. It's well known that lidar tech has problems during rains, snows and low light. Sure, driving it is great for machine learning, but at what cost? Especially when everyone expects so much more from this tech than to equal human drivers. The goal should be to remove accidents from the equation. But, especially for Uber, the goal is just to profit.

</comment><comment><USER72> A straight road, in dry conditions, obstructed by an entire person and a bicycle with REFLECTORS on it, and the car doesn't see her?

I think whoever wrote this code should be in prison, quite honestly, along with their entire management chain. I suspect many people will feel the same way. This is a really really bad look for automated vehicles in general. It also backs up my contention that anything less than full 100% automation is worse than no automation at all, as the driver was complacent and had less than zero chance of taking over.

<comment><USER73> It certainly does look bad for self driving vehicles, and I definitely feel terrible that a life was lost from this.

However, how does one develop a self driving vehicle that's 100% automated without the ability to test in real driving conditions? Despite this accident, self-driving vehicles have a fairly safe driving record for the number of miles and time they have been active.

Details on California accident rates for self driving vehicles, for example, show mostly minor fender benders despite more frequent accidents: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0184952)

<comment><USER55> It's a difficult question. Because we cannot just dive into it assuming that the toll (in life/safety) of beta testing AVs on public roads will result in a net benefit within a reasonable timespan. The human driving fatality rate is ~1 death per 100 million miles. Uber has 2 million miles driven and 1 fatality. It's obviously unfair to extrapolate and say that Uber has 50x the fatality rate of normal driving. But that means we have to keep testing Uber AVs on public roads.

What if an Uber AV accidentally kills someone at the 2.5M mark? That's still not enough data to statistically compare apples to apples. Maybe the next 100M miles of Uber testing is fatality free...that still wouldn't be completely enough (right? I'm not great at stats but I would think we need at least a billion?). Of course, it could go the other way, with Uber AVs killing someone every 1M miles.

As a general tech optimist, I'm inclined to think tech will get better, overall. But let's face it, that's not a given. And in the meantime, it's likely the tech upper-class won't be the ones who suffer the most while tech improves. The case at hand being the prime example: a homeless recently- imprisoned woman was killed.

Earlier today someone submitted an interesting RAND study that argued that the testing time for autonomous vehicles to meet statistical reliability for safety testing would be on the order of decades, or even centuries, and there would still be no guarantee that AVs would be safer. I'm hoping RAND is just being really pessimistic here...

[https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> After comparing the released video and a nighttime video [1] on the same stretch of road, I think the released video very likely showed a lot less visibility of the victim due to the dynamic range of the camera. In [2] the victim's shoes became visible. Note the lamp post with a traffic sign to the right. In [3] captured from [1] note the same lamp post on the right edge and the storm drains on the curb, not far from the lamp post and not that dark. [4] shows the victim was very close to the storm drains. The camera that captured the released video had to adjust to the bright headlight of the vehicle. IMO the victim would be a lot more visible to a human driver.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEaTdYJExq8&t=8m50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEaTdYJExq8&t=8m50s) from user niftich's comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644146)

[2] [https://imgur.com/QfN1XVT](https://imgur.com/QfN1XVT)

[3] [https://imgur.com/Zdkc4PL](https://imgur.com/Zdkc4PL)

[4] [https://imgur.com/ZHE9wYz](https://imgur.com/ZHE9wYz)

</comment><comment><USER75> Clearly there are still issues with the car. The sensors should have picked up on this. I would be surprised if the automated emergency braking in my Honda wouldn't have picked this up based on past experience of a close call at night where it saved my ass.

I want to focus a bit though on the human failure here. Uber has been piloting this program with human backup drivers just for situations like this until there is enough confidence in the maturity and safety of these cars.

Whether this driver could have prevented the collision if their eyes were on the road, we will never know. What is clear is the driver was looking down, most likely on their cellphone.

For that there is negligence on both the part of the driver and on the part of Uber. Uber is recording the interior of these cars, so there should have been some type of review process in place to capture this type of behavior from the drivers so it could be addressed.

<comment><USER76> While I do agree there is a level of responsibility on the driver's part here I will also say that I think it's equally unreasonable to expect someone to stay alert in that situation. Human brains need stimulus and interaction to stay alert focused. To me this is as much a failure of understanding how the human mind functions... not just on Uber's part but of all the companies that think the human will stay alert while the car does the work. Our brains just don't work that way. Once the brain starts to trust the car it disengage and wander off onto other distractions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I really hope Tempe has the balls to revoke Ubers AI driving license.

This is completely unacceptable. Their approach to AI driving has been terrible from the start. They don't have the data, nor the expertise to do this in a safe way.

This is not the first time they've fucked up royally

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/25/14737374/uber-self- drivin...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/25/14737374/uber-self-driving-car- red-light-december-contrary-company-claims)

</comment><comment><USER78> It strikes me that a good way to test self driving cars would be to simulate people doing random dangerous things like walking in front of the car and seeing how good the car is at avoiding an accident. Then you give the car less and less time to see how well it can eg. respond to a giant mannequin being thrown in front of it.

Following that train of thought, an accident like this could have been caused by fear of corporate liability.

Because you would eventually have to set some threshold where the car would not respond to an errant pedestrian for the safety of the occupants. Especially in wet weather. A good lawyer could argue that is when the car software decided to kill the pedestrian. So, Uber's AV team might have just said "she was jaywalking" to avoid writing code that dealt with situations outside of the rules of the road because it might in the future look controversial, even if the addition of that code may have the effect of sparing more lives than it takes.

</comment><comment><USER79> 1) I'd hope and assume that an autonomous vehicle would have better sensors than a single mounted video camera. It does have other sensors that it uses, right? Were they all operational? What do they show? Combined, do they have dynamic response comparable to the human eye?

2) The road seems really dark. Are the headlights intentionally dimmed here? At night, on a empty road with no opposing traffic, shouldn't the headlights normally be on bright, rather than dimmed? Does the autonomous vehicle control this switch or the human driver?

3) I feel like a human driver would have been likely to swerve left to avoid the human. They may still have hit the rear of the bicycle, but no one would have died. Does the car even attempt to prioritize collisions with inanimate objects over living ones? Does it at least attempt to slow down if a collision seems inevitable?

4) If you cannot stop in time to avoid an obstacle on the road after it is illuminated by your headlights, it would seem clear that you are travelling "too fast for conditions". Either you need brighter lights, or a you need to slow down. Is this in dispute?

<comment><USER80> I'm a broken record here, but:

Seriously. Go spend some time in /r/roadcam on reddit to get yourself accustomed to what a typical dashboard camera video looks like. People here are drawing all sorts of conclusions based on seeing an unfamiliar type of video, and that's a really bad thing.

The two biggest things to get used to are:

1\. Dashcams do a terrible job in dark or low-light scenes. The car's headlights, and the streetlights, were almost certainly functioning just fine; the scene only looks as dark as it does because that's the best the camera can do. A dashcam video of a dark/low-light incident will always look significantly darker than how a human would perceive it when actually present.

2\. Dashcams often have a wider field of view than their human operators. Which means you often see obstacles in the video before they'd be in the field of view of a human driver (this causes no end of "well _I_ saw that coming way before the driver did!" snark in /r/roadcam discussions).

And in theory this vehicle has infrared on board, and a LIDAR system scanning the road ahead for trouble. Any such system should have had zero difficulty detecting the pedestrian in time to stop or avoid. The fact that it didn't is a very bad sign for Uber's implementation.

<comment><USER39> Here is what even a GoPro can do at night:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0HamWCVrFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0HamWCVrFI)

<comment><USER50> Not a fair comparison. The gopro is static in a well lighted corner. It's ideal conditions.

The same camera in movement facing moving lights might never be able to adjust its sensitivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> The first question that comes to my mind watching this, is, why didn't the _pedestrian_ see the _car_? It looks as though she didn't even look up until the car was only a few feet away from here. I'm not just trying to "blame the victim". The car "should" have responded sooner. But see-and-avoid works both ways. If you're choosing to cross a road in the dark, you, too, have a responsibility to understand the drivers' limited visiblity and act accordingly. My point is that this is a teachable moment for not only SDV developers, but also for pedestrians.

<comment><USER40> The pedestrian died, not the SDV developers. Calling this a "teachable moment ... also for pedestrians" is rather disrespectful.

<comment><USER82> I think the only circumstance where a pedestrian can cross a road without watching for cars is when protected by a traffic light, and even then that's not wise. A pedestrian crossing a road outside of any crosswalk at night and not watching for cars is playing russian roulette. Doesn't mean the driver (or self-driving system) shouldn't have spotted it as well to prevent the accident. But it is clearly a key driver enabling that accident.

<comment><USER83> > I think the only circumstance where a pedestrian can cross a road without > watching for cars is when protected by a traffic light, and even then that's > not wise.

You are definitely correct about even then you should check. And once you check and see it is clear... _keep_ _checking_ as you cross.

An acquaintance of mine from college was killed crossing Colorado Blvd in Pasadena, California late on a Friday afternoon, in a crosswalk at a fully controlled intersection, with the cross traffic having a red light.

Colorado Blvd is a major street, and late on a Friday afternoon would have a fairly high density of cars.

The car that hit him was going something like 80 mph. At the time he started crossing, that car would have been 3 blocks away. Even if it had been the only car on the road, at that distance there would be no way to judge the speed, and any car that far away traveling anywhere near legal speeds would be far enough away to not be a danger to any normal pedestrian crossing.

With the other cars that were on the road on a late Friday, it probably would not even be possible to see the car that hit him when he entered the crosswalk. There would have been several cars stopped at the intersection obstructing his view, plus cars at the intersections further up the road, or in transit between the intersections.

His only chance would have been to keep checking oncoming cars as he crossed, even after all the cars actually at or near his intersection at stopped.

Almost no one does that. Mostly once we see everyone nearby stop we just concentrate on cars that are turning and so might enter the crosswalk even though the light is red (assuming we are in a right turn on red jurisdiction).

Lesson #1: Treat each step as you cross the street as if it is your first step into the street. Do your full "is it safe to cross" scan constantly.

Lesson #2: Cars very far away at the time you start to cross can make it to you before you finish, even if traffic seems heavy enough that there is no way they could go fast enough to reach you. Your scan needs to look out farther than you think it needs to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> On the one hand, the cyclist became visible in the footage at a very late stage. If that is how the drivers eye saw it they would have very little time to react, however they may have been able to do a sharp swerve.

On the other, the operator was clearly distracted regardless of if they would have been able to avoid this.

<comment><USER85> You're getting downvoted but the guy was obviously reading his phone the entire time...

<comment> david-gpu We don't know if he was looking at a display showing the road from the perspective of lidar, etc.

<comment><USER86> So? It's their job to be the human lookout in the car, not watching a TV screen.

<comment> david-gpu If they didn't want drivers looking at those displays, why would they put them there? Either looking at those displays is part of the job, or the display should automatically turn off. I'm guessing it's the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Although it seems from the dashcam footage that the scene is dark and the bike/pedestrian comes out of nowhere, humans are able to handle extreme low- light situations and I don't doubt that this pedestrian would have been visible to an attentive driver.

If autonomous cars cannot handle low-light conditions given the current state of hardware, either from visible, ir, or lidar, then they need to run in the daytime only.

<comment><USER88> _> humans are able to handle extreme low-light situations_

But this wasn't an extreme low light situation. It was a situation with street lights alternating with extreme low light regions. Under those conditions the human eye will not be dark adapted and your low light vision won't be very good.

<comment><USER87> Ive driven at night and the video is not representative of what I see. With your car's headlights and the road lights, there are no blind spots on the road. If there is not enough street illumination and my headlights cannot reach far enough ahead I turn the high beams on and travel cautiously.

<comment><USER88> _> With your car's headlights and the road lights, there are no blind spots on the road._

I agree that is the optimum, but I don't think all roads are optimal in this respect.

 _> If there is not enough street illumination and my headlights cannot reach far enough ahead I turn the high beams on and travel cautiously._

From what I can see in the video, this is what a reasonably cautious human driver would have been doing on the street shown, since it does not appear to have sufficient light to avoid blind spots. It does not appear that the Uber car had its high beams on. But, as has been noted in other comments in this thread, the car had other means besides visible light (LIDAR and IR) for seeing the pedestrian, so it should have been able to do better than a human driver at avoiding the collision.

<comment><USER87> I would love to see what the lidar/ir system was seeing. I'm not sure that will be released if it's obvious uber fucked up.

<comment><USER89> I doubt that NTSB would fail to ensure that footage got released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Two obvious things from the footages: the pedestrian is invisible until the last moment, and the "driver" is focused on something else, probably a smartphone.

Given of how little time there was between the hitted woman became visible and the impact, a driver action may not have been able to avoid it, but what will be interesting is how his responsability will be engaged or not.

Anyway one advantage of automous car is the theoretical the ability to have faster than human reaction and extra-human sensors. It should have been able to catch the problem.

<comment><USER91> > the pedestrian is invisible until the last moment

In this crappy video, yes. Maybe it was scaled down massively before handing to the police or made darker, we don't know. It might have been visible for a normal person.

<comment><USER92> The Police should ask for the raw footage and at any rate the AD will if there's any doubt. They will probably engage a forensic computer tech expert as well and possibly ASU professors/engineers. But from a black box perspective it's clear that the system didn't not detect anything. Still IANAL but I would probably guess there will be a reckless driving charge for the driver here.. mitigated by the pedestrian failing to yield to the car by not crossing at a cross walk. The human driver was clearly not paying attention and there is video evidence of that. If the driver had kept their eyes on the road and the accident had still happened then it probably would be no charges filed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> The dynamic range in the video is probably misleading compared to the sensor capabilities or what adjusted eyes would see.

If the car can't see things in time to stop, it's probably moving too fast for the conditions.

</comment><comment><USER94> The onus is on driver to see what the path ahead is clear. Uber clearly violated the 3 sec. rule [i.e. reaction time plus braking time with the braking time dominating the equation]. Uber was driving too fast for the conditions. If you have only 30m clear view, you can't drive faster than 10m/s. Driving faster, like Uber did here, is basically driving blind, reckless and negligent. The woman was in the headlights for only 1 second - thus Uber was driving 3 times faster than the maximum safe speed in those conditions ( specifically the power and angle of their low beam headlights)

>the pedestrian showed up in the field of view right before the collision

It takes AZ police and $70B corp together to conclude that the woman appeared too fast. Guess what? If people and objects appear too fast in the field of view then you're driving too fast.

</comment><comment><USER89> In Uber's own tech blog, it describes its use of LIDAR to generate a wire frame of each object and track it. The lighting should be irrelevant for the vehicle, while it is essential for the driver.

From the below article: _"Last fall, Uber officials showing off their vehicles on Mill Avenue said their radar and lidar were able to detect objects, including jaywalkers, as far as 100 yards away and avoid collisions."_

Something went really wrong here, and I look forward to the release of the rest of the data. I'm wondering why the woman, who had a large enough silhouette, wasn't detected by the software.

This is a better source: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.azcentral.com/story/4476480...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.azcentral.com/story/447648002)

<comment><USER95> I suspect she was picked up by the sensors and categorised as an object. These are absolute fundamentals, and I can't fathom the car working at all if it can't do this. If it was being driven with a limited set of sensors or a malfunctioning sensor, hoo boy the NTSB will have a few things to say.

I reckon it's more likely that this is was due to a software issue where she was flagged as "not a collision concern" or similar due to being in the other lane on a 2-lane road, or due to her path not being predicted accurately due to the odd returns received by a bicycle in profile at that range (it may have thrown off their regular pedestrian detection). In any case a terrible shame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Okay, so Tempe police aren't going to be able to get & grok the raw data on how the AI was handling things. So how does that shake out in an investigation? It seems like they'll have to rely very heavily on the good faith of Uber (hah!) to honestly interpret & communicate the truth of that side of the story.

Releasing the video so soon without the equally important (probably more so) AI side is almost deliberately misleading, and at best shows Tempe ill equipped to deal with the investigation if they believe that video to answer any more questions than it raises, and I can't believe they don't know better. The video screams "Blame the poor light/lazy driver/idiot pedestrian!" at least for viewers that aren't more savvy on the tech involved.

<comment><USER97> The NTSB is opening an investigation, and Congress critters are watching.

The Tempe police aren't going to lead the crash analysis. If history is any guide, they'll probably have NASA doing code reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Watch the footage carefully and you'll see that the car actually tracks to the _right_ immediately before impact.

When centered there's about 20" between the sides of the car and the lane markers. (120" lane - 80" car) / 2.

At the moment of impact, the victim appears to be between 3' and 4' from the right lane marker. To avoid the fatality, the car would have only had to track left 2' from center.

So my question is - what was the last possible moment such an avoidance maneuver (veer left) could have been initiated?

I think that's an interesting factor in assessing whether this tragedy was avoidable or not. Certainly seems like a technical failure here here in that the car was easing slightly to the right and not braking or veering left.

<comment><USER99> Could have been getting into the right hand turn lane to head down Mill Ave that blends in right there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> When I cross-reference the lane lines at 0:03 with google maps[1], I get an estimate of the car being about 60ft-70ft away from the victim when I was first able to spot her shoe in the video. Some googling[2] says human reaction at 40mph would've taken 59ft, with an additional 80ft of actual stopping time.

This seems in line with the police report that "it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven)"

Maybe a SDV with superhuman reaction time should've been able to stop some 10ft after hitting her, and maybe if it had night vision-like sensors, it should've been able to see her from farther away, but my impression is that it would've been impossible for a regular human driver to avoid this accident.

Given that the SDV didn't attempt to reduce speed before she was visible under regular light, I'm forced to assume the sensors do require light in order to detect obstacles and that there wasn't enough light to activate the sensor before the headlights illuminated her.

[1]([https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-111.9436199,113m/da...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-111.9436199,113m/data=!3m1!1e3))

[2][https://www.google.com/search?q=stopping+distance+40mph&rlz=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=stopping+distance+40mph&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS746US746&oq=stopping+distance+40mph&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.5503j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

<comment><USER101> The speed limit is only 35 not 40 on that road unless we're looking at different roads? If the driver is paying attention they could turn the wheel a bit and split the left lane (there doesn't appear to be anyone else on the road) and avoid the person who was half way through the lane at time of impact. Might not clear the person but clipping the back of the bike would certainly be better than a direct impact. You wouldn't even have to jerk the wheel and swerve at such a slow speed and on a dry road with modern tcs even over-correcting is handled by tcs to limit what your input does. Of course all this is just playing arm chair quarterback so who knows if someone including myself would have been able to react in time. More of a thought experiment to how an alternative could have occurred.

I'm curious how the visibility differs between what we see on this camera and what a human actually sees in person.

<comment><USER100> According to google maps, the speed limit is 45 northbound (which is the way the car was going), 35 southbound. The report was that the car was going at 38, but I could not find stopping ranges estimates for that exact number. So give or take a little.

Looking at the video, it seemed like the driver reacted (facially) about a second after she shifted her gaze from some device to the road. It took me several runs of replaying the video to narrow down the time between when I first saw her shoe and collision to about 2 seconds. Also, recall this was at 10pm. In my opinion, swerving or braking with a 1-2 second notice is _extremely_ hard, especially if it's late and you're tired. To be perfectly honest, if it was me, I don't think I would've been able to react at all before the collision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> It appears that UBER may have disabled/overridden Volvo's built-in safety platform, "City Safety". City safety automatically brakes for obstructions, up to 50MPH.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcqktnqlf10&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcqktnqlf10&feature=youtu.be&t=18)

[https://support.volvocars.com/en-CA/cars/Pages/owners- manual...](https://support.volvocars.com/en-CA/cars/Pages/owners- manual.aspx?mc=v526&my=2016&sw=15w46&article=b9c7f9b0caf57af1c0a80151666ac460)

</comment><comment><USER103> A lot of people seem to mention how LiDAR should have seen her coming: Generally speaking, that's true. But it's difficult. In a single frame the system would hopefully detect _something_ on the left of the lane, but wouldn't know what it is (if they use AI it's probably not trained for "person shoving bike packed with plastic bags").

If you have the object detection in place, you still need a trajectory for that object; if you don't know the exact angle you're looking at that object it's difficult. And moving at any speed there are plenty of things that could go wrong with the calculation, especially for slow objects. Also remember you're seeing a lot of oncoming traffic (for which you don't want to do an emergency brake) and cross traffic moving onto the road, letting you pass before they enter your lane (for which you might want to slow down a bit).

Maybe the bags reflected LiDAR light causing a wrong classification... Maybe their detection noise was too high and the quick fix was to turn down sensitivity.

Whatever happened exactly (and I hope we get more information), this is a terrible accident, because the object in question was not part of some controlled test, but a human being left dead.

Still, the technology is very promising, but companies should be more careful with testing; have drivers be aware of the road (is that IR light from the camera or a smartphone?), and maybe do more testing in controlled environments.

As a software engineer, I would only release an autonomous car into the wild after I trust it enough to walk into its path on a dark road (with enough space to brake; suicides can not be avoided)... I wonder if the Uber engineers would?

<comment><USER104> I don't know how you can watch this video and then say that they should "maybe do more testing in controlled environments".

This was a complete failure and Uber's cars should be immediately banned from testing on public roads and there should be investigation into their practices to ensure public safety while testing their vehicles. If they rushed it trying to play catch up with Waymo they should be punished.

Personally I see this as a Therac-25 situation.

<comment><USER103> It's a "maybe" because I don't have any more data points than what's present in the video - only assumptions.

But I strongly assume this could have been avoided by more thorough testing (e.g. use a contraption to shove various inanimate objects in the path of the car at various speeds [both object and car] in various light conditions). And _iff_ a proper investigation finds out people responsible for this accident (engineers doing dirty fixes, managers neglecting safety, the driver just being an unaware dummy; you name it), they should carry the consequences same as a human driver would.

And yes, their self driving cars should stay of the road until the fault has been found and fixed. I never claimed the opposite. (Aren't they? IMHO it's the obvious thing to do; but then we're talking about Uber and their poor sense of responsibility...)

Eventually "maybe" has too weak of a connotation in this context (as a non- native speaker I sometimes find it difficult to pick the correct variant for the exact thing I want to implicate) - for which I apologise if I mislead you there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> According to this article, the algos only track objects that have been classified as "moving" and the initial classification is what matters.

"Let's say that there is a huge red fire truck idling at the side of the road. An autonomous car can't see the fire truck if the fire truck suddenly pulls out into traffic. Why? Autonomous cars have a stop and start problem. They don't have unlimited processing power, so they cut down on calculations by only calculating the potential future location of objects that seem to be in motion. Because they are not calculating the trajectory for the stationary fire truck, only for objects in motion (like pedestrians or bicyclists), they can't react quickly to register a previously stationary object as an object in motion.

If a giant red fire truck is parked, and it suddenly swings into traffic, the autonomous car can't react in time."

[http://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2018/03/self-driving- ca...](http://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2018/03/self-driving-cars-still- dont-know-how-see/146797/)

<comment><USER106> That's worrying. If that's really the case, autonomous cars shouldn't be on the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> I've noticed that pedestrians in the US tend not to look at cars coming their way when they cross intersections - I'm not sure if it's an attitude of "you're supposed to stop for me" and and they're willing to bet on that happening every time, or if they're really unaware of the danger of a few tons of steel coming at them.

This always struck me as very strange as someone from Europe - they teach kids in elementary school to look both ways and not to underestimate the speed of a car.

There are about 2500 pedestrian deaths in the US every year [1], it's just tragic and some of these fatalities could certainly be avoided :/

Edit: Since sgc mentioned 6-6.5k pedestrian deaths per year in the EU, which didn't sound any better than the US, I tried to come up with pedestrian fatalities per 100k population (data for 2012 or 2013):

      | Country | Fatalities per 100k | % pedestrian | Pedestrian fatalities  per 100k |
      |</comment><comment>---+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment></comment><comment>--+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---|
      | USA     |                10.6 |         14.1 |                          1.4946 |
      | Italy   |                 6.1 |         16.2 |                          0.9882 |
      | Germany |                 4.3 |         16.7 |                          0.7181 |
      #+TBLFM: $4=$2*$3/100
      http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A997?lang=en
      http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A998?lang=en

This example really speaks for itself.

[1] [https://www.npr.org/2017/03/30/522085503/2016-saw-a- record-i...](https://www.npr.org/2017/03/30/522085503/2016-saw-a-record- increase-in-pedestrian-deaths)

<comment><USER108> I'll bite!

According to [https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/...](https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/files/pdf/statistics/historical_country_transport_mode_graph.pdf), there are 6000-6500 pedestrian deaths per year in the EU (the data is only in graph form). EDIT: here is the raw data: [https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/...](https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/files/pdf/statistics/historical_country_transport_mode.pdf)

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in both places, I can say that the US pedestrian feels more entitled due to an _almost_ universal pedestrian legal right of way outside of controlled intersections (stop lights). It's a foolhardy attitude, and completely antithetical to the way people are taught (which is: look right, then left, then right again before stepping off the curb). But Italians often do the same because they wouldn't ever cross the street otherwise, and there will be a small group of risk takers adding to the statistics in every country.

<comment><USER50> There is also a pedestrian right of way in Europe, at least in the countries I know of.

I think that European drivers are convicted when they hurt a pedestrian. I don't think that Americans get convicted as often or as long. That could explain why they don't drive as carefully.

<comment><USER108> How could you possibly come to that interpretation of the data? There are 2.5x more pedestrian fatalities in the EU. It would appear that US roads are safer for pedestrians, and of course drivers are convicted if they are at fault.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> This is definitely not a case of someone jumping out in the road, as was previously reported. Sure, jaywalking at night is a bad idea, but this is exactly the type of thing an automated driving system should catch and avoid

<comment><USER110> I thought whole initial response from the police was weird. They went out of their way to basically say she jumped out in front of the car, and that the accident was unavoidable. They even told us that the women was homeless, which I viewed as a subtle way to hint that maybe she wasn't in her right mind.

It just felt like they were saying everything possible to absolve Uber, in a way that's very different from how most crashes are treated.

<comment><USER31> 100% agree. The Police Chief even said the video would "potentially shift the blame to the victim herself, rather than the vehicle."

If that's not very strange language to use for a public servant describing a video that shows a fatal vehicle-vs-pedestrian accident, I don't know what is.

I'm not in the US so I don't know, but people in another thread were making comments that that is often how it is handled in the US, the crash victim is blamed somehow. It was implied by one person that police want to avoid paperwork.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> It certainly looks like a human driver would have braked enough to make this a minor injury accident. It's amazing that the additional sensors of the Uber car were not enough to avoid the accident entirely.

<comment><USER112> I wouldn't say minor, but a reasonably attentive driver would have probably slammed the brakes, even if it was too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> The Uber car was a Volvo XC90. They are supposed to have some of the best pedestrian avoidance safety features in existence. My understanding is that a stock Volvo would be expected to catch this situation and avoid or stop. Did Uber override these systems? Or does it just not work very well?

<comment><USER114> I had the same question, especially because several relatives and I own Volvos and pay attention to their safety promises. One would assume that Uber cannot disable Volvo's safety systems...

However, it appears that Volvo's "City Safety" detection of pedestrians or bicyclists requires _clear visual_ identification. So it works in daytime, or at night with strong illumination, but not in relative darkness. [1]

One other thing that seems off in the video is that the headlights don't illuminate much distance ahead.

[1] [https://support.volvocars.com/en-CA/cars/pages/owners- manual...](https://support.volvocars.com/en-CA/cars/pages/owners- manual.aspx?mc=v526&my=2018&sw=17w46&article=c3d7a163845903b5c0a801513bd0d7f3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> I lived in that area of Tempe for nearly a decade, as recently as two years ago.

That is an extremely well-lit stretch of road - there are so many lights on that road that it's practically daylight conditions at night.

The video is far, far darker than what you'd actually see.

</comment><comment><USER116> I feel like a human would've been able to at least brake a little or swerve in this situation?

Not avoiding the collision but perhaps lessening the damage?

It looks like the car doesn't even try to slow down.

</comment><comment><USER117> This time it actually has the video. And it is a poignant reminder that there is no such thing as a too reflective vest for bicyclists.

<comment><USER32> > there is no such thing as a too reflective vest for bicyclists

And to not jaywalk a bike across a street in the dark!

<comment><USER118> Since I've seen this be a very controversial statement here in the past, I'd just like to point out to everyone that American drivers on four lane roads are _not_ expecting pedestrians to be in the middle of the road and not at a crosswalk. That is not a normal thing to happen in America, and no one expects it to happen. It is a very rare situation.

\--edit: okay guys... no where did anyone argue that you shouldn't be watching for pedestrians crossing. Stop yelling "gotcha!" like you caught me in a trap. What I'm arguing against is the common refrain on these articles that there is no such thing as jaywalking and the pedestrian has the right to the road over the car. Maybe it's true in Europe judging by comments on previous articles, but it's not common in the US. It's illegal.

Congratulations on expertly knocking down your own strawman, though.

<comment><USER119> I have driven in the US for over 20 years and have the opposite experience. I am constantly looking for people, animals (deer are quite dangerous to hit, and they move _way_ faster) and lost count long long ago how many times I have been in very similar or worse situations.

It's not even remotely rare. Drive on campus or downtown in AZ for a more than a few minutes.

<comment><USER118> Yes, obviously you should watch for objects unexpectedly crossing the road. No one argued you shouldn't. The point is, some people have and will still argue that the pedestrian has more right to the road than the driver and pedestrians should be allowed to cross anywhere they please. But that's not how it works in the US, crossing roads like this is illegal unless it's done at a crosswalk, and normally people are not stupid enough to do it with oncoming traffic.

<comment><USER119> The proponents of pre-programmed cars would be wise to stop blaming "humans breaking the rules" for their mistakes.

<comment><USER118> You're not even arguing against what I've said. You are not the intended audience for my comment.

<comment><USER119> "obviously you should watch for objects unexpectedly crossing the road. No one argued you shouldn't."

Strawman. I argued the opposite. You made the grossly incorrect assertion "That is not a normal thing to happen in America, and no one expects it to happen. It is a very rare situation."

If preprogrammed cars cant handle random objects in unexpected places then they are uber DOA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> Shouldn't the card have been driving with its brights on? I mean... she was already crossing so she didn't come out of a corner or something and I have a feeling that with brights on she could have been seen. Also, there doesn't seem to be other cars in the opposite direction or anything for which the car shouldn't have had its brights on.

<comment><USER121> No, this is an urban area just north of downtown Tempe:

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/N+Mill+Ave+%26+E+Curry+Rd,...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/N+Mill+Ave+%26+E+Curry+Rd,+Tempe,+email@example.com,-111.9422532,16z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x872b0931b4d9dd05:0x5d55a20356caaf8!8m2!3d33.4377022!4d-111.9433046)

<comment><USER92> I dunno I would've probably had them on if there was no opposing traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> Regardless of how suddenly she appears in the camera, it is pretty logical that she was probably visible to the human driver if he had been watching the road. That's not nearly fast enough on a stretch of road like that to be overdriving the visibility provided by the modern headlights of a brand new Volvo. I bet she was visible to the driver in plenty of time to have stopped.

I'm an optimist, but still I think we are much farther away from legitimate self-driving cars than a lot of people think. And every accident like this where the computer vastly underperforms a human driver is a huge PR blow to the technology.

<comment><USER123> I agree; and particularly like that you mention this is a brand new Volvo -- I regularly drive much faster on roads that are likely to have deer -- and this driver is clearly not paying attention. I think the driver should be considered for manslaughter charges (to which, as they were an employee, Uber is civilly liable for)

<comment><USER122> I am not totally onboard with the idea of manslaughter charges, but in principle I'm with you. I am nervous about how the liability question gets worked out. When a human behind the wheel is directly liable for their actions we at least have some incentive for good behavior. When we detach that liability and assign it generically to a company instead, then it feels like our options for coercive behavior shaping has been significantly reduced. We can't put the corporation in jail, and history shows that we rarely punish corporations significantly, even large fines are frequently pretty small when you look at the budget of the corporation involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> An alert human driver would still have had a bad crash, but might not have killed the pedestrian.

In a two-lane road, you cannot simply swerve to the other lane w/out checking. I (and many other?) drivers would have just slammed on the brakes. But at that road's speed limit, I believe the brakes wouldn't have stopped in time, and a collision would still have occurred.

The pedestrian+bicycle was a direct obstacle, not at some slim and oblique angle. So it is odd that the car's collision detection didn't pick up on it.

tldr; a human driver may or may not have done better.

<comment><USER125> Although a collision may still have occurred if a human slammed on the brakes immediately after seeing the pedestrian, even a 10mph slowdown may have mitigated the fatality into a minor injury. ProPublica has a graph showing the frequency of fatalities in crashes for different impact speeds, showing a more than halving in the occurrence of fatalities in crashes between 38mph and 28mph impacts: [https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many- speeds](https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds)

The article says that the vehicle "doesn't appear to slow down". If the data shows that it actually didn't slow down, it seems like there is a critical bug in Uber's software that has killed a pedestrian.

<comment><USER124> Yep,

> An alert human driver would still have had a bad crash, but might not have > killed the pedestrian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER126> Side note related to this incident:

When did the "futurology" crowd become so militant? I've seen multiple people on multiple forums blaming the victim here, with some even going as far as to say that they "deserved to get hit". Other rather disgusting comments have been along the lines of "you have to break a few eggs to make an omlette".

Since so many of these people are outwardly saying that they're comfortable with people dying to "train the AI" (their words), I wonder if any of them would volunteer themselves or someone they care about to play the role of "broken egg"?

Others have been blaming low light conditions, which is ridiculous for so many reasons I wouldn't even know where to start.

The general feeling I get, is that they simultaneously acknowledge that this technology is still developing, but refuse to admit that it isn't already perfect. If they had their way, and blame for incidents was always shifted somewhere else, autonomous cars would never improve.

Not a good look, and we're in for a very messy dystopian future if the lowest common denominator is already willing to blindly trust what they believe to be "AI".

</comment><comment><USER49> Direct link: [https://twitter.com/TempePolice/status/976585098542833664](https://twitter.com/TempePolice/status/976585098542833664)

The interior view tells you everything you need to know about why anything except perfection in self driving cars will lead to more accidents.

The driver specially selected and trained for exactly this job, does not look at the road! If someone specially trained for that won't do it, the general public certainly will not.

Also, in the video you can not see the bicycle till it's almost too late. But I have better night vision than this camera, I feel as a human I would have seen the bike. (For example the sides are pitch black in the video, but in similar lighting I can see stuff to the side.)

But the real issue is that self driving cars should have better vision than a human, not worse!

<comment><USER127> "The driver specially selected and trained for exactly this job, does not look at the road!"

Humans gonna human. Our brains are trained by millions of years to not pay attention to things not directly important. It's hard enough sometimes to keep our attention on the road when we're doing the driving and the driving is too easy, like being alone on a highway at night. Expecting humans to passively observe driving while making no decisions and taking no actions... well... could _you_ watch eight straight hours of video footage from a car, tomorrow? I know I couldn't. I couldn't even pre-HN/Reddit/instant entertainment constantly in my pocket, let alone now.

The idea that sitting a human in an otherwise-automated car will do anything after the first few hours is absurd. It's a feel-good measure and nothing more. I wouldn't have expected any other result.

<comment><USER96> Yeah, there's that videogame about driving a bus constantly, on an empty road, for hours and hours. It occasionally veers off, so you have to pay attention, but that's all. That game should be a minimum "driving" test for safety drivers. (Not really, but something like that)

<comment><USER128> Desert Bus. Not quite Twitch stream material..

I agree that it's an apt comparison, except Uber seems a worse experience. In Desert Bus you have to correct the bus.. Stupid work, but something necessary - boring - to do or you fail.

There seems to be nothing at all to do in that Uber?

<comment><USER129> _ahem_ [https://desertbus.org/](https://desertbus.org/)

<comment><USER128> I .. was aware of that, but you literally pay for Schadenfreude and charity there. I sincerely believe that no streamer can make money or get a following with a schedule of Desert Bus runs.

Nor do I want to believe that there are people out there, bored out of their mind to click on anything, anything(!) on Twitch, would pick Desert Bus over literally any other thing for more than three minutes.

It's painful. People like seeing others suffer, I guess.. But these streams do serve a purpose in this thread: The poor players do look exhausted and ready to die after a short while already. Which brings me back to my original point: These Desert Bus gamers have something to do (correct the bus repeatedly) and in your example a whole community who engages them. The Uber driver ... has nothing at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER130> Apart from all the questions about the camera, resolution and culpability, we need to re-think what it means to be training and evaluation of autonomous cars with respect to the rare incidents.

Training the cars based on data collected from roads is heavily biased towards incident free conditions. This does not give any training or feedback on the rare occasions such as these. If there was a learning algorithm deciding what to do (assuming hand coded rules are brittle and hence one would want to learn handling these scenarios) then it perhaps has no training data.

Evaluating the cars based on incidents per million is fine but doesn't tell anything about how the incidents would have been handled if they had happened. There is no incentive for the learning algorithm to slow down the car to prevent fatality, if all it cares about is an incident happening and not the severity.

One possible solution, autonomous cars are trained in real life simulations (using realistic lighting conditions, dummies and what not) to be able to handle the rare incidents and they are also required to pass regulatory testing in similarly realistic conditions to test for their behavior in rare incidents, before they are allowed to drive on actual roads.

<comment><USER89> Luckily, self-driving companies agree.

All of the major ones use test tracks with live hazards, including the scenarios you mentioned.

Waymo hazard testing [https://www.google.com/amp/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/08...](https://www.google.com/amp/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/08/24/google- autonomous-car-spinoff-waymo-builds-town-as-test-track/amp/)

Uber hazard response [https://youtu.be/LM8Zw8fiPXE](https://youtu.be/LM8Zw8fiPXE)

Uber test track [https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/ubers-f...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/ubers- fake-city-pittsburgh-self-driving-cars-2017-10)

Cruise Automation's test track [https://www.autoevolution.com/news/general- motors-starts-an-...](https://www.autoevolution.com/news/general-motors- starts-an-autonomous-car-development-team-builds-it-a-test-track-108721.html)

As far as driving on public roads, I tend to agree. As do the companies. They all have a safety driver behind the wheel, ready to take over.

There was clearly something that went wrong here in this tragedy, but it's not a reckless disregard for safety on anyone's part that led this to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> The worst part of all of this is the XC90 (the car involved) has emergency pedestrian braking built in (like many new cars today), yet based on the video it appears to be disabled so as not to interfere with Uber's autonomous driving.

</comment><comment><USER132> Can't believe all those redundant sensors didn't catch this obstacle.

</comment><comment><USER133> Lots of mention about LIDAR here. As well as IR sensors, etc.

Unless Uber comes out with all the technical specifications that is mounted on the car to detect motion and obstruction on the road, all are mere speculations.

The vehicle in question here would be in the custody of the authorities (impounded), so they should be able to investigate the details on it. Uber should provide as much technical specifications available on the vehicle to aid in the investigation (especially if they are certain that it was more the fault of the pedestrian rather than the self-driving vehicle (SDV)).

SDV companies and advocates should probably pool resources where they could buy a parcel of land, simulate it into a city like settings, and perform edge case tests such as people suddenly crossing, animals, objects, lighting conditions. This will allow for better simulation as well as advancement of technology that would soon realize the possibilities of autonomous driving cars on the road as safe and reliable.

Update: Added safe and reliable.

<comment><USER134> Waymo has 91-acres already[0]. They are selling/donating that land to the "California AutoTech Testing, Development and Production Campus", which will expand to 300 acres and allow others to use it too[1].

[0] [https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car- ca...](https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car-castle- testing/)

[1] [http://wardsauto.com/industry/samsung-joins-waymo- autonomous...](http://wardsauto.com/industry/samsung-joins-waymo-autonomous- testing-site)

</comment></comment><comment><USER135> It isn't obvious from the video if the human driver would have had time to react, but they certainly did not help their chances by being unalert. What is the point of having a human driver if they are not going to be watching the road or able to react.

If they aren't a passenger, are they merely there to get around regulation that requires a human in test autonomous driving vehicles?

</comment><comment><USER136> This exact situation happened to me on an unlit road 3 years ago. I swerved in the opposite lane and avoided the collision, without thinking. I was just lucky that my reflexes kicked in on time and that there was no opposing traffic.

I had to stop and shake out all the adrenaline and rage after that.

Real question, what would have happened to me, a human driver, if I had hit the person?

<comment><USER137> Police ruled it wouldn't be your fault.

<comment><USER136> This would be an incredible relief. This has been haunting me.

I didn't have video however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> Can't tell if the camera has poor contrast resolution or if it was indeed that dark. With the dynamic range available on digital sensors, it seems to me that even without some form of FLIR it still should be more possiblle to capture this for sensors than eyes at any rate. Do self driving vehicles use any of this, especially at night?

</comment><comment><USER139> This is pure speculation, but it is my working theory: The car's so called "AI" thought the thing in front of it was a four legged animal (e.g., see <[https://goo.gl/images/3qAmiM>](https://goo.gl/images/3qAmiM>)).

In most states, braking for animals in a way that might endanger others on the road is illegal. So, it decided to go ahead and hit the thing in front of it on purpose.

I am not sure if the people who program the firmware for these contraptions have ever driven cars in difficult conditions. Between Teslas ramming into trucks and Uber cars taking out poor homeless people for a bonus score, it seems to me they are programming things, but they have no idea how this stuff is supposed to function outside of ideal parameters.

Sure, provide the driver with more information. But, taking the driver out of the responsibility equation is stupid.

<comment><USER140> > In most states, braking for animals in a way that might endanger others on > the road is illegal.

If that is true, then that is a very bad law. If something appers in front of a car I'm driving, the first thing I do, before anything else, is braking. And so should you, and everbody else. First, you save precious reaction time by first braking, then thinking. Second, it might be a human and thus worth much more than a damn car. Third, if it's not a living thing, it's not uncommon for humans to step on the street to go after it.

Any dangers by sudden braking are avoided by mandating sufficient space between cars. If a car breaks suddenly and the car behind it crashes into it, the driver of that second car is responsible for the damages, because they evidently didn't have enough distance to the car in front of it to react in time to danger situations.

<comment><USER139> The intent behind such laws is simple: You must not endanger others to save an animal. These are good laws, even if those without actual driving experience may not understand them.

As the Globe and Mail puts it: "It doesn't matter why the chicken crossed the road — your responsibility is to the people around you."[1]

        "If you're forced to choose between getting
        rear-ended and hitting a small animal — hit
        the animal."

        "People end up in serious crashes with other
        cars because they let their emotions take over
        when they see a bunny, DiCicco says."

        "Drivers need to be prepared to make these
        tough decisions and not get in a 12 car pileup
        because they saw a baby deer and thought of
        Bambi," he says.

My unfounded speculation is that the RC car jockeys who programmed how the car should react under various conditions did not fully understand what such laws mean (probably having no real life driving experience in ambiguous conditions). And, the cars sensors saw the human with the bicycle, but thought it was an animal.

This is pure speculation, but it makes sense to me. My gut feelings are somewhat validated by every single comment here that tries to make this this poor woman's fault.

PS: You might correctly deduce that I do not think "self-driving cars" is a good idea. I think everyone needs to be reintroduced to Asimov.

[1]: [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe- drive/culture/commutin...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe- drive/culture/commuting/what-should-you-do-if-you-see-an-animal-on-the- road/article19494060/)

<comment><USER140> > These are good laws, even if those without actual driving experience may not > understand them.

No, they are not. You didn't even touch the arguments I gave.

If there is a risk of collision with the car behind you, then not you but the driver of the car behind you is at fault for not keeping a safe distance to account for their reaction time and brake performance.

<comment><USER139> > but the driver of the car behind you is at fault

That will be small consolation if you cause harm to others' persons or property when trying to avoid an animal such as a deer. That is the practical upshot.

If you hit a deer, insurance will pay you under comprehensive coverage and your rates will not go up. On the other hand, if, because of your attempt to save the deer's life, you hit a guardrail and smash your car, and get hurt in the process, you'll be lucky to collect anything.

The main point I tried to make above is this: I am speculating that the car's "AI" thought the person walking a bicycle fit the profile of an animal which interacted with a ruleset that embodies this principle in a simplistic way because the code for these stupid self-driving cars is being written by people with little to no experience driving in less than ideal conditions.

Also, Tesla S cannot see a stopped firetruck: [https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash- radar/](https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I suppose we'll need to wait for some standardization in the sensor department, but it would be great if autonomous car makers could share the sensor data for collisions so that everyone can learn from the mistakes. Test data is great, but there's nothing like real world problems.

</comment><comment><USER141> This was not what I was expecting. If this had been an accident with a normal vehicle, I think the driver would have been found to be at least partially at fault, and guilty of involuntary manslaughter. But I'm not a lawyer.

I thought the victim jumped out into the street, but that clearly isn't the case. The pedestrian always has the right of way, a human would have seen her and slowed and swerved, and no one should be driving so fast that they can't stop for an obstacle that is just coming into view. And like many others mentioned, I'm sure she was visible to the human eye where the camera's exposure was set up to not wash out what was in the headlights.

Uber screwed up on this, maybe they were just lucky it didn't happen earlier.

<comment><USER83> > The pedestrian always has the right of way

That's a very common misconception, but in fact in the majority of states in the US vehicles have the right of way on roads over pedestrians outside of marked crosswalks and crosswalks at an intersection [1].

I think this misconception arises because many people overestimate what privileges and protections having the right of way confers. Some people seem to think having it means that you can go come hell or high water, no matter what the people who are supposed to yield are doing.

It is not nearly as powerful as that.

All that having the right of way actually means is that others that want to use the same resource as you are supposed to let you go first. If they ignore that and try to go ahead of you, it doesn't mean you can unsafely force your way ahead of them.

For example, if I'm standing beside a highway, nowhere near an intersection or a marked crosswalk, looking toward the other side clearly wanting to cross, the cars have the right of way in most states. I'm supposed to wait until there is a gap in the traffic sufficient to let me cross safely.

If no such gap comes and I start to step out into the street the cars have to stop even though they have the right of way. If police witness this they can ticket me for something like "failure to yield".

[1] [http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/pedestrian- cross...](http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/pedestrian- crossing-50-state-summary.aspx)

<comment><USER141> Yea good points. I didn't mean "right of way" as a legal term, but as a common phrase which means you are responsible as a vehicle driver to not hit people, even if they are doing stupid, illegal things. If you've had a bad day at work you don't get to speed up and swerve into little Johnny as he runs across the street after his ball, then tell his parents "he shouldn't have been in the street" and drive away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER142> Please, mind that the camera does not have the same dynamic range a healthy person has. There are also other subtle signals that humans can use that computers will still have problems using. I have personally avoided few collisions with pedestrians just on the fact that they occluded some far away light or on very subtle flicker of some part of their clothing.

I don't see how car relying solely on vision (it does not seem to react to the pedestrian as if it was "seeing in the dark") can replace human with the current level of technology.

If this is true and the car was not able to use LIDAR/Radar/IR camera etc. to augment its visible spectrum then I don't think it should have been allowed for this car to be driven fully autonomously.

</comment><comment><USER143> Collisions between pedestrians, bicyclists and cars would be impossible if we restricted the roadway. Collisions of vehicles between lanes, including the opposite and crossing lanes, would also be impossible.

You don't even need self-driving cars to do it, and it would greatly reduce the number of serious accidents and fatalities. You could start with just the roads with the most accidents.

And by the way, nobody seems to have mentioned that _assisted driving technology_ could be added to cars today. We already have cars that emergency- brake for us. They could also warn us of upcoming red lights, fast approaching obstructions in the roadway, or unsafe actions on the road, such as letting the car drift lanes without a turn signal.

</comment><comment><USER144> I'm surprised the vehicle didn't detect an object moving into its field of view. What are the expectations from the driver under the terms of Arizona's self-driving car laws? Are they expected to remain engaged as a driver, or are they permitted to allow the car to perform all of the driving? It's impossible to say whether an attentive drive would have changed the outcome of this scenario -- largely because a highly compressed video doesn't really convey what the driver actually was capable of seeing, but it's very clear from the video that the driver was more focused on a phone (or some other device) and was not an active participant in driving the vehicle.

<comment><USER55> I'm definitely interested in the legal expectations too. If it turns out LIDAR completely dropped the ball here, it might not be the case (given AZ's lax rules) that Uber would be penalized for LIDAR that was substandard.

Presumably, there'd be regulations for software too, classifiers and AI decision making. Has any jurisdiction set standards in this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER145> I think this brings up an interesting philosophy for autonomous driving technology - is it feasible if it's "only as good as human driving"?

I mean I've seen comments that a human might not have seen the pedestrian. Is that a "defense" of driving AI? That's it's about as good as human driving?

Seems to me the public won't accept driverless cars unless there is significant evidence that it's much better than human drivers - after all human drivers make a lot of mistakes and cause a lot of fatalities. I don't think any other claims of the advantages of AI driving could offset any negative publicity of injury or death.

Just a thought in the context of this tragedy.

<comment><USER146> I think experience is the best teacher. In a perfect world, Uber will look at the data, determine why this happened. The AI will learn and it won't happen again. That is compared to countless new human drivers entering the road every year. That's not a defense, or an excuse, but an explanation or reality.

I know we don't live in a perfect world, but regardless, we can't change what happened here, so it's best to learn something from it.

<comment><USER147> > The AI will learn

[https://xkcd.com/1838/](https://xkcd.com/1838/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER148> However bad the car was or wasn't at detecting the victim, it's nothing compared to how bad the human victim was at detecting the car (which presumably had its lights on coming down an empty street at night).

Imagine if the victim was driving a car...

<comment><USER31> What's your point? She wasn't driving a car. Imagine if the uber hardware was installed into a petrol tanker. It just just as pointless a discussion.

If self driving cars can't be trusted to not smash into any obstacle that appears such as a deer/roadwork/child/runaway shopping cart, then they shouldn't be permitted on the road.

<comment><USER148> The point is that humans who have poorer sensors and do even stupider things are allowed to drive. So the bar for self-driving is a lot lower than people around here make it sound.

<comment><USER125> I actually believe that the kind of situation shown in the video (pedestrian walking across road at night in the path of a car, where car has to brake hard to avoid a collision) happens much more frequently than most people think. And most of the time the pedestrian comes out fine because most drivers are looking ahead most of the time, and someone walking across the road is a big abnormal event that is easy for a human to notice and react to.

I don't have any data to support this, other than a vague memory of doing something similar many years ago. Although if I remember correctly, that was a more major road that was probably better lit. But I still find it hard to believe that human vision would have been as lousy as the camera's.

<comment><USER31> I agree. I can remember quite a few times I've had to slow down.

One time there was a bar fight that spilled onto the road I was driving along. I slowed down as I could see the commotion on the sidewalk, and lucky I did because they ended up in the path of my car.

This self driving car would have killed quite a few people in that case it seems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER149> Do you remember the reaction test where a ball is rolling onto the road and you have to hit the breaks?

This situation is more akin to a ball laying on the road already and you drive over it.

This situation is very clear cut. There is an object (a subject even) on the road directly in front of the vehicle and the car just straight forward drives into it. It doesn't even swerve. It doesn't break. Nothing. This is a total fail of the system.

What if there is an accident and people are standing on the road for some good reason? What if it is a deer in the headlights? What if a kid is running loose? Is the vehicle supposed to just hunt them down?

</comment><comment><USER150> If the car was able to pick up the person with the sensors, but the system failed to stop the collision, will the programmers who designed the autonomous system be held ethically accountable for the bug that led to the death? O_O

<comment><USER92> Yes. I am not sure if self driving cars are subjected to regulatory aspects such as the SDLC in FDA regulated industries but they probably should be (as should embedded computers in autos in general).

</comment></comment><comment><USER151> The other commenters here have done a good job of examining this incident under the lens of computer vision and AI/ML automated driving.

So I would like to take a moment to remind everyone, especially pedestrians but also drivers: To ignore the road is to play russian roulette. It doesn't matter where you grew up, even if it was a place where drivers always stopped for pedestrians and were oh so polite. Even a car at a stoplight could malfunction itself or the person driving it errs... Always keep your distance and track anything heading in your direction. It is a tragedy what happened here but it begs the question, at what point of negligence do we classify risky behavior? Russian roulette is clearly suicide but crossing a street at night and not paying attention to headlights in the distance isn't? I'd say the relative risks are vastly different but the outcome similar.

What is even worse for life loving pedestrians is the fact that cars can have their headlights turned off at night(usually newer models cant but older ones can.) And then add in EV and the car is invisible and silent... Well clearly it starts to look like someone driving under these conditions is just a potential murderer. But similar scenarios are worth thinking about. Really, anyone walking the street at night should be aware of the non obvious cues of motor vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER152> Some thoughts from a Tempe / Phoenix pedestrian:

Arizona has the highest pedestrian death rate in the United States. Drivers are incredibly reckless here, and for people like myself who do not drive jaywalking is never an option. I will not excuse Uber's mistake here. There must be repercussions for their lack of oversight. However, I would like to defend Arizona's loose legislation surrounding self-driving testing on our streets. The honest answer is that the only way forward for self-driving adoption is through real-world data. It's the fastest way to reach global adoption. The faster that companies like Uber and Waymo can improve their technology, the faster we can see a reduction of human drivers on our roads. While this accident was horrible and must serve as a wakeup call, it must be acknowledged that there were 224 pedestrian deaths across Phoenix in 2017. In the past week alone there were 12 pedestrian deaths. This figure has actually increased over the years and makes Arizona a unique data point for auto companies. I am in no way suggesting that Uber should face zero repercussions. However, as a local pedestrian, if you gave me the option to magically switch every vehicle here over to Uber's technology with current specifications I'd take it in a heartbeat. I interact with these vehicles every day, and feel safer with them still.

</comment><comment><USER153> Since I didn't find it in a Ctrl+F, I'll chime in to say that one of the advantages of self-driving cars is the scrutiny that accidents will come under, and how the results of that investigation can improve the driving of all other self-driving cars.

While many fatal car accidents are scrutinized to an appropriate level throughout the various countries across the world, many are not. And when they are examined in detail and the vehicle had a fault, the systems in place to issue recalls and defects are quite robust and reasonably effective, although time consuming. When the driver is at fault, the local judicial system (if it exists) can attempt to rectify that behaviour through the usual means - fines, imprisonment, training, whathaveyou.

But with a self-driving car, the autonomous systems can be updated after a collision like this is understood, improved, and distributed to existing vehicles at a scale and rate far surpassing anything possible with humans driving cars individually in every city across the world.

I don't think self-driving cars are flawless in concept or mandatory for all circumstances, but having been to fatal car accidents that are eerily similar to one another on a few too many occasions, I can welcome large scale discussions on what went on in a death such as this one - because the positive outcomes can be replicated elsewhere, hopefully saving someone from the same fate.

<comment><USER154> Typically models don't work like that... i.e changing the model or its training alters it's behaviour generally and needs to be tested against its overall performance. So whilst crash data may go toward a dataset which is then used to better evaluate or train different aspects of a system, it has none of the luster of the learning from every accident being maximised.

The human mind is a quite unique in its ability to decide where one model stops and another one starts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER155> The way I see it is that this fatality was a calculated risk for Uber. Uber realizes how much Waymo is ahead of them and decides to drop too many safety restraints in development of the self-driving technology.

Any safety regulations based on this fatality are going to hit Waymo just as much as Uber, but also slow Waymo down and give Uber time to catch up. Any financial fine would be tiny comparing to total money invested in self driving technology.

</comment><comment><USER156> Isn't the driver clearly looking at a phone in his lap?

</comment><comment><USER157> The issue I am having with this is that you can easily see that something broke the sight line between car and lights on slight left. Mind that - <USER2> video is not only of pretty low resolution but also it is not giving out proper "blackness" of black. A human observing the road would be able to catch that and as a precaution take the foot off a gas and put it on a brake pedal. Those small changes make the difference.

<comment><USER158> That's a great point, and something we use in driving even in daytime, sometimes you are driving on a curvy mountain road and see something move through the leaf cover and know to take precautionary steps - to slow down and extra care on being in the lane. I don't know much about it but wildly speculate some of this might fall into general AI, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER159> It's time to set the precedent by jailing those who deemed the system was ready for real-world use.

This woman's death will not be in vain. I did not expect such a terrible fuck up so early on, but I'm glad it clearly demonstrates how badly made autonomous vehicles are. They're not going to be ready to hit the streets for decades, unless of course we decide that Uber's profit margins are worth more than human life.

</comment><comment><USER160> A few people have commented along the lines of "I probably couldn't have stopped in time even if I had been driving." I think it's important as a driver to hit the brakes as hard as you can even if you don't think you'll be able to avoid collision, because the energy is reduced greatly even with a small amount of deceleration (F=ma). Probability of death in car/pedestrian collision is reduced from over 80% to under 10% by slowing from 40 mph to 20 mph. [1]

Also, I think it's likely the human eye would have been able to see the woman before the camera does. The camera needs her to be fully covered by the headlight beam. I know when I drive at night I focus my attention on the area between the road ahead and the fringe of the beam as I scan center, left and right. The area outside the beam coverage never looks fully black to me. I definitely can perceive obstacles outside the main beam coverage.

[1] [http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm](http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm)

<comment><USER88> _> I think it's important as a driver to hit the brakes as hard as you can even if you don't think you'll be able to avoid collision_

It's good to hit the brakes, yes, but the best way to avoid almost all collisions is to steer, not just to brake. Braking combined with steering sharply to the left (since the pedestrian was moving to the right) would have been the best response to this situation.

(Note that, before anti-lock brakes became common, "hit the brakes as hard as you can" was _not_ good advice, precisely because it would lock the wheels and prevent you from steering. In a car with anti-lock brakes, that's not an issue.)

<comment><USER161> Depending on your speed, that is very bad advice. Sounds like a recipe for losing traction and fish tailing (potentially into other cars or people or even stationary objects).

There is only so much traction afforded by the contact patch on your tires. You can brake, you can turn, you can speed up but I would not recommend doing more than one at a time.

<comment><USER88> _> There is only so much traction afforded by the contact patch on your tires_

If you have anti-lock brakes, they are designed and calibrated to know how much to brake to be just short of losing traction. That's what they're for--to allow you to brake and steer at the same time without having to have special training to know exactly how to balance the two.

If you don't have anti-lock brakes (but it's very rare now not to have them in a car of recent manufacture), then it's still possible to brake and steer at the same time, but it's not easy or intuitive to balance the two to maintain control. It can be done, but you basically have to be a professional driver.

<comment><USER161> You cannot argue against the laws of physics.

It is inadvisable for any non professional driver to attempt to maximum break and also steer away. It is just not safe.

<comment><USER88> _> You cannot argue against the laws of physics._

Sure. Anti-lock brakes work in accordance with the laws of physics.

 _> It is inadvisable for any non professional driver to attempt to maximum break and also steer away. It is just not safe._

This is true for a vehicle that does not have anti-lock brakes. It is _not_ true for a vehicle that does have anti-lock brakes. As I said before, that is precisely what anti-lock brakes are for: to allow you to just push the brake pedal as hard as you can while also being able to steer (because the anti-lock brakes translate "push the brake pedal as hard as you can" into "don't apply the brakes hard enough for the wheels to lock"). And the reason why anti-lock brakes were invented and put into cars was precisely that you need to _both_ brake _and_ steer to avoid most collisions.

<comment><USER161> I looked into this further, since I was trained to not steer and brake. I understand anti-lock brakes but it does not answer the question of breaking traction, just stops your wheels from locking up (which does maximize traction vs locked wheels).

The answer to the question is ESC (Electronic Stability Control) which is mandated by law in all US vehicles as pf 2012. ESC controls braking on individual wheels to prevent over/under-steering which was my primary concern about swerving in emergency situations.

This short video is a great illustration, it helped me understand how the system works. Looks like my information about swerving is out of date.

[https://youtu.be/L1qt84c2KN0](https://youtu.be/L1qt84c2KN0)

Previously I only found this study that claims people were not driving or braking properly with ABS resulting in more single car crashes due to over- steering while braking.

[http://www.smartmotorist.com/traffic-and-safety- guideline/im...](http://www.smartmotorist.com/traffic-and-safety- guideline/improper-steering-endangers-drivers-with-abs.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER162> This is just the raw camera input. The question here is, what did the software see?

What did the sensors register? Is their system using an ultrasonic sensor? Did this detect anything? Commercial ultrasonic sensors can detect something at least 15' away. So the software could have at least slowed down to minimize the collision impact.

What did the LIDAR see? Did their software detect an object?

This accident happened on a clear night. There was no rain. There was no snow. The pedestrian crossed the street in a perfect 90 degree angle to the sidewalk. The pedestrian did not jaywalk and cross diagonally. The pedestrian even walked the bike across the road. Thus, the pedestrian performed a legal road crossing.

I don't think a human driver would have made this same mistake. When I drive on a dark road, I occasionally flash my high beams to ensure that there is no obstacle in front of me for hundreds of feet. That is how I, as a human, can safely determine that the road is clear for me to proceed.

What's on trial here, is the safety of the software system developed by Uber. And on this instance, their system failed, and a human died.

<comment><USER163> I believe this isn't even "input", it's just a dash cam. The data available to the car hasn't been released yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Someone recorded driving the same section of road at night using a cell phone camera and you can see how much better that camera reproduces the real-world visibility of the situation: [https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=26](https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=26)

That stretch of road was not particularly poorly lit, the pedestrian would have been abundantly visible to anyone paying attention, and it should have been picked up by the Uber vehicle's vision system as well, let alone their sensor suite.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the pedestrian that got hit has crossed at that area many times in the past. There is actually a pedestrian crossing on the median there, but it is purely decorative and posted with signage saying not to use it. However, the area has pretty good sight lines down the road and it does seem to be well lit, so a pedestrian who cavalierly crosses through traffic would likely nevertheless have a very low chance of getting hit.

</comment><comment><USER164> This reminds me of a Google story from two years ago.

"A Cyclist's Track Stand Befuddled One of Google's Self-Driving Cars"

[https://gizmodo.com/a-cyclists-track-stand-totally- befuddled...](https://gizmodo.com/a-cyclists-track-stand-totally-befuddled- one-of-googles-1727024285)

Perfect example of a corner case. I do NOT believe you can kind of be driving and so having a safety driver means little. The software has to be able to handle this type of situation or should not be on the road.

I get it was crazy for this lady to be in the middle of the road in complete darkness. But this is the EXACT situation you would have thought a SDC would perform far better then a human.

What is really needed is some way to replay this in data against others algorithms and see what they would do.

Love to see what Google would have done? I also worry in trying to keep up with Google these companies are doing very unsafe things. Uber would be far better off just using Google technology.

</comment><comment><USER165> I thought self driving cars had radar. How is this in any way excusable? This looks like it should have been trivial to detect and avoid.

</comment><comment><USER164> This video just reinforces you can NOT be kind of driving. Google has been pushing this point for awhile and I completely agree.

</comment><comment><USER166> Oh, come on, I think all these comments about Uber PR are way, way too harsh. Sure, the camera sensor might be making video appear darker than it actually was, and I'm surprised LIDAR didn't help, and sure something might and should be improved. But given the amount of accidents happening in a clear daylight in pretty damn obvious situations without any automatics whatsoever, purely because of humans — it's unfair to make a case of robot-auto unreliability out of it. I don't know what would be the chance of human driver hitting this girl, but I'm guessing high. If anything, the pedestrian _sure as hell should 've seen_ the car! Apparently though, she didn't. Why? Well, because.

The though of myself driving this car manually in this situation actually makes me feel scared. I _might_ would have been going slower… I _might_. Fuck, I'm actually panicking trying to imagine that.

<comment><USER167> As bad as they are, human drivers in the US have 1.25 fatalities every 100 million miles, across all road conditions and pedestrian behavior.

Uber just crossed the 2 million miles and it already has a fatality, where a competent driver could have, at the minimum, slow down by a few miles per hour to reduce the severity of the crash enough to result in an injury instead of death.

There's no excuse here. The Uber self driving car should not be anywhere near a public road, where children, the elderly, or distract people can be found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER168> IIRC, high-resolution thermal infrared cameras are ITAR controlled-- which means they are not available for consumer applications above an abysmal resolution (something like 320x280).

Public safety like this seems like a great impetus to do what was done for GPS, and declassify this crucial (and now really quite mature) technology for the general public.

<comment><USER169> You can easily buy a VGA FLIR camera in the US. They'll probably run your name through the denied-party list to make sure you don't have a history of diverting products to countries we don't like.

FLIR will sell you cryo-cooled cameras domestically as well.

[https://www.flir.com/browse/rd-and-science/high- performance-...](https://www.flir.com/browse/rd-and-science/high-performance- cameras/fixed-advanced-level-cameras/?page=2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER170> Based on the video, it took about 1.5 seconds from when the pedestrian came into view till the vehicle collided with them.

At 38 mph, a car is traveling about 56 feet/second. That means that the car traveled about 84 feet in that timeframe. VOL (Visual Aim on Left) headlamps are supposed to be aimed 2.1 inches below headlamp level at a distance of 25 feet [1]. If the headlamps on the vehicle were about 2 feet off the ground, then they should have been able to light up the roadway about 286 feet ahead.

Had the headlamps been aimed properly, then the driver could have seen the pedestrian about 5 seconds in advance. That would have given the driver about 1 second to react and 4 more seconds to slow down or change direction to avoid the collision.

[1] [http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/aim/aim.html](http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/aim/aim.html)

<comment><USER171> > they should have been able to light up the roadway about 286 feet ahead

But when that person was 286 feet away from the vehicle - she was also way off to its left. Headlights mostly light up what's ahead of you, not what's on your side. Unless I am missing something.

<comment><USER170> > Headlights mostly light up what's ahead of you, not what's on your side.

Good headlamps should have a uniform and widely distributed beam pattern which should be able to light up at least the lane of traffic you're in, as well as the shoulder and several lanes to the left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER172> Not to say there isn't a problem here... But walking across the street in dark clothes, without any light or reflectors, at a random spot does not seem like the best idea to me.

If I have a picknick on the train tracks and get hit by a train, maybe you should consider my stupid decision as well when evaluating the security of trains.

<comment><USER173> People don't expect trains to avoid them if they step on the rails.

Recently I almost got hit by an electrical scooter. Ambient noise was very low, and I relied on sound alone until very late, and saw it at the very last moment.

I've learned, and I won't rely on sound anymore. If cars occasionally don't react to them, people will learn too, and completely stop jaywalking in unclear situations. It will also cost many lives before everyone has had a chance to adapt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER174> It's incredible how bad the self-driving system failed in this instance; it's clear that any self-driving system (Uber or any other) -including any update/change to its software- should be audited by the government AND all major tech universities (e.g. MIT) before a single one of those cars go into the public streets.

</comment><comment><USER175> Wow, the pedestrian just walked onto the road without so much of a glance at the direction of incoming cars.

Sure, it's the car's responsibility to stop. But still--it's almost like the pedestrian didn't care at all. She never saw the car throughout the entire incident. She never saw it coming. She didn't cared to.

<comment><USER176> it's almost as if she has done this many times before and never been hit by cars being driven by real people

<comment><USER175> yes, that's why she should keep doing it and not expect anything to ever happen! Who cares? Not her. She doesn't care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Anyone here have expertise on the current state of law governing autonomous vehicles? I know AZ is supposed to be lax compared to California, so I wonder if there is any situation in which Uber could be at fault (besides a civil suit from victim's family)? Let's say that the car's LIDAR was indeed dysfunctional, or obviously inferior compared to the industry standard. It could be a hardware problem, or the software attached -- e.g. the Uber AV classified the victim as a large paper bag. What legal framework is there to assign fault to company/manufacturer in an accident like this, other than design/planning that is obviously malicious or grossly negligent?

In other words, is there any situation where Uber (or Waymo, etc) could be found legally at fault in a state like Arizona, no matter how badly their vehicle performs in an accident?

<comment><USER89> There's nothing in the tort or criminal justice system that prevents responsible parties from being held responsible for negligently causing the death of a person in the realm of self-driving cars. If Arizona prosecutors don't have enough for a case now, they might later after the NTSB investigation. No charges have been brought, so they could be brought up later.

I would suspect that the backup driver would bear the criminal responsibility for any collision the car got into. What the general consensus of the other HN commenters is that the driver could not have reacted better, though the LIDAR should have detected the woman.

In that case, the woman's family would have a strong wrongful death case against Uber.

(I'm not a lawyer)

<comment><USER55> What you wrote made me realize that regulations/laws about equipment/performance/computational standards would probably be managed at the federal level anyway (e.g. NHTSA). Though America is not necessarily the lead in autonomous travel, right? How far along are nations like Singapore and Germany in having legal frameworks for autonomous safety?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER177> Why is the backup human driver staring at the dashboard most of the time? Should he not be closely watching the road? It appears he lost a few valuable seconds right before the collision because his attention was diverted to the interior of the car rather than focussing that attention on the streets?

</comment><comment><USER178> Driver not looking at the road (as obvious in any automated vehicle).

Might be wrong, but it looks like either the headlights are not the maximum setting, or they are broken or the camera is underexposing the picture.

And complete software or hardware failure at detecting the obstacle.

Definitely not a combination that should be driving on public roads at night.

That said, the pedestrian is crossing outside of a crosswalk at night without looking at the road, so they are at fault as well.

Note however that obviously even a terrible driving system like this one is extremely more likely to hit an unattentive than an attentive pedestrian (and in fact even more than a good driver, who tend to have accidents due to more exceptional circumstances than "neither party was looking at the road"), so that doesn't excuse Uber's fault, and actually makes their position worse.

</comment><comment><USER179> I would hope self driving cars have better sensors. There are high dynamic range cameras that simultaneously take multiple exposures and composite them in real time. The dynamic range in this video is horrible. An HDR camera should have made her visible much sooner. Further why not use larger CMOS sensors, something like on a DSLR camera. Finally, the headlights appear fairly ineffective too. I would hope these cars are using Xenon headlights or something that does a much better job illuminating the road.

bi-xenon example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNjckOUEqWo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNjckOUEqWo)

HDR video at night example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyaSHGQc49s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyaSHGQc49s)

<comment><USER180> Xenon lights should be required on all new car sales. My new car has them and the difference is incredible. Not only can I see far more, but signage _really_ pops. I've noticed that they are also much easier to look at when approaching. It is an incredible safety feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER181> Whatever the outcome of this case, autonomous cars are not going away. That cat is already out of the bag.

As for this accident, I think in time it will be shown in time that while machines can make mistakes, they make fewer mistakes than humans. Six years ago I heard that CSX (a major rail line in the U.S.) was actively pursuing autonomous trains. I thought the idea was horrible, until the programmer working on the project informed me that machines guiding trains have been proven to make fewer mistakes than humans guiding trains. It keeps the human element of error out of the equation.

There is a certain amount of fear these events generate, but did you notice that the same level of media coverage was not given for the dozens of similar accidents that happened in the past 24 hours with non-autonomous vehicles?

<comment><USER104> > I think in time it will be shown in time that while machines can make > mistakes, they make fewer mistakes than humans.

This is religious thinking.

>There is a certain amount of fear these events generate, but did you notice that the same level of media coverage was not given for the dozens of similar accidents that happened in the past 24 hours with non-autonomous vehicles?

This is a known unethical company testing dangerous technology on public streets and killing someone. By the numbers Uber's self driving cars are far worse than human drivers when it comes to safety, and the video shows their autonomous system has serious issues. Why defend them?

If you're a fan of self-driving cars you should be slamming Uber, if anything is going to hurt the technology it's shitty companies playing fast and loose with their tech resulting in people's deaths.

<comment><USER181> > If you're a fan of self-driving cars

I'm actually not. I'm agnostic about the technology, and I don't care for Uber either for or against, and am not defending them nor am I interested in attacking them.

Just being realistic, looking at the big picture. Realistically speaking, this tech will be improved in time.

<comment><USER104> >nor am I interested in attacking them.

Why not?

<comment><USER181> I have better things to do with my time. My comment wasn't aimed at any one company. I think you misread my comments as fanboy cheering for autonomy by the whole point of my comment was centered around the fact that the technology cat is out of the bag. That's just reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER182> Uber shills and other defenders of straight up manslaughter by a machine (breaking first rule of robots), I thought it was the woman's fault and tooootaaallly not a failure on Uber's part. Hopefully this puts the final nail in the coffin of a terrible business. Sad someone had to die.

</comment><comment><USER183> That is one super dark patch, but lack of visible light shouldn't be a problem for IR?

And whether the human driver/observer could have reacted fast enough to prevent death is a question, but it would help if the human in the car had been looking out the window more than looking down at her? phone.

</comment><comment><USER184> What are the legal implications for the safety driver in this one? We don't have laws to protect self driving accidents right? So if the authorities determine that the "car" is at fault, would that mean the driver at the wheel be implicated?

</comment><comment><USER185> One thing that I haven't seen a whole lot of commenting on is how distracted the safety driver appears to be in the interior shots. He looks bored, and his attention seems to be directed everywhere _but_ the roadway.

This raises some serious concerns about the extent to which "safety drivers" actually increase the safety of self-driving car tests. If that's how they normally behave when a car's in self-driving mode, then it seems to me more like they are creating a false sense of security that mostly just serves to make the public feel better about the risk of half-baked self-driving equipment being tested on the public roadways.

</comment><comment><USER186> Something that tickles my brain since yesterday: are their obstacle detection systems active or passive? In other words, do they emit IR to illuminate nearby obstacles or they rather rely exclusively on visible light projectors on board and street lights? I ask because emitting IR would likely interfere or even blind speed cameras (which use IR themselves to take night photos), so I expect this to be either forbidden or strictly regulated. Which brings me to the question: if it uses IR, and therefore detects it, could a speed camera IR beam, or any other IR device, in vicinity have interfered with that car obstacle detection?

</comment><comment><USER187> That is utterly terrible. The car should have reacted to the pedestrian comfortably. I think something in the change in lighting confused the sensors (the road appears to go from having street lights to not having them at the point of contact).

<comment><USER31> I would have thought that it should be irrelevant if the street lights are there or not with LIDAR.

<comment><USER187> Not if the algo is making statistical inferences from a visual input as well. I feel it may have clouded the "perception" of what was actually there.

<comment><USER31> Then it's clearly not safe to be on the road at night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER177> Timeline:

00:03 - The feet of the pedestrian are visible

00:04 - The entire body of the pedestrian is visible

00:05 - Collision occurs

If we assume that the computer only had this video as input, then the computer only had 2 seconds to avoid the collision. That would be unavoidable for the computer. But the fact that there was no sign of slowing down or braking in these 2 seconds is pretty alarming.

But it sounds unlikely that this video was the only input to the computer. Did the car have multiple cameras to "see" bright as well as dark objects at night? I would imagine that a self-driving car driving at night would use multiple cameras (tuned to various level of brightness) so that the car can match human level vision?

<comment><USER188> > the computer only had 2 seconds to avoid the collision. That would be > unavoidable for the computer.

At the time of the accident, the car was traveling about 40mph. A Volvo XC90 is capable of braking from 60mph to zero in about 2 seconds.

[https://www.autoevolution.com/news/2016-range-rover-sport- fa...](https://www.autoevolution.com/news/2016-range-rover-sport-fails- braking-test-falls-way-behind-volvo-xc90-audi-q7-video-99010.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER189> Here is a YouTube URL for anyone like me who cannot seem to make Twitter videos work with adblockers.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuo8eq9C3Ec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuo8eq9C3Ec)

</comment><comment><USER190> Questions to be answered about a specific accident (not about whether we should have autonomous cars at all):

Who is legally at fault?

Would an average human driver have avoided/lessened this accident?

Should the car have reasonably performed better?

</comment><comment><USER191> Is the video slowed down? Also they need to release a better quality. If I was behind that wheel, I don't think I would've seen that lady to be quite honest. The place where the lady was crossing the road was under a shadow of nearby trees or buildings. If one is going to cross a road like this, they should at least use a well lit part of the road. Also, why did she have her back turned to the traffic if she is jaywalking on such a big road. Very poor decisions on her part. I am willing to bet Uber gets out scot-free with this one, and rightly so.

<comment><USER192> 1) I wouldn't be surprised if that is the "best quality" they have.

2) I also suspect that human eyeballs would have a different view of the light/dark portions of what's depicted there, and especially eyeballs would have probably had a much higher chance of detecting movement in peripheral vision than that video gives any hint of.

<comment><USER193> I expect the original was probably much better quality. Twitter's video compression is terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER194> The video is very damning. Either a problem of camera contrast or a big bug. And having a backup human driver is useless.

There is a terrible ethical dilemma here. Humans are currently at a a death rate of about 1 per 10^8 (hundred million) miles travelled. Waymo, which is best in class, is at 1 human engagement every 5,000 miles as per California data. Of course, most of those were likely minor. But there are more than 4 orders of magnitude there to allow for plenty of surplus dead people. These things shouldn't be on the streets!

</comment><comment><USER195> It looks like Uber is hiring irresponsible homeless people to save $$. It is hard to say if I would have seen her, I am accident free driving for 63 years, however, when I drive, my eyes are on the road, I do not doze off or look at accidents I pass, so I would have slowed dramatically, and possibly stopped. Some frame by frame analysis versus time/velocity etc should answer some questions. LIDAR does not depend on full spectrum light, and should have seen the woman, although the frame is mostly open space?

</comment><comment><USER196> The interior shot seems to support the idea that it is not feasible for semi- autonomous systems to rely on an alert human monitor to handle the difficult bits. Passive alertness is not a human trait.

</comment><comment><USER197> Whats the point of a safety driver who's eyes are not on the road? Pretty easy to monitor if the safety driver is paying attention or looking down every second like this safety driver was.

</comment><comment><USER198> 1\. What a clear failure for self-driving/collision avoidance technology, especially in conditions (night time) that we've been told are much better for machines to "see" in.

2\. "safety driver" useless if he's distracted. what's the point if he's not actively engaged?

3\. Video comes from what? Is this raw video from the cheapest chinese dashcam uber found on the shelf and slapped into the system so they can get ahead of the story and plausibly deny in certain situations?

</comment><comment><USER199> I'm surprised the footage looks so bad, I wonder if it was altered to look darker to help lessen Uber responsibility.

Is there a technical way to check if some video filters were applied?

</comment><comment><USER200> oof. As a motorcycle rider Looking at the video is hard. Im always vigilant but sadly, I'd probably have plowed right through the woman. The street lights seem to do absolutely nothing.

People are unpredictable...however this kind of crossing feels familiar. In Los Angeles we have transients that are known to wander through 5 lanes of empty street at 5 AM with impunity. Ive been hard-stopped by wagon trails of shopping carts laden with old rags and garbage, being pulled by an elderly sisyphean figure cloaked in old comforters and tarpaulins. Ive also had the unfortunate luck to see a garbage truck plow through a stolen utility cart from Home Depot, conveniently parked by a homeless woman in the center of an off ramp as she was engaged in a furious battle with unseen forces under an adjacent bridge.

Transients are also struck and killed on our highways almost semi annually. not to mention the occasional car-through-a-homeless-camp [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/los-angeles-homeless-camp- hit-c...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/los-angeles-homeless-camp-hit-car- jumped-california-freeway/)

My point is, its easy to sensationalize a computers miscalculation. Humans in control may have also made this mistake.

<comment><USER31> And yet you didn't make that mistake when you were in a very similar situation.

I don't think I would have hit that lady pushing the bike. If I saw her slowly meandering into the left lane like that, I would have slowed down. The car just plowed ahead at full speed. In fact, it plowed ahead, at night, at 3mph _over_ the speed limit.

I've seen my own dashcam videos that look very similar to that, and in reality things are much more visible than what the dashcam shows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER201> State of the art emergency assist systems in normal driver-operated cars would have seen this woman/bike and started to brake the vehicle. Even without any assist systems, it should be possible for a human driver to see this bike/woman. It was dark, but otherwise conditions were excellent.

I would suppose that sensory capabilities of a driverless vehicles are above those of normal cars. There is clearly something very wrong with uber's technology.

<comment><USER202> And due to human vision being better than a dashcam, this car's emergency- assist system, the safety driver, could probably have caught this as well, if they had paid attention to the road.

Which is something that that production-grade technology can ensure with head and eye-tracking. Some non-autonomous cars have this feature to stop people from dozing off, and good semi-autonomous systems, like GM's SuperCruise will refuse to go into or stay in self-driving mode unless the driver is paying attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER203> We're still in the early days on this, but given this video it appears that there was a hazard in the road that should have been detectable by a road safe system. In this case, the system failed to recognize a person, and they're dead.

I'm not a legal expert, but it seems plausible that this isn't going to be just a sad tragedy with no one at fault - in the near future we could see actions such as negligent homicide charges.

</comment><comment><USER204> For reference, here is a marketing video of Ford self driving at night: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/business/technology/pro...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/business/technology/project- nightonomy-ford-tests-autonomous-car-in-pitch- black/2016/04/11/ba00def0-ffe8-11e5-8bb1-f124a43f84dc_video.html?utm_term=.7a524de367b1)

</comment><comment><USER142> You can see the human driver taking her eyes off the phone and immediately recognize the situation.

Yet I see no hard deceleration. This would have to be immediately visible as it would jerk the driver forward from her seating position, yet you can't see this happening.

I understand that once the pedestrian came into the light cone, the computer should have reacted almost instantly to a very obvious threat situation, yet I see nothing.

</comment><comment><USER205> 2+ seconds from the time you first see the person on this really crappy video is enough time for a human to react and a car to stop from 35mph. I don't blame the driver. Trying to stay alert for hours just for an incident like this is impossible and futile. I do blame Uber's shitty tech. Even this low- res camera sees the person in time and yet it never even applies the brakes from what I can see.

This should have been avoided.

</comment><comment><USER206> I really hope this will be looked at professionally and unbiased. The initial statement of the police sounded anything but. If they looked at the same evidence as we do now, it would indicate a severe lack of understanding of the difference between camera pictures and human vision. Plus, who spread the rumor on the very first day that the victim was a homeless person? What does that have to do with anything?

</comment><comment><USER207> The automotive cameras that I have worked on seemed to have a better low-light performance than this video suggests.

Some of the more recent OmniVision focal plane arrays (imagers) are really very good in low light conditions (for the price).

Of course, it is difficult to tell without a side-by-side comparison, but I would have thought that the equipment could/should have been better than this.

Who was the supplier of this camera?

</comment><comment><USER208> A lot of comentors are talking about the differences between the eye and a sensor. Here is a brief overview of those differences with references at the bottom: [https://medium.com/photography-secrets/whats-the- difference-...](https://medium.com/photography-secrets/whats-the-difference- between-a-camera-and-a-human-eye-a006a795b09f)

<comment><USER89> I didn't see anything about light adjustment time in that article. Can the human eye adjust between high and low light conditions faster than a camera?

<comment><USER208> The article talks about that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER209> The quality of the video is completely unrelated. The car should have stopped. It's as simple as that. This is night self-driving mode 101.

</comment><comment><USER210> I realize the self-driving/lidar/AI/IR is more interesting to the HN audience but what about the pedestrian? How can the pedestrian not see, anticipate and react to a 4000 pound SUV, on the road (where cars normally are), with headlights (I assume they were on), driving right towards her?

Did the pedestrian not look both ways? The pedestrian could have easily gone to the crosswalk, waited a few seconds for the car to pass and then jay- walked, at least stopped in the left lane when they realized the car wasn't slowing down, hurried to get across, or something.

Based on the video it looks like the pedestrian was just as clueless as the "driver", only looking up in surprise at the last second and making no move to avoid the collision. Maybe it sounds cruel blaming the person that died but they certainly played the largest part in their death.

I am making no excuse for Uber, I know nothing about self driving cars or the tech behind them. But come on- how can a 150 pounds person walk into the middle of a road without making any effort to check for their own safety? It seems similar to stories of people wearing headphones and walking down the middle of a train track.

As a 200 pound ball of squishy flesh and my life on the line, I feel it is my job to be very aware, very cautious, very careful when entering the domain of 2 ton speeding metal objects, especially in the dark.

</comment><comment><USER32> With all the logged sensor data this should be the best documented fatal collision in history and will be able to be replayed again and again with different software to see if it was avoidable with the current hardware configuration.

Obviously a sad situation, but it's reassuring that the knowledge from one crash can lead to all other autonomous vehicles learning to avoid it in the future.

</comment><comment> kyle-rb I'd be really interested to know if there have been any 'close calls' before now, where a similar malfunction occurred, but the human driver caught it in time and manually hit the brakes. Not that I blame this driver; I just think that any incident where the human driver had to take control to avoid an accident is really just as bad as this.

</comment><comment><USER211> I sure couldn't have reacted quickly enough to have prevented this collision. I'd expect the car to have better reflexes then I do, but given the little time from when the pedestrian first showed up on camera and the time when the collision occurred, I doubt that there was anything that the car could have done, regardless of the sophistication of its software.

<comment><USER39> An autonomous vehicle obviously shouldn't exceed a speed where it's stopping distance exceeds it's vision capabilities, since next time it might as well be a tree trunk. That's sometimes difficult for humans to gauge, but then we want autonomous cars so they can make these calculations (and they are much better equipped to).

<comment><USER212> That's a good point. But in this situation I think we'd probably find that the driver wasn't at fault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER213> I'm more than a little disappointed to see the victim walked all the way across the left-side lane, unnoticed, before being struck. While the monitor appeared to be more interested in her phone, or whatever she was continually looking down at, instead of keeping an eye on the road and vehicle performance which I imagine was what she was being payed to do

</comment><comment><USER214> A human driver would have braked and swerved left into the other lane; there was obviously no oncoming traffic.

A human driver would have seen the woman much better than this camera footage makes out.

The Uber attendant was sadly not paying attention, which is going to look very bad for the self-driving car industry, even if it is very hard to ask humans to pay attention and do nothing.

</comment><comment><USER215> Does anybody really think its a good idea for Lyft, Uber, Tesla etc to develop safety systems for the open roads separately in isolation? Who benefits from that?!

I'll bet a Tesla would not have run this person over. This is where the Government should step in and force all of these AV manufacturers to implement a common safety system / protocol.

</comment><comment><USER216> As expected, when there's a death, there will be overreaction. I'm surprised the Hacker News crowd is part of it.

</comment><comment><USER217> Ethical question for HN...

Certainly, some team of engineers is tasked with analyzing the cause of this failure and providing potential solutions for future releases. What is the best way to do this without trivializing the fact that a human life was lost? Does anyone have experience with analyzing the aftermath of some event which caused death?

</comment><comment><USER218> It would be really good to have the IR camera recording as well as the internal state of the model that drives the car.

</comment><comment><USER219> I dont know exactly how autonomous cars works, but is it possible there was a warning (beep) before the system tries to stop the car, She got confused, hits the accelerator, disabling the system, and hits the pedestrian by accident? How autonomous cars decide when there is an obvious obstacle and the driver hits the accelerator?

</comment><comment><USER220> Anyone have a mirror? I can't play videos on twitter for some reason.

Mirror: [https://streamable.com/vllgl](https://streamable.com/vllgl)

She wasn't wearing anything visible at a pitch black street at night. It seems like there was about 7 meters before her shoes were even visible.

</comment><comment><USER221> Relevant from a few weeks back:[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe- drive/culture/technolo...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe- drive/culture/technology/the-ethical-dilemmas-of-self- drivingcars/article37803470/)

</comment><comment><USER222> This thread is a case study on the Dunning–Kruger effect. I hope a lot of self reflection occurs once the actual studies and, you know, facts get around about human vision, peripheral perception, low light peripheral perception, reaction times, pedestrian fatality statistics, this accident...

</comment><comment><USER223> I wonder how the Uber engineering team is feeling. I've had bugs in my code, but they've never killed anyone.

I guess the feeling may depend on how rushed vs. well-tested they feel their software is. But no amount of "I told you it wasn't ready" is going to repair the psychological damage.

</comment><comment><USER224> The real problem here is not that the tech is imperfect, I'd actually expect it to be imperfect given it's not been even a decade for this tech. The real problem is that this imperfect tech is on public roads. How do they even get the permission to test drive on public roads?

</comment><comment><USER225> I remain curious about the set of detection mechanisms in place - if this video is the only one, I'd say Uber is culpable (of course it's not the only one), and if it's not the only detection mechanism, then where's the data from the others?

Another note: I haven't heard criticism about the driver's inattention...

<comment><USER125> I think the inattention is just expected now. If you have to do absolutely nothing 99.99% of the time, then it just doesn't seem possible to constantly focus on the road. At least if you are driving down an empty highway you still have to hold the wheel and press the accelerator. For this reason, I think level 0 systems ("may momentarily intervene but has no sustained vehicle control") hold much more promise for the near future (next decade or two), and I wish there was more focus on getting these systems widely deployed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER226> Did the vehicle have high beams enabled?

<comment><USER118> I certainly wouldn't have high beams on here. It's a lit road and it seems to be in the city, so you'd likely be encountering other cars often enough that you'd spend more time turning the high beams on and off than you would controlling the speed and direction of your vehicle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER227> What happens when the human grabs the wheel? Is it possible the car could/would have stopped, or reduced the danger to the pedestrian, but the human actually overrode any emergency corrective measure the car would have taken? Did the human prevent the car from working as intended?

</comment><comment><USER228> If the autonomobile was speeding... it is very definitely at fault.

And given that it's Uber we can expect that there's an email chain where a programmer is told to ignore the map layer with speed limits on it.

I hope the prosecutor (best case) or plaintiffs lawyer (worst case) finds it and makes Uber suffer.

</comment><comment><USER229> It's very disingenuous to release this video. This is not the picture the car saw nor the human. That coupled with the fact that no radar or lidar data was released makes me wonder why the police seem to be bending over backwards to absolve Uber.

<comment><USER93> Police are nearly always primarily motorists and therefore biased to the motorist perspective.

<comment><USER230> Police are also nearly always pedestrians, so what?

<comment><USER65> Baloney. In most USA cities the vast majority of police officers on patrol are in radio motor patrol cars, not footposts. Are you even from the USA? Or is there a city that is an exception?

Or are you repeating the trite idea that all motorists are also pedestrians because they have to walk a few feet in a parking lot or driveway at the start and end of their trip? That is ridiculous if so -- travelling a few feet in a parking lot, a place designed to be safe for pedestrians, is very different from having no choice but to walk miles of dangerous high speed roads like the one in question today because it's the only way to get home

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER231> Watching someone die, and then watching someone else watch the same person die is really hallowing.

</comment><comment><USER232> It'd be nice if some telemetry came out, when the car started to brake, steering inputs, etc.

<comment><USER31> Even the police already reported that the car did not brake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER233> Yea that video pretty much sums it up. The car is definitely the proximate cause. If I were handling the claim I would go 90% liability to the car for driver inattention and careless negligence and 10% to the pedestrian for jaywalking.

</comment><comment><USER234> I have to wonder if HID headlights contributed to this problem as well. The headlights have such a sharp, defined "edge". The woman was not visible until she was within the bright portion of the lights (which isn't very big).

</comment><comment><USER30> While this may be unfair - but LISTEN UP REGULATORS: IT's time to have standardized tests for SDVs before they are allowed to be considered road ready. And I hate to say this, but WAYMO is the company to design the test suite.

</comment><comment><USER235> I don't think Uber with their "Hustlin'" culture should be allowed to run field tests that may endanger human lives. We simply cannot "move fast and break things" when it comes to self-driving vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER236> What about the logs? Do companies like AppDynamics, Datadog support self- driving cars yet? Any companies out there providing a platform to do this? So important for debugging, auditing, compliance, legal, etc.

</comment><comment><USER237> I'm waiting for the 'grassroots' campaign to get every human and dog to wear locator beacons to make them easier to spot by self driving cars.

Maybe Cambridge Analytica is already working up a facebook campaign for it.

</comment><comment><USER238> I passed there tonight, the place is incredibly well lit and the person was probably visible from before the underpass, and probably visible the entire time she was on the road because of the geometry of the curve.

</comment><comment><USER239> Elaine Herzberg probably casually jaywalked previously but human driver slowed.this time she got surprised by robot killer that violated asimovs 1st law. Safe av's are coming but why so impatient?

</comment><comment><USER240> Wow, this is inexcusable. I hope Uber is found liable for this death. Someone walking across the road at night? That is literally the first test case I would add if I were building a self-driving car AI.

</comment><comment><USER241> If anyone is wondering how to avoid accidents like these while YOU are driving - look for shadows. You may not see someone wearing dark clothes, but you can see the shadow they project change as you move.

</comment><comment><USER242> Hmmmmm... looks like something went wrong with object detection in the dark.

</comment><comment><USER243> It's completely predictable that the human driver would stop paying attention, which is what makes these "semi-autonomous" systems worse than systems that aren't at all autonomous.

</comment><comment><USER244> There are a lot of questions around the vision side of this, but I have slightly different question, the answer which probably points to greater systemic issue in the overall solution.

Why is a car, the speed of which is regulated by the autonomous driving system, breaking the legal speed limit?

Even accounting for errors/accuracy of odometers/speed cameras, this car was traveling at a speed in excess of the legal speed limit for that section of road, increasing both all the underlying risks of operating a 1-2t motor vehicle at 60+km/hr, and the material impacts from those risks.

In a relatively new technology, why is the decision to trade safety for speed being made?

In any technology where safety (and ultimately human life) is concerned, why are we testing in production?

</comment><comment><USER245> This almost leads me to believe the LIDAR part doesn't even work...

</comment><comment><USER246> Driver was obviously on cell phone.

Since this is still in development, Uber should have assumed that the self driving software _would_ fail unexpectedly.

If a human sees something work 1000 times, they will expect it to work every time. Uber should have anticipated overconfidence in the software. They should have coached the driver on this. They should have reviewed footage of safety drivers to ensure that safety drivers are complying with instruction.

This was not an accident. This was carelessness. I blame Uber. Uber's "just get it done" cultural attitude is incompatible with developing safe self- driving software. There's a reason that Google, with 10X the number of miles on the road, have not killed anyone.

</comment><comment><USER247> Is it me or does it seem the safety driver is on their mobile phone?

</comment><comment><USER248> Obviously a "hello, world" failure of self-driving.

I wouldn't blame a human for not seeing that person, but better should be expected of the tech.

However:

* there doesn't appear to be a single reflective device on the bike. For instance, the usual spoke-mounted reflectors that are stock equipment on even low-end bikes do not seem to be there.

* the woman seems completely oblivious to the car's approach. She doesn't react at all but keeps casually walking with the bike right until the moment of impact. She mustn't be looking in the direction of traffic at all and is mowed down completely by surprise, like someone sucker-punched in a bar. (Was this someone with disabilities? Visual or hearing impairment? Developmental?)

* I think here is the road where this took place: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-111.9415554,3a,60...](https://email@example.com,-111.9415554,3a,60y,323.19h,90t/data=!3m9!1e1!3m7!1sOJwMRRXHT2K5i9cHVvrmkA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!9m2!1b1!2i38) The scene of the accident is a little bit forward of here. Utterly not a place to be crossing at night in a way that is completely oblivious to the presence of vehicles and far away from the intersection. Note that this is a one-way double lane; there is only one direction in which to look out for cars.

This kind of badly behaved, suicidal pedestrian is a challenge to drivers even in daylight. However, you would expect precisely this sort of situation to be among the highest priority test cases for self-driving tech.

BTW: here is a shot of a sign forbidding pedestrians from crossing at almost that exact spot: [https://email@example.com,-111.9424451,3a,15...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-111.9424451,3a,15y,181.71h,83.76t/data=!3m9!1e1!3m7!1s4fS1O8O3KI3F7Tw5Mip- ww!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!9m2!1b1!2i19) She wouldn't have seen that one because she probably crossed the other lane already; she's coming from the median. How did this person live to 49?

<comment><USER249> Jesus Christ, show some decorum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER250> Would love to see the log files of the car to see why and how this occurred. I'm pretty sure it's known internally - but is Uber obligated to release them for the public?

</comment><comment><USER251> The bicycle is visible in the video during 0:01/0:22. The glint of the reflector appears when there are two full white divider lines between the camera and the victim.

</comment><comment><USER252> Did anybody else think that the human operator in the driver's seat, should always be looking in the front, than being distracted by looking down or below ?

</comment><comment><USER253> Volvo's pedestrian detection works exactly for these cases, and it's exactly these cases that have been hailed as cases where AI will be better.

</comment><comment><USER254> It looks to me that the car's lights are too low. Probably if you are not 100% driving you don't feel like you need to adjust the lights.

</comment><comment><USER255> Why did the pedestrian walk into the traffic? She should have seen the car. Probably she got used that the cars stop to let her cross the street.

</comment><comment><USER256> I knew the woman was coming up in the video and I didn't see her until it would have been too late.

The driver definitely seemed distracted by a device of some kind.

<comment><USER242> That's only because there's no light on her until the end.

The car hardware should have seen her. If it doesn't work in the dark it shouldn't be on the road imho.

<comment><USER256> > That's only because there's no light on her until the end.

Yes, quiet true.

> The car hardware should have seen her. If it doesn't work in the dark it > shouldn't be on the road imho.

I tend to agree. I think unfortunately this video indicates that the car did not perform _worse_ than a human. It's still valuable to have cars that perform _better_ than humans, even if they aren't perfect.

<comment><USER242> What do you think based on this video:

[https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/976591851384745984?...](https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/976591851384745984?s=21)

The woman with the bike wasn't moving fast at all. I dunno...

<comment><USER257> Even in that over-exposed video, at 35mph, I think you would have to be extremely lucky to not hit her. From her coming into view to collision is ~700ms. Subtract average human reaction time (250ms), and that leaves a little less than half a second to swerve.

A human would have made this mistake, but I don't know enough about LIDAR to understand if a computer should have made this mistake. Is night vision poor on these machines?

<comment><USER258> Then slow down. If you can't stop or swerve when something becomes visible to you then you're driving too fast regardless of the posted speed limit. Period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER259> Just curious: How many times has an Uber car hit a pedestrian or cyclist and NOT killed him/her? Can we see footage from those accidents?

</comment><comment><USER260> Setting aside the fault of the vehicle in this case, why didn't she get out of the way? Would she not have seen the car coming at 38 MPH?

<comment><USER261> The report said she was homeless, it's possible she was ill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER262> That look of horror on the driver's face... I can't say a human driver would have managed to stop or swerve any quicker either.

<comment><USER243> Uh, really? You don't think a human driver could have taken _any_ corrective action if they were paying attention to the road? The risk I see with these semi-autonomous systems is precisely that they invite the sort of inattention seen here. The brakes, at least, should have been applied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER155> The way I see it is that this fatality was a calculated risk for Uber. Uber realizes how much Waymo is ahead of them and decides to drop too many safety restraints in development of the self-driving technology.

The fatality is likely not cause big direct loses to Uber. Any safety regulations coming out of the result are going to hit Waymo just as much as Uber, slow them down and give uber time to catch up. Any financial fine would be tiny comparing to total money invested in self driving technology.

</comment><comment><USER263> Well, obviously something did not work properly. There is log data about this incident? The problem can be "debugged"?

</comment><comment><USER264> Is that the crappy video the car uses, too?

Looks so low-res and like they added contrast until you really can't see the person any more.

</comment><comment><USER265> I drive an VW with a pedestrian emergency brake system that is made for these situations. I wonder if it would have worked

</comment><comment><USER266> There is I think a broader legal/philosophical question here:

Are we to judge the car's ability to avoid the pedestrian on human standards or AI/machine standards?

From the video, it looked like this could be a situation where a human driver cannot avoid the accident (due to poor light, not enough reaction time etc) but a machine should be able to avoid it with it having multiple cameras, IR sight, and much faster processing speed.

Greater power comes with greater responsibility?

</comment><comment><USER267> Why is the resolution so low?

Why is the FPS so low?

Why don't we see the IR/LIDAR footage?

Was the brightness adjusted after the fact to look favourably?

Why didn't the vehicle issue a full stop once the woman was clearly visible?

I feel PR handled.

<comment><USER268> My guess would be that this is an off-the-shelf dashcam, completely independent from the self-driving cameras and sensors. Being an off-the-shelf dashcam means extracting and publishing the video from it is easy, which is why it came out first. It also explains why it has video from inside the car; many off-the-shelf dashcam models have both a forward-facing and a backwards- facing camera.

Personally, I'm more annoyed at the blurring of the telemetry data at the bottom of the video. What was blurred probably included the dashcam model, date/time, GPS coordinates, calculated speed, and so on.

The output from the other sensors might take more work to extract and convert into an understandable form, if they are even available after the fact; they might be immediately used in the control loop and then discarded, instead of being stored.

<comment><USER269> This makes the most sense. It's probably a redundant system: off the shelf dash cam not connected to anything but power. The police could easily extract the sdcard.

The actual car data will need to be collected and released by the NTSB and will probably come in a few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER270> Makes me wonder if the lady was riding her bike in the lane if she still would've got plastered by the robocar?

</comment><comment><USER271> How do we know that this footage hasn't been artificially darkened by Uber before they gave it to police?

<comment><USER43> It essentially is. Even with that crappy autoexposure, she would probably be visible if the resolution and framerate wasn't terrible, and the compression hadn't taken out whatever detail remained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> I feel sorry for the driver. Now his face is plastered all over the internet forever simply for doing his job.

</comment><comment><USER272> Why was the car speeding? Doing 38 mph in a 35 mph zone. Are these things programmed to systematically speed?

<comment><USER273> It was a 45 mph zone. The poice statement was wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER274> "There is no such thing as an accident. Only negligence."

This was no accident. The jaywalker was negligent for crossing the street as she did.

Uber is negligent for not having autonomous vehicle standards that clearly exceed what humans can do (I don't think a human could have avoided her based on the video).

Not sure about the driver. Depends on his training/job etc...

<comment><USER275> The 'safety driver' wasn't even looking out the windscreen. If your job is to act as a backup for an untrusted system, you are responsible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER276> I do wonder if perhaps Uber made the video darker before releasing. Or used a camera that is not the main sensing camera. Because I would hope the cars are smart enough to increase ISO to get more detail at night time.

<comment><USER277> 1) It does NOT show what the LIDAR sees.

2) They should be using a dark adapted / night vision camera and probably are, the video feed presented is just that, the best one that "presents".

3) They should be using thermal infrared to spot living things

4) They were severely over driving their headlights if what we are seeing is "reality" as seen by the onboard computer.

I want to know how much access to the hardware Uber had after the accident, including physical and remote. I also want to see the streaming logs and full provenance.

<comment><USER278> It's Arizona. I just checked. The high today was 92F. Pavement would almost certainly be warmer than that. How's a thermal camera supposed to detect 98F on a background that is proably +/\- 5 degrees of that?

<comment><USER279> > The high today was 92F.

Probably not relevant to conditions at 10pm on Monday, when it was between 70F and 57F (the range for 6pm Monday to 12am Tuesday.)

> Pavement would almost certainly be warmer than that.

Sure, when it was 92F the pavement would probably be 140+F.

> How's a thermal camera supposed to detect 98F on a background that is > proably +/\- 5 degrees of that?

At night, the pavement would be much cooler than a human; at the high temperature you report, it would probably be much hotter; there's a place in between where the problem you have would be occur, sure, but it's neither at the high nor, more to the point, in the conditions when the accident occurred.

<comment><USER278> So, if the asphalt is 140F when it's 92F, what's it when it's 65? About 100?

<comment><USER280> The reason why it's so hot is because of radiated heat from the sun. It'd be much closer to air temp at 10 pm, well after sunset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER281> What no one seems to be talking about is that a person was walking their bike across a divided 4 lane road that in many places would be called a highway. This is not a pedestrian friendly crosswalk, and it's not high noon.

You can tell by the tail lights of the car in front (first second of video) that a pedestrian would be able to see a car coming.

Which begs the question - why did the human step out in front of the car? Is there culpability there, too? If a person intentionally puts themselves into a deadly situation, how should AI handle this?

We're all looking at the cars, but let's keep in mind that crossing a dark divided highway in front of a car you can see coming is a really really bad idea.

<comment><USER282> You make an interesting point regarding responsibility. Say that person were:

\- Mentally deficient.

\- A child suddenly running because thats what children do.

\- A blind person making a mistake.

There are countries where if a pedestrian is crossing the road anywhere that isn't a designated crossing zone, then they are responsible for their fate.

In Canada and the USA, I believe that pedestrians "always" have right of way and drivers are supposed to be as vigilant as possible.

Of course, some pedestrians take this to heart and suicidally jump onto a road. In the US, this is more prevalent in walkable cities and college towns.

<comment><USER283> Pedestrians do not always have the right of way.

However, drivers must avoid collisions with pedestrians, even when the vehicle has right of way.

Here's the relevant vehicle code in Arizona: [https://www.azleg.gov/ars/28/00793.htm](https://www.azleg.gov/ars/28/00793.htm) [https://www.azleg.gov/ars/28/00794.htm](https://www.azleg.gov/ars/28/00794.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER284> Is it me or the street lighting is beyond mediocre? It is weak and alternate between a "lighted" portion and a literally black portion.

But even then, the driver was busy with his cellphone. The accident might have happened nevertheless due to bad lighting. But this could have been avoided was the driver on alert.

<comment><USER285> Coming from Europe, I've been surprised as how many places in the US that don't have streetlights at all. Driving between Maryland and Virginia, there are 4-lane highways that are _completely_ dark for long stretches at a time. I'm assuming this is a money-saving concern, since the US has such a huge amount of area to cover.

Back in many native, smaller habitat, I've only rarely encountered this kind of darkness, and it's usually on small, isolated country roads. When I got my license, my instructor's company had a special spot, an hour outside the city, where they always went to for dark driving lessons, because almost all of the road network is (exceedingly well) illuminated.

<comment><USER286> I prefer the situation of no lights other than headlights.

I'm from Maryland, and my neighborhood is off a country road with a single streetlight at the head of the neighborhood. If the weather is doing anything (fog, rain, snow) even a little bit then it's completely awful to drive through that intersection.

If the light didn't exist, I could keep my vision adaptation the same before / during / after, and could compensate for inclement weather the whole time. As- is, I go from very-dark to bright-light and back to very-dark over a hundred feet or so, and it makes it very hard to adapt safely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER287> Is it me or the car seems to steer slightly to the right, just before the impact ?

</comment><comment><USER288> Hereby I'd like to name this as "Jack-in-the-box" test case for self driving cars. No self-driving car should be allowed on road unless it can detect and avoid collision with person literally popping up out of ground at 20ft of distance while driving at 40mph in total darkness.

</comment><comment><USER258> Never outrun your headlights should be a rule for self driving vehicles as well.

</comment><comment><USER289> Wow... This is REALLY bad for self driving cars. HOW did it not catch this? I'm a huge proponent of self driving cars, but I'm shocked that the car literally did NOTHING to avoid her. I know for a fact, I would have seen and potentially swerved (at least slammed on the breaks).

</comment><comment><USER290> Alternate systems perform way better. Granted this is broad day light.

</comment><comment><USER291> Seems like Uber is using pretty bad radars, software and drivers.

<comment><USER167> And management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER292> So, Uber self driving cars also have humans operating them?

</comment><comment><USER293> Driver wasn't even paying attention to the road.

</comment><comment><USER212> She crossed at a spot that was pitch black. Sneakers come into view maybe 40 feet away. Clearly visible at 20. Is that enough time to stop at that speed? Not sure I would have stopped in time.

<comment><USER40> You don't need to stop. Slowing from 40 to 30mph decreases the fatality rate by an order of magnitude. Maybe the car shouldn't have been going above the speed limit if the conditions were so poor that it couldn't plausibly see humans walking right in front of it.

<comment><USER118> That's an argument intended only to shift blame and distract. The car was going 38 in a 35 which is well within the legal margin of error on a speedometer[1]. For all we know, the speedometer read exactly 35.

There's enough blame to go around between the driver who was obviously texting and the woman illegally jaywalking, you don't need to invent a false controversy.

[1] [https://www.caranddriver.com/features/speedometer- scandal](https://www.caranddriver.com/features/speedometer-scandal)

<comment><USER50> I recall reading that the speed guns where I am from have a tolerance of 5 km/h or 5%, whichever is greater.

3 mph is beyond the margin for error, you'd get fined for driving that quickly.

<comment><USER118> I mean... I even provided a source and everything. And you threw that all away with a glib "nah I read somewhere that you're wrong".

Please read the link. I may still be wrong, but by my math, the car was a Volvo XC90 which means the acceptable margin of error on the speedometer is +/\- 3 miles per hour.

<comment><USER50> Our points are complementary. The errors of the speedometer and the error of speed gun may add up.

The police will take off 5 km/h on the recorded speed, when editing the fine. That's supposed to cover the margin for error.

You're out of luck if your car meter is 5 km/h off and you were trying to drive at the speed limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER294> streamable mirror: [https://streamable.com/vr5j6](https://streamable.com/vr5j6)

</comment><comment><USER295> I don't know if I would have seen her either.

</comment><comment><USER296> bottom line was that the person hit was crossing in the middle of the street (jay walking), so they are to blame for the accident not the car. while the technology _should have_ seen them, i don't blame it. this is essentially the same as someone breaking into your house, getting hurt and you getting sued. the person is breaking the law, yet you're to blame... that wouldn't be fair to you, so it isn't fair to blame the car in this incident.

</comment><comment><USER129> Focusing on the car-automation and driver may be missing the point in this scenario.

@jedweeks: Nearly 2 miles between crosswalks, that's why. Street was designed to kill pedestrians.

</comment><comment><USER297> average people will expect robot cars to avoid these. it must also be a terrible experience for the woman who was in the car.

</comment><comment><USER298> I don't trust Uber. Thats it.

</comment><comment><USER299> Well, that's upsetting.

</comment><comment><USER300> Daaaang. That is monstrous.

</comment><comment> dylan-m This is such a blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion before the actual data appears. Even if Uber's software _is_ ridiculously using visible light for its decision-making, it should definitely be taking into account what it doesn't know. A system like this should not be guessing. There is a giant swath of black in the video; the camera doesn't know what's there. So, the car should be moving so it has a short enough stopping distance to avoid a collision. (Or at least flash the high beams, but that would be pointless, because obviously it isn't actually using this camera. Uber may be run by reckless psychopaths, but their engineers aren't stupid).

<comment><USER301> The police department released the video, not Uber.

<comment> dylan-m Mm, fair enough, that's my inner conspiracy theorist happening :b (Every part of the US government is obviously in cahoots with Uber as part of a complex scheme to take over the world, right?). Okay, probably not intentional on their part, but I think it's really disappointing that this is the video they had to share. The video itself is manipulative, and surely they would realize that. It provides some context, but the prevailing focus is "look how dark much darker those pixels are than those other pixels!", which just isn't useful.

<comment><USER302> No conspiracy needed. AZ wants to appear friendly to self driving car companies (e.g. they already don't regulate them as hard as CA.). A single undesirable being taken out isn't gonna change that.

Plus it's not like AZ has a long history of pedestrian friendliness anyway. It's practically engineered to harm them, with 2mi between crosswalks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER303> Maximum Uberdrive

</comment><comment><USER304> Uber is at fault.

</comment><comment><USER305> Did not enjoy that video auto playing in my twitter feed.

</comment><comment><USER176> wow, Uber's system sucks big time

</comment><comment><USER306> So who's going to jail for this murder?

</comment><comment><USER307> Awesome

</comment><comment><USER308> if it bleeds it leads

</comment><comment><USER309> yupe. I wold certainly have hitted the guy. Only seen him in the last second.

</comment><comment><USER310> Something that's worth pointing out as well is what happens to low-light contrast sensitivity as we age. I believe there's something like a 50% loss in night vision between the ages of 20 and 50.

Having watched the video, I seriously doubt I'd have seen the pedestrian in time to stop for her. I don't know that I would even feel that sorry for her, frankly -- there is only so much we can (and should) do to protect drunks and idiots from hazards like crossing the street at night without looking.

Finally, had the driver been paying attention, at least some blame could probably be assigned to DOT's stubborn refusal to bring their lighting standards into the 21st century. Cars in other countries are equipped with noticeably better lighting tech than US cars are allowed to use. It looks like you'd be overdriving these headlights at any speed over 15 MPH or so.

<comment><USER311> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644056) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER310> Nice. Let a hundred flowers bloom, right?

<comment><USER311> Actually it was more flamebait than off topic, though the two are related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER312> While I'm surprised the sensors on the car didn't catch the cyclist, I pretty sure if I had been driving and paying full attention I would have hit the bike too.

Personally, given this video, I'd still be totally comfortable with a self driving car on the road with no safety driver (who clearly didn't make a difference here anyway, not that they could have).

<comment><USER55> I agree in that I consider the safety driver to be irrelevant in this situation, because of the reaction time needed to take control, nevermind hit the brakes, nevermind after a complacent state of mind.

But as others have pointed out, it's hard to tell what the driver could have seen just from the dashcam video, which for starters, has a much less dynamic range than human vision. Because in the accident scene photos/videos, the ambient street light is much more visible [0]. I'm guessing driving down that Arizona road at night can't possibly be as pitch dark as the camera shows it, given how that area seems to be used for entertainment venues/festivals.

[0] [http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/19/uber-self- drivin...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-car- fatal-crash-tempe-arizona/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER242> Here's a better video:

[https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/976591851384745984?...](https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/976591851384745984?s=21)

The car should have seen that.

<comment><USER313> How is this video "better?" This is clearly somebody holding a camera recording a screen and seems to have much more artifacting and brightness changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER314> To all the armchair experts: try recreating this accident scene in the real world.

Sodium Vapour (monochromatic) lamps, then a large darker area with a pedestrian in dark clothing with car's headlights dipped.

You will be alarmed at how much stuff you can put on the road and not see it because the road has a lighting pattern that makes it less safe than no lights at all.

With no lights at all, and a hedge between carriageways, the car would have had high beams on and the driver may have seen the pedestrian with plenty of time to brake and either avoid collision altogether or reduce the impact to non-fatal energy.

Now go recreate the scene for yourself and see how it works for you.

<comment><USER315> Nope. That person + bike would have been completely trivial to detect with the LIDAR those cars have mounted on top.

<comment><USER316> The comparison should be against humans. It is humans that autonomous vehicles are being compared against.

Because the alternative to an AV is a human. So the only thing at all that matters is "is this better or worse than a human".

<comment><USER315> There are two explanations for the video published:

1\. They _DO_ have cameras onboard with the exposure settings necessary to see the woman in the video, and have not released the video because it makes for bad PR.

2\. They _DO NOT_ have such cameras, in which case they should have their self-driving permit revoked because this failure mode is completely predictable to anybody working in this space. And anyway their LIDAR should've detected the person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER317> Looks like somewhere between 1.0 and 1.2 seconds between when I can see the pedestrian in the video and when the collision occurred.

I don't think a normal human, even if they were paying attention to the road, could have braked or swerved in time to avoid hitting them.

Not sure if visibility is better for a real human than that video but from what I remember about the eye test at the DMV it is extremely lax. They had a vision test sign with a really big font and it was really close. I was appalled that they let people drive who can't see the vision test sign on the opposite side of the room -- even that was ridiculously easy to read.

Also, even if they reacted within 0.1 seconds (unlikely) I doubt the car would have been able to slow down in that timeframe.

I'm surprised IR and LIDAR didn't pick it up though. Would be useful to have the other data released. Video is only a small part of what the car sees and excluding this information is a huge disservice.

Not sure if they already do, but would be nice, no, imperative, for car companies to collect "black box" data of collisions and shared this with all other interested parties. This is a dataset that would be extremely beneficial for all self-driving AI engineers.</comment>