Nine months ago, an Uber vehicle in autonomous mode struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. Immediately after, Uber pulled its self-driving cars off the roads. Now Uber has announced that its cars will resume testing in autonomous mode on public roads.
The backlash from the highly-publicized crash was swift and fierce. The governor of Arizona barred Uber from testing in the state completely. Uber suspended their self-driving testing on public roads everywhere in the U.S., and laid off hundreds of workers.
According to the company, after the incident Uber completed a “top-to-bottom” audit of its safety policies.
“We implemented recommendations from our review processes, spanning technical, operational and organizational improvements,” wrote Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber’s autonomous vehicle program. “This required a lot of introspection and took some time. Now we are ready to move forward.”
Pennsylvania DOT sent the company a letter authorizing it to restart the self-driving testing in Pittsburgh, but there will be strict requirements for the program starting out.
- Uber will only be permitted to test in a one-mile loop near the company’s Advanced Technologies Group headquarters in Pittsburgh’s Strip District.
- The vehicles can’t exceed the speed limit of 25 mph.
- Every vehicle must have at least two safety drivers at all times.
- The cars won’t pick up any passengers.
The parameters of testing will change in the future if Uber proves itself. But critics of the company point out that their self-driving cars were having issues even on private tracks as recently as September. The company says that the issues – including hard braking – aren’t safety issues.
“To raise the bar for system performance, we’ve reviewed and improved our testing program to ensure that our vehicles are considerate and defensive drivers,” said Meyhofer. “Before any vehicles are on public roads, they must pass a series of more than 70 scenarios without safety related failures on our test track. We are confident we’ve met that bar.”
Source: ttnews, theverge, cnet, cnbc, washingtonpost
Wait a minute! “Hard braking, is not a safety issue”! Have you list your damn mind? Hard braking is the number one cause of rear-end collisions. Morons
“Every vehicle must have at least two safety drivers at all times”.
Now, if they do THIS all the time, these robots might be fine. But I’M not getting into any car that doesn’t have SOMEone in control (even if it IS someone who doesn’t speak English or smell pretty).
I hate when they pour on the cologne or perfume. Ick. Self-driving cars are a bad idea.
Yeah, it would be crazy to put your faith in a computer that watches its surroundings 360° every millisecond, and can make adjustments to the centimeter.
I much rather put my faith in someone who messes with the radio, drinks their coffee, puts on makeup, fiddles with the thermostat, talks on their phone, and has a 140° field of vision, and looks in their rearview mirror every few miles at most.
Better to put your faith in someone with an A in arithmetic than a calculator. A witness to a crime rather than a video recording. A cop with a stop sign in his hand and whistle in his mouth than a traffic light. A bank teller rather than a money counting machine. A pilot, rather than the autopilot (even if 50% of plane crashes involve pilot error, 15% are mechanical, less than 1% involve the autopilot), a nurse rather than a biomonitor. Milli Vanilli rather than a CD player. Oh wait, skip that one! 🙂
There are 1,000,000 auto related deaths around the world each year. There are 35,000,000 auto related injuries involving medical intervention. Most of those statistics are due to HUMAN error.
Self driving cars will reduce those numbers by about 90%. But just as trains and aircraft were incredibly dangerous in their infancy, there will be some growing pains. But I sure wouldn’t be faulting Uber’s car, when the woman was jaywalking in the dark, and crossed in front of the car!
Watch the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7d90ZFhg28
There has to be some sacrifices for progress to be made these days.
Maybe one day all cars will be self driving, this will probably make more sense than the mix of both.
I’m quite certain that self driving cars will be mandated within 20 years. People are LOUSY drivers!
You heard it here first folks!
Just get rid of all humans. Every problem is then solved
I just saw the most scariest thing this morning. Driving home in Mississippi a girl passes me in her car with no hands on the wheel just cradled in her lap. She’s doing at least 75-80 mph. I value life seems that notion is going by the wayside real fast. TECHNOLOGY IS NOT THE ANSWER.
And their called artificial intelligence Lmao!!
Perhaps Uber should pack it up and quit.
We dont need AI to be driving for us..what we really need is better educated drivers …we have to renew our drivers license every few years why not have a refresher course in drivers ed at the same time …there really isn’t a decent excuse for the lack of proper rest ..or ..not keeping aware of what they are doing …or where they are ….its a shame that good old fashion common sense doesn’t exist anymore …we dont need artificial intelligence…what we truly need is good old common sense
Maybe we will just beam our loads there Scotty
Why not when a murderer kills someone they let them back out to kill again! I wonder how Garret Camp would feel about these cars if it was someone he loved that was run over by one of these cars?
I’m not opposed to Uber, but this autonomous car BS is ridiculous as any other – you cannot replace a human driver. It’s been proven. If the driver was paying attention, they may have stopped the car. They didn’t. The car didn’t either. Someone died.
The program needs to die.