
Uber self driving car drives on the wrong side - thesanerguy
http://qz.com/798092/a-self-driving-uber-car-went-the-wrong-way-on-a-one-way-street-in-pittsburgh/
======
alistproducer2
Being totally serious here, given how terrible their mapping software is, I'm
not really surprised they're not crushing autonomous vehicles. I'm by no means
trying to say mapping is an easy problem but if you couldn't pull together a
competent version of the much easier problem, chances are you won't do much
better with the harder one.

~~~
yaur
From the article it looks like one of these incidents, not knowing that a
street was one way during or after the incident, was probably a mapping
problem.

I don't want to diminish the difficulty of autonomous vehicles but I'm not
sure that keeping up to date on every road and driving regulation change is
that much easier. There also places, Iceland comes to mind but also in the
rural US, where speed limits are completely divorced from what is a reasonable
speed even ideal conditions. So anyone that wants to do autonomous vehicles
outside of urban centers is going to have to do a better job at understanding
the road network than local government is doing.

~~~
mc32
This brings up a question, how will fully automated systems deal with
temporary detours, the signs for some of which are badly placed and hard to
understand by humans, at times. Sometimes it's a construction worker waving
confusing indications.

Some detours last just a few minutes or hours, so it's not likely a source of
truth map would get updated. Or maybe they would.

------
ljoshua
> _“I couldn’t see any of the damage,” says Jason, the Uber driver, who
> requested Quartz withhold his last name because he feared being deactivated
> by the company._

Difficulties of self-driving tech aside, fearing that you will be
"deactivated" by a company sounds rather dystopian...

~~~
divbit
> fearing that you will be "deactivated"

without reading the article, I'm imagining Jason as the AI driving the (self-
driving) car..

~~~
J5892
"NO DISASSEMBLE JOHNNY-5!!!"

------
yannyu
This article reads like a fear-mongering hit piece rather than even remotely
unbiased journalism. It's unfortunate because I think the author does have
some detailed knowledge on governmental regulations of self-driving cars as
well as differences in implementation between the various companies, but the
article as a whole seems to dismiss all self-driving car technology as not
even being remotely viable based just a few recent incidents.

>For now Uber’s cars have limited operating hours and terrain, and they must
travel with two humans up front—a designated “safety driver” behind the wheel
and an engineer in the adjacent seat. Even so, the company is pushing this
technology onto the public when it remains largely unproven and other tests of
driverless cars around the US have yielded their fair share of accidents.
Earlier this year a self-driving Google car hit a public bus while trying to
make a right turn in Silicon Valley. In May, the driver of a Tesla Model S
died in an accident while he had the autopilot function enabled. Google
suffered its worst crash yet just a few weeks ago when another driver ran a
red light and barreled into its self-driving Lexus.

>Uber is taking advantage of a regulatory void in Pennsylvania, which has yet
to enact autonomous vehicle legislation. Its self-driving cars are insured for
up to $5 million per incident, in line with pending legislation in the state.
Uber has repeatedly declined to specify to Quartz who would be held liable
were one its self-driving cars involved in an accident, saying it doesn’t deal
in hypotheticals. The company also doesn’t have an ethics board and is
reluctant to discuss “trolley problem” scenarios, in which a car might have to
protect one group of people (say, its passengers) at the cost of another
(i.e., pedestrians). The DOT cautions in its guidelines that self-driving cars
will inevitably have to be programmed to make “ethical judgements.”

~~~
untog
How on earth is it a fear-mongering hit piece? It reports, accurately, some of
the difficulties Uber have had in launching self-driving cars. I don't see any
dismissal of self-driving cars as a concept, just reporting of the
difficulties that you encounter along the way.

Are we really at the point where any coverage that is even vaguely critical is
a "hit piece"?

~~~
greglindahl
"pushing this technology onto the public" is a bit much, as is the author's
summary of Google's driving experiences. I don't think it rises to the level
of fear mongering, but it reads like "I barely understand this so I'll repeat
a few things I found by googling".

------
riphay
Obviously lots of work to do for all the players in the autonomous vehicle
game. And I actually like Uber's approach to testing: get lots of miles of
testing while being paid to do it by your customers. Clearly not a cash
positive venture but it's still a cool business model.

I'm wondering if the autonomous vehicle industry will fight for market share
along the lines of which company's software platform is better. Will consumers
who buy such a car be looking at safety records as much as comfort and looks?
Will we end up seeing "Ford Fusion powered by Uber" vs "VW Golf powered by
Apple" etc.? Maybe we end up with only a few platforms that fight for market
share, like Windows vs Mac and Android vs iOS.

~~~
dgacmu
They're not getting paid. Rides in a self driving car are currently free.
(source: I live in pittsburgh...)

