Uber's Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash (nytimes.com) 284
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Uber's robotic vehicle project was not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz. The cars were having trouble driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs. And Uber's human drivers had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects. Waymo, formerly the self-driving car project of Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per "intervention" in Arizona (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times and two people familiar with the company's operations in the Phoenix area but not permitted to speak publicly about it. Yet Uber's test drivers were being asked to do more -- going on solo runs when they had worked in pairs. And there also was pressure to live up to a goal to offer a driverless car service by the end of the year and to impress top executives.
Pressured to proceed despite poor test results.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does that sound so familiar?
Oh, wait. I'm a software developer.
Re:Pressured to proceed despite poor test results. (Score:5, Funny)
What I'm shocked about is that, of all companies, Uber would make morally dubious decisions in its race to profit off of a new market. I mean, when have they ever acted like that before?
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Re: Pressured to proceed despite poor test results (Score:2)
Well then, stop using them. The only way for the market to punish this behavior is to stop using the service. But as we see time and time again, convenience, compliance, and human stupidity will allow them to succeed. We really are out worst enemies.
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Yes, indeed. Stop using them. However your alternatives may in the long term become limited, because Uber is one of those companies built around an ideology of market disruption.
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Re: Pressured to proceed despite poor test results (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone is dead because of a faulty development process, which in turn is the result of a toxic business climate.
I suspect this happens more often than we know; it's just seldom that you can connect the dots so readily.
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It happens all the time which is why I am finally running away screaming fro software.
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Re:Pressured to proceed despite poor test results. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like just about every failed IT project. Rush to market, ignore test failures, probably a thermocline of truth [brucefwebster.com].
From what we've been hearing, somebody in the chain of command between the inattentive driver and the CEO, deliberately created this situation and should be charged with manslaughter.
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This isn't an IT project though, it's the real world. Failed IT projects seldom costs lives, just money. This is what the app IT world needs to understand when moving into the real world of engineering. Rushing to market has real consequences.
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But marketing tools us it was all rainbows and unicorns as far as the eye could see.
Self driving car hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Self driving cars are mostly hype. They're primarily self driving on very good, very clean, very well mapped roads only. Take them out of perfect conditions, and they fail miserably.
That being said, the technology is still cool, even though it has a long, long way to go. A lot of the technology could eventually be incorporated into normal everyday cars to help human drivers avoid accidents.
But the hype, at this point, is kind of out of control.
Re: Self driving car hype (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with the hype is that high early expectations of perfection will drive fear which may lead to regulations that will ultimately cause more deaths. Give it ten years and this stuff will probably outperform human drivers, but watch one kid chase a ball out in front of a robot car and e.g. Utah will ban the technology.
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You apparently don't work in the industry. I do. The "hype" is to attract investors. It's purely for money. The actual timelines I've seen from the companies developing the sensors don't even suggest autonomous driving is possible in 10 years. There aren't any sensors that can detect common road obstacles, and there are no known solutions. A child is the road? Can't see it. This is by their own admission. Remember the time when a car crashed head on into a semi-truck? Can't see them either - they admitted t
Re: Self driving car hype (Score:3)
So Waymo being able to drive 5,600 miles without human intervention is just a lie then?
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What about this makes it an edge case? I appreciate most of driving (on a per-mile base) is keeping lane, following the speed limit, and not running into any other cars; and that this part is relatively trivial to manage. Detecting traffic signs/signals is the next increment, and defensive driving follows.
But, saying that a pedestrian at an unmarked crossing is an "edge case" I think belies what driving is.
I will accept a beach ball blowing across a highway as an edge case though.
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I call it an edge case because a person dressed in dark standing in a darkly lit section of road with an outcropping behind and choosing to walk into the path of the car is not a common event
Note that while the above is a difficult case for a human, there is really no excuse for LIDAR/Radar/Sonar sensors not to have detected this particular human. My suspicion is that we'll find out that the either some or all of those sensors weren't working properly on that car, or the car's software was inadequately tested and some sort of bug prevented it from reacting appropriately to its sensors' input. Really, "don't hit pedestrians, no matter what" should be the First Law of Automotive Robotics, and t
Why set the bar so high (Score:5, Insightful)
Self driving cars are mostly hype. They're primarily self driving on very good, very clean, very well mapped roads only. Take them out of perfect conditions, and they fail miserably.
But even a car that could drive under such conditions would be extremely useful. Take, for example, public buses. They just drive around the exact same route everyday, and the route in many places is upgraded with special lanes and signalling infrastructure to make their job easier. There is no reason why you couldn't start with replacing such bus routes in cities with moderate weather conditions. Over time a combination of roading infrastructure improvements (special lanes, intersection redesigns, beacons etc) and the tech getting better could easily expand out to cover the majority of vehicle uses in a city. Again, we do this for bicycles and buses, so why is it impossible to imagine it would make sense to do some road works to cater towards driver less cars?
Another example is motorway driving. Motorways are already an extremely controlled and regular environment. It would be great to have a driver less truck that can go door to door, but there is no reason why we can't start with depots built off the side of motorways where local human drivers pick up and drop off longhauled trailers. As for weather conditions guides in the road way and other navigation infrastructure could be added if these problems cannot be dealt with using lidar and cameras.
Yes, I agree that a car you can just dump into an unknown urban environment is a long long way off. But I don't understand the fascination with meeting this goal before driver less vehicles can be useful to us.
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Self driving cars are mostly hype. They're primarily self driving on very good, very clean, very well mapped roads only. Take them out of perfect conditions, and they fail miserably.
I have a solution to this. Let's develop some technology and put it through an iterative improvement process combined with years of trials in the real world in increasingly complex scenarios. It's a shame no one has thought of doing this.
By the way, hype has two possible meanings:
a) It's publicised a lot to which I say So? That's kind of the point of all new technology that many groups are working on.
b) It's benefits are exaggerated: No they're not.
So yes, Self driving cars are currently hyped up. That is n
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. So it's perfectly okay for a "self driving car" to have a LIDAR that doesn't work, a radar that doesn't work, cameras that can't see at night and/or a neural net that doesn't work, and ultrasonic sensors don't work, and to have the "self driving car" rely on a person who's not been driving being suddenly instantly able to hop into "driving mode" during each of the once-in-every-1500-mile occurrences where the car tries to crash itself without warning. Got it! This is all totally okay.
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen that video (Score:2)
Re: I've seen that video (Score:2)
Yeah, you should hate using that phase, because the actual phrase is "toe the line".
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To be fair, it seems as if that is also the police line, so that's probably where they got there information. If a large number of groups say the same thing, the first thing to suspect is not that they were conspiring, but that they used the same source.
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Naw, probably the police just assessed the situation as they would for a human driver. Nighttime. Pedestrian in a place a pedestrian shouldn't have been. An unimpaired human driver might well have been unable to avoid an accident and very likely wouldn't have been held responsible. BUT. The damn car seemingly SHOULD have done better than it did. Disturbingly it never seemed to try to avoid the accident even though it might have been too late to do so by the time the pedestrian was recognized. THAT se
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Re:That's exactly what the parent said. (Score:5, Insightful)
If that machine is incapable of detecting and avoiding unexpected obstacles and that unexpected obstacles is less squishy than a human it could easily be the occupant of said machine that dies...
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Informative)
A human driver would have seen her and not hit her.
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Insightful)
And what if the obstacle was a fallen tree, or a large animal, or anything else that could be fatal to the car's occupants? I guess they shouldn't be so entitled to expect a self-driving car not to kill them either right?
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Or a toddler.
Which won't work here. We hate children on Slashdot.
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How is not being hit by a car having the world revolve around you?
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I'm in that older demographic and I never got any. You won or lost and 2nd place was the first loser.
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Depends on the event. IIRC in track there were often 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place trophies. Probably copied from the Olympics. Or perhaps from horse racing. (I'm not really sure what "Win, place, and show" means.)
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Informative)
Victim was already crossing the road, in the adjacent lane, as the car approached. The condition was caused by a bad self driving car that should apparently never been on the road.
That the root cause was someone jaywalking doesn't change the fact that jaywalking happens and is a predictable event. It also suggests that the car is inadequately prepared for avoiding hazards. (It also doesn't change the fact that when you don't have crosswalks at reasonable intervals people will improvise.)
Not just a jaywalker.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. Also, how many of us have had kids run out in front of us? I have. And if I weren't paying attention, the kid, his parents and I would have a very bad year. Who cares who fault it is: I was part of hurting someone.
And so what if someone was an "airhead" and stepped out in front of the car? Doesn't make it OK. The purpose of self-driving cars is to make the roads safer because the machines are supposed to be better than humans.
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Informative)
Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world. It is some weird concept spoken about in movies and TV shows from the US.
For example, in the UK we would call it 'crossing the road' and 'crossing the road' is not illegal (it is expected that pedestrians will use common sense). The idea that 'crossing the road' could be illegal is very strange to someone from the UK.
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world. It is some weird concept spoken about in movies and TV shows from the US. For example, in the UK we would call it 'crossing the road' and 'crossing the road' is not illegal (it is expected that pedestrians will use common sense). The idea that 'crossing the road' could be illegal is very strange to someone from the UK.
Germany has the same rule, I think. Came as a surprise to us from Norway, but we crossed so far from traffic nobody fined us or anything. But then Germany is notorious for having rules for everything and actually sticking to them. It's kinda nice and incredibly frustrating at the same time, depending on what side of the stick you're on.
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:4, Informative)
Germany has the same rule, I think. Came as a surprise to us from Norway, but we crossed so far from traffic nobody fined us or anything. But then Germany is notorious for having rules for everything and actually sticking to them. It's kinda nice and incredibly frustrating at the same time, depending on what side of the stick you're on.
In Germany it depends, but is is not illegal to cross the road. The law is:
(3) Wer zu Fuß geht, hat Fahrbahnen unter Beachtung des Fahrzeugverkehrs zügig auf dem kürzesten Weg quer zur Fahrtrichtung zu überschreiten. Wenn die Verkehrsdichte, Fahrgeschwindigkeit, Sichtverhältnisse oder der Verkehrsablauf es erfordern, ist eine Fahrbahn nur an Kreuzungen oder Einmündungen, an Lichtzeichenanlagen innerhalb von Markierungen, an Fußgängerquerungshilfen oder auf Fußgängerüberwegen (Zeichen 293) zu überschreiten. Wird die Fahrbahn an Kreuzungen oder Einmündungen überschritten, sind dort vorhandene Fußgängerüberwege oder Markierungen an Lichtzeichenanlagen stets zu benutzen.
-- https://www.gesetze-im-interne... [gesetze-im-internet.de]
Translation:
Someone walking on foot has to cross roadways, while heeding vehicle traffic, speedily on the shortest path perpendicular to driving direction. If the density of traffic, speed of traffic, visibility conditions, or the flow of traffic require it, a roadway must only be crossed at road intersections, at traffic lights, on the inside of markings, or at pedestrian crosswalks. If crossing the roadway at road intersections, any available pedestrian crossings or markings at traffic lights must be used.
I.e., you cannot simply cross just anywhere on a high-level road with dense, fast traffic (think Autobahn) or in really bad visibility like dense fog. But a road like in the accident video, even if it's dark, is just fine if there is no dedicated crossing nearby
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Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world. It is some weird concept spoken about in movies and TV shows from the US.
That's because it's an invented concept created by car companies to trick people into thinking that roads are only for cars and not for walking. No, seriously: the origin of the term comes from "jay drivers" and has to do with the fact that "jay" was 1900s American slang for effectively "idiot." Drivers of the time were frequently called "jay drivers" and were seen as a menace. After all, originally, there were very few cars (as they were expensive) and quite a lot of pedestrians and horses (as that's how p
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I can think of a few different kinds of Jaywalking: indifference by walker, convenience to the walker, indifference by planners, and just crossing the street when there is a reasonable break in traffic.
The indifference kind (think San Francisco) is really inexcusable. The convenience kind is a shame, but kind of reality-- going a couple blocks out of your way to cross at a marked intersection rather than an unmarked intersection can be a bit of a pain. In an area where there should be an expectation of wa
That Adam ruins thing has a bit on it (Score:2)
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Jaywalking has an interesting history actually. During the early days of the car manufacture, there were quite a few fatalities as a result of cars hitting pedestrians, to the point that the car industry got a lot of bad press.
So they got some heavy duty PR, invented a word "jaywalking", pushed this into the press, and lobbied intensely that it was all really the fault of the pedestrians. They managed to get it passed into law with one or two years effort. Very effective. Blame the victim.
The Uber video was
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Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world
It does in many places actually, but it is usually applied with some manner of common sense. E.g. Australia, It's only Jaywalking if you're within 10m of a traffic light that is red for pedestrians.
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And yet if a human had hit her they wouldn't have been judged to be at fault. Over 4000 pedestrians get killed and another 50,000 injured every year and many of those are because of their own error. The real question here is would it have made any difference if it had been a human driving the car. Most likely not. I personally have barely avoided killing an individual running on the side of the road in the dark. I managed to miss them by 2 or 3 feet and spent the next few miles running 20 mph below the spee
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet if a human had hit her they wouldn't have been judged to be at fault.
Yes, they would. Drivers are routinely held to be responsible for hitting almost stationary objects in the middle of the road. That is irrelevant anyway. What's relevant is that the car did not see an almost stationary object in the middle of the road. That the object happened to be an old lady pushing a bike is irrelevant.
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Insightful)
What's relevant is that the car did not see an almost stationary object in the middle of the road. That the object happened to be an old lady pushing a bike is irrelevant.
Exactly. And any modern non-autonomous car with "simple" collision avoidance system would have noticed. Dunno what Uber is doing, but it does not come as a surprise that it's Uber who are the most irresponsible and reckless
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Not likely. A.R.S. says the pedestrian has a duty to yield outside of crossings. It's damned hard to see pedestrians crossing in black at night. And yes, I have seen that before.
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Self driving car hype (Score:5, Interesting)
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As things in the world are made safer, people seem to lose the ability to look out for their own safety and become totally reliant on others...
Not to mention arrogance, many cyclists have an attitude problem and disdain for both pedestrians and vehicles.
So yes stupidity should be punished, why should society bear the burden of protecting people too stupid to look out for themselves?
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Nice company (Score:2, Offtopic)
Really nice company, Uber. Their 19th century attitude towards its employees surely will make them do their very best.
Re: Nice company (Score:3, Interesting)
Their mutual rating system actually does do just that. Get used to the gig economy - your 19th century factory model is going away.
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What? The gig economy IS the 19th century factory model. Back then workers assembled at places and the bosses pointed out which got to work that day. No job security, bad wages, no insurance.
The gig economy is just a scam trying to fool people into believing that they are "freelancers" or "consultants" when they in fact are making slave wages working more hours than is legally allowed. A freelancer or consultant can set their own wage and negotiate on it. In the gig economy you have to accept whatever wage
Corporate death penalty... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, so forcing them to liquidate might be extreme, but clearly there is some kind of regulatory framework missing here!
I hope the victim has some relatives that want to get rich though.
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Two words: tort liability.
You want good? Or cheap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, not all autonomous vehicles are the same.
It's very like camera - a cheap one and an expensive one will both offer "autofocus" and "zoom lens"
The cheap one will have 3 or 4 focus settings, while the expensive one will be continuous. The cheap one will have 2 or 3 zoom settings, while the expensive one will, again, be continuous.
So, Uber's cars look to be at the "what is the minimum that can make a car steer itself" end of the scale, and the Google ones are "have we missed anything off the long list of things that will help a car steer itself" end
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1) It is damn expensive to do it right, and
2) There is no standard method to prove if someone is doing it right before allowing them on public roads
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1) This is Silicon Valley. They have lots of money to pursue difficult technology like this.
2) There is a standard measure already, average distance between interventions by the human monitor. Waymo is clearly ahead here at 5100 miles to Uber's 13. When that average distance gets to some agreed value of very high, self-drive will be ready for general use.
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2) That's a poor measure. We need to know exactly how many and what type of obstacles the cars are dealing with in those miles. The biggest problem is, self-driving is easy 80% of the time. It only gets hard for the 20% of edge cases like this one. It doesn't really matter how many successful miles there are if we don't know how well they deal with difficult edge cases.
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What they are doing at the moment is like teaching someone to drive a car, where the instructor takes over when something goes wrong. What they also need to be doing is being like a flight school where they train the pilots to handle things when they go wrong. Otherwise, there are always going to be high profile accidents in the news, like the Viola Group accident:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne... [telegraph.co.uk]
I've seen these kinds of bridges in Norway. One end of the road at the bridge becomes a solid concrete wall. The
What is a Jay? (Score:2)
Contrary to popular belief, the term jaywalking does not derive from the shape of the letter âoeJâ (referencing the path a jaywalker might travel when crossing a road). Rather, it comes from the fact that âoeJayâ used to be a generic term for someone who was an idiot, dull, rube, unsophisticated, poor, or simpleton. More precisely, it was once a common term for âoecountry bumpkinsâ or âoehicksâ, usually seen incorrectly as inherently stupid by âoecityâ folk.
Comment removed (Score:3)
You think? (Score:2)
I don't undertand (Score:2)
Why a company would want to get into the self driving car angle of the rideshare market.
We see the reports of the incredibly low profits the drivers currently make, and UBER wants to buy a bunch cars as well? The one thing that drives down profits?
Re: I don't undertand (Score:2)
Is this the triggering event of the AD winter? (Score:2)
Uber lost $4.5 bn last year, in a revenue stream of $7.5bn. They were evaluated to be next-to-last in a large survey when it comes to AD technology and strategy.
They are the ones with the largest stakes as their current business model is less than solid, and really need to bring AD to the streets ASAP in order to survive.
This accident shows how far they are from that - this accident was not a difficult case from any perspective, sensory (the video shows dashcam footage, without any kind of HDR functionalit
Re: Is this the triggering event of the AD winter? (Score:2)
Uber lost $4.5 bn last year
That's misleading as hell. Uber's is profitable with shitloads of cash flow; they chose to spend that money, which they did. Are their investors stupid? Perhaps but that's another debate.
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I don't think that is particularly misleading. It just tells us that is ridiculously expensive to develop AD, and that Uber needs to do that for quite some time yet before they can start to make money from it. Will the investors sign up en-masse for a long period? I doubt it.
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They are not profitable. They will never be profitable at current ride rates unless they eliminate their biggest expense which is drivers.
Excessive Hate On Uber - do the math (Score:2)
Uber might be an easy company for some people to hate (and there are even some people with financial incentive to hate them) but other than the slashdot hate for crypto currencies this is excessive. They also might have the worst self driving car on the road but someone has to be the worst*. We need self driving vehicles a
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Stop the victim blaming (Score:2)
Cars are not allowed to do that. Period. People blind, kids fail to pay attention, roads are icy, people have strokes and heart attacks crossing the street etc. SDV *must* accommodate.
SDV will never take humans out of the look as all software is written by humans
Re: Uber hatred turned political a long time ago (Score:5, Informative)
That's a baldface fucking lie, and you know it. Uber has come under massive criticism from day 1 for shamelessly and egregiously breaking livery and employment laws in nearly every jurisdiction in which they have established themselves.
Now their half-baked AI implementation has killed someone, and you want to beg off criticism of blatant criminality as merely political grandstanding? These mobsters deserve every ounce of criticism they get regardless of who is in office.
Re:Uber hatred turned political a long time ago (Score:4, Insightful)
When Uber started as a 'ride sharing app', ostensibly helping people coordinate carpooling where they were going to be going anyway, it was fine.
When it became "a taxi, but paying drivers less and trying to get out of the same regulations for no other reason than somehow being 'cooler' than taxi companies", a lot of deserved criticism came about.
Re:Uber hatred turned political a long time ago (Score:4, Insightful)
When it became "a taxi, but paying drivers less and trying to get out of the same regulations for no other reason than somehow being 'cooler' than taxi companies", a lot of deserved criticism came about.
If that's the case, then why isn't everyone piling on Lyft as well?
Re: Uber hatred turned political a long time ago (Score:2)
Re: Uber hatred turned political a long time ago (Score:2)
When Uber started as a 'ride sharing app', ostensibly helping people coordinate carpooling where they were going to be going anyway, it was fine.
You're not all that familiar with the early history of Uber, are you.
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Nice story, very imaginative, Did you make it up yourself?
Re:Uber hatred turned political a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you not even bother to read TFS? In the summary it quite clearly states the other self drive companies were achieving 5600 miles between interventions while uber could not meet it's 13 mile goal. Sounds to me like uber's system is just plain not ready. I'd even question 5600 miles. Once they get to 1 million I'd say they are there.
I think you are the one making this political.
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Did you not even bother to read TFS? In the summary it quite clearly states the other self drive companies were achieving 5600 miles between interventions
No, it didn't state that. It states that the other companies claimed to achieve 5600m/intervention. Prior to this crash Uber also made outrageous claims about the progress and state of their SDC capability.
Waymo claims 5600m between interventions. Maybe it's true, but until they are forced to release some data (say, via a fatality) I see no reason for believing a claim made by a company spokesperson. Hell, I shudder when I hear the claims my employer makes about our products. Same with every previous emplo
Re:Uber hatred turned political a long time ago (Score:4, Informative)
Waymo claims 5600m between interventions. Maybe it's true, but until they are forced to release some data (say, via a fatality) I see no reason for believing a claim made by a company spokesperson.
It's public [theverge.com] because California's regulations require it to be public. 352454 miles driven, 63 disengagements = once every 5600 miles. Read the report (pdf) [ca.gov] yourself.
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It's also likely that those 63 interventions were because the car was *too* cautious. For example, around construction zones [wired.com].
I remember hearing one anecdote. Workmen were moving around their vehicle, inside the border of traffic cones. The car was predicting that they might step out in front, so it just didn't move.
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So Uber lags Waymo in self-drive? Microsoft has been getting away with being the laggard in operating systems for years, yet it still makes billions.
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Privatized space companies seem to have been working out ok, at least better than I thought it would.
This may end up being a bust for now at least, but this specific article suggests that Uber isn't good at this compared to others, and this deficiency may have cost a human life and thrown a huge roadblock for the entire industry. Other companies may have well been doing well enough, though it of course may be the case things are far worse than they imagine. Certainly I feel the reporting is more enthusias
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I seem to remember a few years back that some major auto-maker said they would have self-driving cars on the streets by 2018. Now a bunch of them are making predictions for 2020, and Ford plans on removing the steering wheel by 2024.
In 2012 they were all saying "five years time", so we are now in the sixth year of the five year prediction.
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Most of the driving we do is routine, boring and done from sheer necessity. This is exactly the kind of task at which humans tend to slack off and do poorly. Because of this, decades of car safety improvements have been unable to reduce the annual death rate below about thirty thousand in the US. This is impressive in terms of the increasing number of vehicle-miles, but still an unforgivably large number.
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Given that Waymo has cars that go 5600 miles on average between human interventions, and Uber was only averaging 13, I'd say your being alarmist. If I had a Waymo car I could in theory get away with intervening less than twice a year on average. What all of this has shown is that Uber isn't competent or responsible enough to be working in this field.
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Re: 13 miles per intervention (Score:2)