Uber Self-Driving Vehicle Involved in Arizona Crash

Megalith

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I thought I had seen a headline about Uber’s self-driving tech being crap compared to the other players, and this story suggests that could have been pretty accurate. The photo shows an Uber Volvo self-driving SUV on its side after a bad accident, which is total poetry, based on the state of the company these days. At first I thought this was just a test vehicle, but apparently it was a normal-service car that may have had passengers. Thanks to Kyle and cageymaru for this one.

Uber’s self-driving car program has also been mired in controversy. Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous driving business, sued an Uber unit called Otto earlier this year for allegedly stealing designs for an important component of driverless cars known as lidar. Uber called the suit "baseless." The photo, showing the Uber SUV on its side, suggests a relatively high-impact crash. That would be a contrast to the incidents involving self-driving cars tested by Waymo. In more than two million miles of testing on public roads, Waymo’s vehicles were mostly minor incidents, often when other cars drove into the back of their vehicles in busy areas.
 
Well, the other party failed to yield then plowed into it at high enough speed to flip it sideways, so I'm guessing somehow that's the software's fault. I suppose it should come with a phalanx system for close interception capabilities? I desperately want this type of technology to succeed so Uber Eats can deliver me food from my favorite restaurant 15 miles away without paying a crapload of tips.
 
Why is fault never at the core of these articles involving AI?
That's literally what I want to know, did the vehicle make the mistake or not?
Shitty reporting
 
Why is fault never at the core of these articles involving AI?
That's literally what I want to know, did the vehicle make the mistake or not?
Shitty reporting
Well the police said the other vehicle was at fault. Since the volvo is on it's side it probably got broadsided. I think most of the car AI systems out there use radar front/back only to get realtime speed from doppler shift while relying on ultrasonic (very short range) and lidar (long range but higher reporting latency = less precision when interpolating objects with fast changing vectors) for the sides, so if a car suddenly turns into the side, it has less time to react than a car approaching from directly behind, or braking right in front. Perhaps a useful strategy if I ever need to disable a self-driving convoy someday?
 
I'm in AZ, and seen one of these switch from center to right lane and zoom ahead much faster than a human would normally do and faster than the speed limit, so no surprise to me.
 
Aren't Uber self driving cars supposed to have a human driver available to avoid situations like this? What was the human driver doing at the time?
 
So the self-driving car wasn't at fault. Why was that so hard to dig up?
 
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