No more testing in AZ:
Waymo takes a shot at Uber, saying their self driving car wouldn’t have hit the pedestrian. (Waymo is Google’s self driving spinoff, the one that’s done over 5 million miles now)
In fact, Waymo’s car would have stolen some personal info about the pedestrian and spammed them with a targeted ad as it drove by.
Uber was at 3 million miles, so they’re not far behind Google. Apparently Uber had been having other issues with developing their self driving cars, though. https://mashable.com/2018/03/23/uber-self-driving-car-problems/#4nytJCPgiOqN
This will likely be the last nail in the coffin for this project.
For the past two years, I’ve been on a national council for product development with MEB and autonomous driving vehicles for the largest automaker in the world. Nobody is even close. Between the technology (we are at stage two with autonomy, we need to get to stage 5. Going from stage 1 to stage 2 took years, getting to stage 5 is going to take ten times as long), the legislation, laws, the infrastructure, “curveballs” like snow/ice and the fact that most people won’t get into a self driving car - there’s a ton preventing this from ever coming to fruition. We’ve have hybrid vehicles for almost 20 years and it only represents ~2% of auto sales in the US. Adoption of new tech is a bigger problem than most people think.
That’s pretty damning. For a company with a cash burn of over 2 billion a year that was already having trouble getting new VC’s on board because of PR problems the lawyers may be the final nail in the coffin of the company, not just the self driving division.
Better make sure your Lyft account is working. They’ve been quietly positioning themselves as a platform any automated car company could run a rideshare business on instead of chasing their own self driving car and it looks like that may turn out to be a far better strategy.
“The driver also did not intervene.”
I assumed this was a driverless car. WTF? So basically the driver killed someone.
With all the variables involved with driving on public roads, I’ve sometimes felt we’ll get personal flying drones before self driving cars. The sky doesn’t have pedestrians…
Oh definitely. You don’t even think twice about passing 2-3 feet apart on a 2 lane road with your car and the oncoming car both doing 60+mph while a pedestrian is walking down the shoulder. The potential for a catastrophic crash is huge and the margin for error tiny but it’s something experienced human drivers deal with basically on a subconscious level. In the air if a plane gets within 200 feet of a colliding with another object it’s a total failure of the system and headline news worthy. In the air at least with the air traffic density in the near to mid future that proximity would never be an issue.
Uber Technologies Inc. disabled the standard collision-avoidance technology in the Volvo SUV that struck and killed a woman in Arizona last week, according to the auto-parts maker that supplied the vehicle’s radar and camera.
“We don’t want people to be confused or think it was a failure of the technology that we supply for Volvo, because that’s not the case,” Zach Peterson, a spokesman for Aptiv Plc, said by phone. The Volvo XC90’s standard advanced driver-assistance system “has nothing to do” with the Uber test vehicle’s autonomous driving system, he said.
haha, Can’t blame Volvo for getting out ahead of that one.
