njkayaker

????

Rollfast

Read the story. I don't think this person should have been operating a test vehicle.

Kontact 

Maybe its the Deep State!!!!!!

Which AM radio station will have more on your theories?

Rollfast

Kontact 

What sort of work should felons who have been out of prison for 13 years do? Or should he have been the one on the way to the homeless camp?

tyrion

The story doesn't suggest the operator might have been at fault.

Rollfast

I'm not sure they should be driving for Uber, if you've kept up with their legal troubles concerning criminal actions by drivers.

"Court records obtained by the Arizona Republic show Vasquez has a criminal record in Arizona under a different legal name, and was released from prison in 2005.


The 44-year-old served three years and 10 months in a state prison for convictions on attempted armed robbery and unsworn falsification."


I'm not saying everyone has to be a saint but this still looks bad given Uber's track record with bad employees.

jefnvk

Oh you'll find no disagreement from me on that particular point, but being a felon in and of itself doesn't make them any less or more responsible for this wreck than someone who isn't.

Dunbar

To be fair he wasn’t driving for Uber. He was the backup driver in a test vehicle with no paying passengers ever being allowed in it. It’s not great from a PR standpoint for Uber but, as I understand it, this backup driver gig is incredibly boring and menial work. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do. Imagine if this guy was driving his own vehicle when he hit this lady. Would you say is old felony had anything to do with the accident?

KD5NRH

A conviction for a crime utterly unrelated to driving, with sentence completed a decade ago. How is that even remotely relevant to anything?

1) People change their names for plenty of other reasons. They conveniently don't list the "other" name, so it could easily be a matter of maiden/married name. I've also known a few Hispanics (and other ethnicities, for that matter) who changed an uncommon spelling to the most common one just because they were tired of having to spell out their name every time they gave it.
2) LE will nearly always list as "known aliases" any common misspellings of a name, and will always list any that have previously occurred on that person's paperwork. Somebody puts down "Vasques" on a form by mistake and it's going on the record.

Besides, that's not such a high-profile crime that anyone would bother changing their name to get away from the stigma after it had nearly four years of incarceration to fade from public memory. Aside from mass murderers or people who were already in the public eye, anyone not directly impacted by a crime is highly unlikely to remember the offender's name after even a few months. For those directly impacted, a simple name change isn't going to matter.

CliffordK

There are two issues.

Fault... Ok, chalk that one up to the woman stepping in front of the car. Or, perhaps the city for the "do not use sidewalk" .

But the other issue is whether the accident would have been preventable, or should have been preventable. Was there technology that could have been added to make detecting a person in the dark easier? For example, there is mention of visible light cameras, but did the person show up on IR cameras or radar/sonar? Active laser imaging?

Or, as I've mentioned, perhaps defensive driving would have encouraged moving over or slowing when a pedestrian is spotted near the road. Evaluate which direction the pedestrian is facing.

Maelochs

The thing that I see when I look at Uber is that they tested without official permission on California streets and got busted when an AV ran a stop sign. That's what go them banned from California.

Cutting corners? Or just an intern slow to file paperwork?

As for the driver here … as jefnvk says, you get out of prison because strong-arm robbery doesn't work ... good time to get an honest job. And since not many people will hire a felon ... the guy Legally changed his name.

He wasn’t using a fake ID or anything. He went to court and got his name changed … probably so he could get a job.

Anyway … this is a great opportunity for the legal system to see what it can do with the reams of data afforded by the many AV sensors.

Meanwhile, Waymo is sitting pretty … if I worked there, I’d do a “Russian Hacker” campaign … hashtag-We’re the other company, hashtag-We’re not the one who killed that lady ….. flood social media with complete deniability, then respond by disavowing all the posts and playing up their much longer history of safe driving, more than twice as much testing, many years more of development ….

Maelochs

as a lizard person I disavow Alan Jones ..... even we lizard people think he is nuts.

Maelochs

I and the other lizard people thank you.

Maelochs

Hey, cna anyone help me spell "Google"?

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...hief/79525926/

Kontact 

This is part of the problem. When you are driving around people standing on the sidewalk, you're making an assumption that they aren't about to dash out into the road. If a human being isn't able to divine the actions of other humans, will a robot programmed by people have any advantage?

In many ways these AVs have better vision than people and faster reaction times. But they don't have crystal balls.

jefnvk

Nah, my job just happens to be dealing heavily with designing and tuning autonomous systems (braking, specifically) on vehicles. It is utterly silly to me just how wrong some people are on here.

Kontact 

There was a human in the car. He didn't even see the woman.


There's nothing in this incident to suggest that AVs aren't already "driving with caution" when they observe people, because there was no conflict between what the car did and what the driver would have done.


I'm not trying to sell some sort of AV success story, but this is the first time a cyclist or pedestrian has been struck by a driverless vehicle, and it is certainly not the first time one could have been. Until something happens to suggest an actual danger, why assume a particular deficiency?

CliffordK

And this is precisely why one creates safety buffers.

Just like passing a cyclist on a car. 6" of clearance is more than adequate most of the time. But, there are many reasons why cyclists will deviate from riding in a straight line, so give them 5' or 10'.... just to be safe.

Maelochs

For all those people who think opinions are the same as fact:

The Tempe police chief delivered an opinion---After Watching the Video---that the person--who might or might not have been homeless--stepped out of the shadows and into the path of the car so quickly and so close to the car that No control system would have been able to avoid the accident.

Yeah, a human, had s/he seen the person, might have thought, that lady pushing the bike festooned with grocery bags might step in front of me.

A computer would simply have decided--"Pedestrian--curbside--potential hazard." But neither can identify and plan a response for something which comes out of nowhere, from behind obstructions, and doesn't pay attention to a car coming down the road.

The issue of whether the pedestrian might step into traffic wasn't an issue until after the pedestrian had already stepped into traffic. So all that "Human vs. Computer" stuff is moot.

You know there are enough links right in this thread and the other about this, that anyone who wanted to Not make a clueless response could get a clue.

Just an option.

Maelochs

So there we have it. it is all jefnvk's fault.

Kontact 

Why are you pretending to know that there isn't already a safety buffer?

jefnvk

Its only my fault if the cameras and computers tell me to brake and I don't

squirtdad

as long as you use xilinx chips all is good

CliffordK

Apparently not enough of a buffer.

There is also ambiguity on whether or not the Uber car was speeding. Hopefully that will get clarified.

Also notes that the Uber car did not apply the brakes before the incident. So, obviously computer processing is not instantaneous, but perhaps also not fast enough in this case.