Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, according to one of the reports, forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or** locate an officer who could move the police car**.
So, in conjunction with a cop car, the road was blocked. I’d love to see an actual picture or diagram of the blockage.
These AVs are programmed to give high priority to police cars, ambulances, read works, and what not. They’re also happy to interprete what they see in the strictest way possible.
IIRC, there was a YouTube video of one of them going crazy because of a traffic cone… then running away from the operator when they tried to override and correct what it was doing.
It could be as little as cops leaving the car “somewhat” blocking the normal flow of traffic, then the Cruise cars strictly obeying “pull over and wait”, while someone with more common sense might’ve reversed, gone onto the curb, or whatever.
Then again:
Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo countered that one of the cars cleared the scene and that traffic to the right of it remained unblocked. “The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do,”
…it could’ve been the “blocked” ambulance’s drivers who were on autopilot?
Seems like not enough data to draw a conclusion.
Maybe don’t allow autonomous cars on public streets then? The tech is nowhere near ready for prime time.
We should ban police cars too - because allegedly an empty police car was also blocking the ambulance.
The AV spokesperson said they reviewed the footage and found there was room to pass their vehicle safely and another ambulance and other cars did so.
Obviously it is a sad story for the deceased and it’s family but according to the cruise spoke person there was supposed to be enough space so the emergency car could pass. And later the article mentioned there were 55 more situations where these cars caused problems. Well there are car accidents everywhere in the word every day because of careless drivers so this is kinda common. So I really don’t think banning these cars should be an answer, but to keep improving them.
Those damn things are not ready to be used on public roads. Allowing them is one of the more prominent examples of corruption that we’ve seen recently.
Statistically they’re still less prone to accidents than human drivers.
I never quite undestood why so many people seem to be against autonomous vehicles. Especially on Lemmy. It’s unreasonable to demand perfection before any of these is used on the public roads. In my view the bar to reach is human level driving and after that it seems quite obvious that from safety’s point of view it’s the better choice.
This is just such a bad take, and it’s so disappointing to see it parroted all over the web. So many things are just completely inaccurate about these “statistics”, and it’s probably why it “seems” so many are against autonomous vehicles.
- These are self-reported statistics coming from the very company(s) that have extremely vested interests in making themselves look good.
- These statistics are for vehicles that are currently being used in an extremely small (and geo-fenced) location(s) picked for their ability to be the easiest to navigate while being able to say “hey we totally work in a big city with lots of people”.
- These cars don’t even go onto highways or areas where accidents are more likely.
- These cars drive so defensively they literally shut down so as to avoid causing any accidents (hey, who cares if we block traffic and cause jams because we get to juice our numbers).
- They always use total human driven miles which are a complete oranges to apples comparison: Their miles aren’t being driven
- In bad weather
- On dangerous, windy, old, unpaved, or otherwise poor road conditions
- In rural areas where there are deer/etc that wander into the road and cause accidents
- They also don’t adjust or take any median numbers as I’m not interested in them driving better than the “average” driver when that includes DUIs, crashes caused by neglect or improper maintenance, reckless drivers, elderly drivers, or the fast and furious types crashing their vehicle on some hill climb driving course.
- And that’s all just off the top of my head.
So no, I would absolutely not say they are “less prone to accidents than human drivers”. And that’s just the statistics, to say nothing about the legality that will come up. Especially given just how adverse companies seem to be to admit fault for anything.
These cars don’t even go onto highways or areas where accidents are more likely.
Accidents are less likely on highways. Most accidents occur in urban settings. Most deadly accidents occur outside of cities, off-highway.
I could see accidents being more likely for autonomous cars on highways though
Why? Driving on highways is the easiest kind of driving?
For humans, but not necessarily for camera-based autonomous cars? They also can’t just stop on a highway to prevent accidents.
Well hey - atleast I provided some statistics to back me up. That’s not the case with the people refuting those stats.
I honestly can’t tell if that’s a passive-aggressive swipe at me or not; but just in case it was: stats mean very little w/o context. I believe the quote was “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”. I simply pointed out a few errors with the foundation of these “statistics”. I didn’t need to quote my own statistics because, as I was pointing out, this is a completely apples to oranges comparison. The AV companies want at the same time to preach about how many miles they go w/o accident while comparing themselves to an average they know doesn’t match their own circumstances. Basically they are taking their best case scenario and comparing it against average/worst case scenario stats.
I’d give more weight to the stats if they where completely transparent, worked with a neutral 3rd party, and gave them access to all their video/data/etc to generate (at the very least) proper stats relative to their environment. Sure, I’ll way easier believe waymo/cruises’ numbers over those by tesla; but I still take it with a grain of salt. Because again, they have a HUGE incentive to tweak their numbers to put themselves in the very best light.
No, I see your point, and I agree. These companies are almost guaranteed to cherry-pick those stats, so only a fool would take that as hard evidence. However, I don’t think these stats flat-out lie either. If they show a self-driving car is three times less prone to accidents, I doubt the truth is that humans, in fact, are twice as good. I believe it’s safe to assume that these stats at least point us in the right direction, and that seems to correlate with the little personal experience I have as well. If these systems really sucked as much as the most hardcore AV-skeptics make it seem, I doubt we’d be seeing any of these in use on public roads because the issues would be apparent.
However, the point I’m trying to highlight here is that I make a claim about AV-safety, and I then provide some stats to back me up. People then come telling me that’s nonsense and list a bunch of personal reasons why they feel so but provide nothing concrete evidence except maybe links to articles about individual accidents. That’s just not the kind of data that’s going to change my mind.
Avoiding dangerous scenarios is the definition of driving safely.
This technology is still an area under active development and nobody (not even Elon!) is claiming this stuff is ready to replace a human in every possible scenario. Are you actually suggesting they should be testing the cars in scenarios that they know wouldn’t be safe with the current technology? Why the fuck would they do that?
So no, I would absolutely not say they are “less prone to accidents than human drivers”.
OK… if you won’t accept the company’s reported data - who’s data will you accept? Do you have a more reliable source that contradicts what the companies themselves have published?
to say nothing about the legality that will come up
No that’s a non issue. When a human driver runs over a pedestrian/etc and causes a serious injury, if it’s a civilised country and a sensible driver, then an insurance company will pay the bill. This happens about a million times a week worldwide and insurance is a well established system that people are, for the most part, happy with.
Autonomous vehicles are also covered by insurance. In fact it’s another area where they’re better than humans - because humans frequently fail to pay their insurance bill or even deliberately drive after they have been ordered by a judge not to drive (which obviously voids their insurance policy).
There have been debates over who will pay the insurance premium, but that seems pretty silly to me. Obviously the human who ordered the car to drive them somewhere will have to pay for all costs involved in the drive. And part of that will be insurance.
You don’t understand why people on Lemmy, an alternative platform not controlled by corporations, might not want to get in a car literally controlled by a corporation?
I can easily see a future where your car locks you in and drives you to a police station if you do something “bad”.
As to their safety, I don’t think there are enough AVs to really judge this yet; of course Cruise’s website will claim Cruise AVs cause less accidents.
I can imagine in the future there will be grid locks in front of the police station with AV cars full of black people when the cops send out an ABP with the description of a black suspect.
We’ve seen plenty of racist AI programs in the past because the programmers, intentionally or not, added their own bias into the training data.
Any dataset sourced from human activity (eg internet text as in Chat GPT) will always contain the current societal bias.
Autonomous driving isn’t necessarily controlled by a corporation any more than your PC is. Sure, the earliest computers were all built and run by corporations and governments, but today we all enjoy (the choice of) computing autonomy because of those innovations.
I can be pro AV and EV without being pro corporate control over the industries. It’s a fallacy to conflate the two.
The fact is that letting humans drive in a world with AVs is like letting humans manually manage database entries in a world with MySQL. And the biggest difficulty is that we’re trying to live in a world where both humans and computers are “working out of the same database at the same time”. That’s a much more difficult problem to solve than just having robots do it all.
I still have a gas powered manual that I love driving, but I welcome the advancement in EV/AV technology, and am ready to adopt it as soon as sufficient open standards and repairability can be offered for them.
Autonomous driving isn’t necessarily controlled by a corporation any more than your PC is.
That’s just outright wrong.
Modern cars communicate with their manufacturer, and we don’t have any means to control this communication.
I can disconnect my PC from the internet, I cannot disconnect my car. I can install whatever OS and apps pleases me on my PC, I cannot do anything about the software on my car’s computer.
So, while I can take full control of my PC if it pleases me, I cannot take any control of my car.
With all due respect, you’re still not understanding what I’m saying.
If you traveled back 50+ years to when computers took up several hundred sq ft, one might try to make the same argument as you: “don’t rent time on IBM’s mainframe, they can see everything you’re computing and could sell it to your competitor! Computers are always owned by the corporate elite, therefore computers are bad and the technology should be avoided!” But fast forward to today, and now you can own your own PC and do everything you want to with it without anyone else involved. The tech progressed. It wasn’t wrong to not trust corporate owned computing, but the future of a tech itself is completely independent from the corporations who develop them.
For a more recent example, nearly 1 year ago, ChatGPT was released to the world. It was the first time most people had any experience with a LLM. And everything you sent to the bot was given to a proprietary, for profit algorithm to further their corporate interests. One might have been tempted to say that LLMs and AI would always serve the corporate elite, and we should avoid the technology like the plague. But fast forward to now, not even one year later, and people have replicated the tech in open source projects which you can run locally on your own hardware. Even Meta (the epitome of corporate control) has open sourced LLaMA to run for your own purposes without them seeing any of it (granted the licenses will prevent what you can do commercially).
The story is the same for virtually any new technology, so my point is, to denounce all of AVs because today corporations own it is demonstrably shortsighted. Again, I’m not interested in the proprietary solutions available right now, but once the tech develops and we start seeing some open standards and repairability enter the picture, I’ll be all for it.
nearly 1 year ago, ChatGPT was released to the world. It was the first time most people had any experience with a LLM. And everything you sent to the bot was given to a proprietary, for profit algorithm to further their corporate interests
You might want to pick another example, because OpenAI was originally founded as a non-profit organisation, and in order to avoid going bankrupt they became a “limited” profit organisation, which allowed them to source funding from more sources… but really allow them to ever become a big greedy tech company. All they’re able to do is offer some potential return to the people who are giving them hundreds of billions of dollars with no guarantee they’ll ever get it back.
Maybe reread my post. I specifically picked ChatGPT as an example of proprietary corporate control over LLM tech.
I never quite undestood why so many people seem to be against autonomous vehicles.
People aren’t against autonomous vehicles, but against them getting let lose on public roads with zero checks or transparency. We basically learn what they are and aren’t capable of one crash at a time, when all of that should have been figured out years ago in the lab.
The fact that they can put a safety driver in them to absorb any blame is another scandal.
Statistically they’re still less prone to accidents than human drivers.
That’s only due to them not driving in the same condition as humans. Let them drive in fog and suddenly they can’t even see clearly visible emergency vehicles.
None of this would be a problem if those companies would be transparent about what those vehicles are capable of and how they react in unusual situations. All of which they should have tested a million times over in simulation already.
Let them drive in fog and suddenly they can’t even see clearly visible emergency vehicles.
That article you linked isn’t about self driving car. It’s about Tesla “autopilot” which constantly checks if a human is actively holding onto the steering wheel and depends on the human checking the road ahead for hazards so they can take over instantly. If the human sees flashing lights they are supposed to do so.
The fully autonomous cars that don’t need a human behind the wheel have much better sensors which can see through fog.
That article you linked isn’t about self driving car.
Just because Tesla is worse than others doesn’t make it not self-driving. The “wiggle the steering wheel” feature is little more than a way to shift blame to driver instead of the crappy self-driving software.
so they can take over instantly.
Humans fundamentally can’t do that. If you sit a human in a self driving car doing nothing for hours, they won’t be able to react in a split section when it is needed. Sharing driving in that way does not work.
The fully autonomous cars that don’t need a human behind the wheel have much better sensors which can see through fog.
Is anybody actively testing them in bad weather conditions? Or are we just blindly trusting claims from the manufacturers yet again?
Just because Tesla is worse than others doesn’t make it not self-driving.
The fact that Tesla requires a human driver to take over constantly makes it not self-driving.
so they can take over instantly.
Humans fundamentally can’t do that. If you sit a human in a self driving car doing nothing for hours, they won’t be able to react in a split section when it is needed.
The Human isn’t supposed to be “doing nothing”. The human is supposed to be driving the car. Autopilot is simply keeping the car in the correct lane for you, and also adjusting the speed to match the car ahead.
Tesla’s system won’t even stop at an intersection if you need to give way (for example, a stop sign. Or a red traffic light). There’s plenty of stuff the human needs to be doing other than turning the steering wheel. If there is a vehicle stopped in the middle of the road Tesla’s system will drive straight into it at full speed without even touching the brakes. That’s not something that “might happen” it’s something that will happen, and has happened, any time a stationary vehicle is parked on the road. It can detect the car ahead of you slowing down. It cannot detect a stopped vehicle.
They’ve promised to ship a more capable system “soon” for over a decade. I don’t see any evidence that it’s actually close to shipping though. The autonomous systems by other manufacturers are significantly more advanced. They shouldn’t be compared to Tesla at all.
Is anybody actively testing them in bad weather conditions?
Yes. Tens of millions of testing and they pay especially close attention to any situations where the sensors could potentially fail. Waymo says their biggest challenge is mud (splashed up from other cars) covering the sensors. But the cars are able to detect this, and the mud can be wiped off. it’s a solvable problem.
Unlike Tesla, most of the other manufacturers consider this a research project and are focusing all of their efforts on making the technology better/safer/etc. They’re not making empty promises and they’re being cautious.
On top of the millions of miles of actual testing, they also record all the sensor data for those miles and use it to run updated versions of the algorithm in exactly the same scenario. So the millions of miles have, in fact, been driven thousands and thousands of times over for each iteration of their software.
With Tesla the complaint is that the statistics are almost all highway miles so it doesn’t represent the most challenging conditions which is driving in the city. Cruise then exclusively drives in a city and yet this isn’t good enough either. The AV-sceptics are really hard to please…
You’ll always be able to find individual incidents where these systems fail. They’re never going to be foolproof and the more of them that are out there the more news like this you’re going to see. If we reported about human-caused crashes with the same enthusiasm that would be all the news you’re hearing from then on and letting humans drive would seem like the most scandalous thing imaginable.
The AV-sceptics are really hard to please…
I do not care about situations that they work in, I care about what situations they will fail at. That’s what matters and that’s what no company will tell you. As said, we learn about the capabilities of self driving cars one crash at a time, and that’s just unacceptable when you could figure all of that out years ago in simulation.
So far none of the self-driving incidences I have seen were some kind of unforeseen freak situation, it was always some rare, but standard thing, fog, pedestrian crossing the road, road blocked by previous crash, etc.
Humans get into accidents all the time. Is that not unacceptable for you?
I feel like people apply standards to self driving cars that they don’t to human driven ones. It’s unreasonable to expect a self driving system never to fail. It’s unreasonable to imagine you can just let it practice in simulation untill it’s perfect. This is what happens when you just narrowly focus on one aspect of self driving cars (individual accidents) - you miss the big picture.
I feel like people apply standards to self driving cars that they don’t to human driven ones.
Human drivers need to pass driving test, self-driving cars do not. Human drivers also have a baseline of common sense that self-driving cars do not have, so they really would need more testing than humans, not less.
It’s unreasonable to expect a self driving system never to fail.
I don’t expect them to never fail, I just want to know when they fail and how badly.
It’s unreasonable to imagine you can just let it practice in simulation untill it’s perfect.
What’s unreasonable about that?
individual accidents
They are only “individual” because there aren’t very many self-driving cars and because not every fail ends up deadly.
Tesla on FSD could easily pass the driving test that’s required for humans. That’s a nonsensical standard. Most people with fresh license are horribly incompetent drivers.
I don’t expect them to never fail, I just want to know when they fail and how badly.
“Over 6.1 million miles (21 months of driving) in Arizona, Waymo’s vehicles were involved in 47 collisions and near-misses, none of which resulted in injuries”
How many human drivers have done millions of miles of driving before they were allowed to drive unsupervised? Your assertion that these systems are untested is just wrong.
“These crashes included rear-enders, vehicle swipes, and even one incident when a Waymo vehicle was T-boned at an intersection by another car at nearly 40 mph. The company said that no one was seriously injured and “nearly all” of the collisions were the fault of the other driver.”
According to insurance companies, human driven cars have 1.24 injuries per million miles travelled. So, if Waymo was “as good as a typical human driver” then there would have been several injuries. They had zero serious injuries.
The data (at least from reputable companies like Waymo) is absolutely available and in excruciating detail. Go look it up.
As a software developer, that’s not how testing works. QA is always trying to come up with weird edge cases to test, but once it’s out in the wild with thousands (or more) of real-world users, there’s always going to be something nobody ever tried to test.
For example, there was a crash where an unmarked truck with exactly the same color as the sky was 90° sideways on the highway. This is just something you wouldn’t think of in lab conditions.
there’s always going to be something nobody ever tried to test.
That’s not what is happening. We don’t see weird edge cases, we see self driving cars blocking emergency vehicles and driving through barriers.
For example, there was a crash where an unmarked truck with exactly the same color as the sky was 90° sideways on the highway.
The sky is blue and the truck was white. Testing the dynamic range of the camera system is absolutely something you do in in lab situation. And a thing blocking the road isn’t exactly unforeseen either.
Or how about railroad crossing, Tesla can’t even the difference between a truck and a train. Trucks blipping in out of existence, even changing direction, totally normal for Tesla too.
I don’t expect self driving cars to be perfect and handle everything, but I expect the manufacturers to be transparent about their abilities and they aren’t. Furthermore I expect the self driving system to have a way to react to unforeseen situations, crashing in fog is not acceptable when the fact that there was fog was plainly obvious.
And a thing blocking the road isn’t exactly unforeseen either.
Tesla’s system intentionally assumes “a thing blocking the road” is a sensor error.
They have said if they don’t do that, about every hour or so you’d drive past a building and it would slam on the brakes and stop in the middle of the road for no reason (and then, probably, a car would crash into you from behind).
The good sensors used by companies like Waymo don’t have that problem. They are very accurate.
For me it’s because they’re controlled by a few evil companies. I’m not against them in concept. Human drivers are the fucking worst.
They can’t come quick enough for me. I can go to work after a night out without fear I might still be over the limit. I won’t have to drive my wife everywhere. Old people will not be prisoners in their own homes. No more nobheads driving about with exhausts that sound like a shoot out with the cops. No more aresholes speeding about and cutting you up. No more hit and runs. Traffic accident numbers falling through the floor. In fact it could even get to a point where the only accidents are the fault of pedestrians/cyclists not looking where they are going.
The possibilities really are endless.
When the light turns green the entire row of cars can start moving at the same time like on motor sports. Perhaps you don’t even need traffic lights because they can all just drive to the intersection at the same time and just keep barely missing eachother but never crash due to the superior reaction times and processing speeds of computer. You could also let your car go taxi other people around when you don’t need it.
I think you might need lights for pedestrians at crossings.
I did wonder if ambulances would need sirens but again, pedestrians!
Just ban pedestrians. Problem solved,
deleted by creator
Even better!
Which way shall we choose
- substitute pedestrians by autonomous bipedal robots?
- develop autonomous exoskeletons which have to be used by pedestrians?
- Or aim high and develope injectable nano-sized neuro implants that take care of the autonomization of pedestrians?
- other options?
🤔difficult choice.
I don’t get it, why isn’t there an option for a Cruise employee or a first responder to just take control of the thing when it gets stuck?
Drive to the right edge of the road and stop until the emergency vehicle(s) have passed
That is a direct quote from the California DMV and from the sounds of it that’s exactly what the autonomous car did.
The right answer, in my opinion, is to allow the first responders to take control of the car. This wasn’t just a lone ambulance that happened upon a stationary car. It was a major crash (where a human driven car ran over a pedestrian) with a road that was blocked by emergency vehicles. A whole bunch of cars, not just autonomous ones, were stopped in the middle of the road waiting for the emergency to be over so they could continue on their way. Not sure why only this one car is getting all the blame.
Not sure why only this one car is getting all the blame.
Because it generates clicks.
I just actually bothered to read the article, and it sounds like it was an empty police car blocking the way between two Cruise cars that had pulled over leaving a space, and there in fact was a way to manually move them but it took critical time.
These cars get stuck all the time and are a major local controversy, so I’m guessing this was the click-baitiest headline they could go with. “Police officer carelessly gets in the way of paramedics” just doesn’t have the same ring.
