
Uber takes its self-driving cars off the road after one flipped over in Arizona - sosuke
https://qz.com/942199/uber-suspended-its-self-driving-cars-after-one-flipped-over-in-tempe-arizona/
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954323)

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Animats
_" Anthony Levandowski, the Otto founder who became head of Uber’s self-
driving efforts last summer, also shares Kalanick’s brash disregard for
regulatory authority. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that a running
joke at Otto was “safety third.”_

Uh oh.

The California DMV won't yet allow testing of autonomous vehicles heavier than
10,000 pounds on California public roads. Otto is thus testing in Arizona.
Looks like that was a good decision by DMV.

I wrote this on HN yesterday:

 _An important question is whether their system is smart enough to take
evasive action._

 _It 's becoming clear that there are two ways to approach self-driving. The
first stems from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was about off-road driving.
For that, the vehicles had to profile the terrain, plotting a path around
obstacles, potholes, and cliff edges. The GPS route was just general guidance
on where to go. That's the approach Google took, as can be seen from their
SXSW videos. Google also identifies moving objects and tries to classify them.
With all that capability, it's possible to take evasive action if some other
road user is a threat. The control system has situational awareness and knows
where there's clear space for escape._

 _The other approach is to start with lane following and automatic cruise
control, and try to build them up into self-driving. This can be done entirely
with vision systems. That 's the Cruise Automation and Tesla approach. This
puts the car on a track defined by lines on the pavement, with lane changes
and intersections handled as a special case. There usually isn't a full
terrain profile; that requires LIDAR. So there isn't enough info to plan an
emergency maneuver for collision avoidance._

 _This distinction is not well understood, and it should be._

~~~
arglebarnacle
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but your last paragraph seems to imply that the
"Tesla approach" is unable to "plan an emergency maneuver for collision
avoidance"

If true, that would seem to mean that Tesla's self-driving car program is dead
on arrival. Clearly emergency collision avoidance is not optional for a self
driving car with mass adoption. That's a pretty serious claim to make.

~~~
Animats
Here's 25 minutes of what Tesla is currently shipping as their latest
release.[1] This is not freeway driving, but suburban roads, which the current
system really isn't intended to support. It gives a good sense of what the
system can and can't handle. Traffic islands turn out to be a big problem,
especially if the lane line leads to the center of the traffic island, not the
edge. This is what happens when you're not profiling elevation. The system
also loses its edge reference when passing wide driveways. Realistically, this
thing is good for long freeway drives, and not much else.

Detection of other vehicles, as shown on the dashboard display, is far below
the level Google has demonstrated. Often, there's a nearby car that's not
showing on the display. This probably reflects that Tesla only has vision and
radar forward; side sensing is just short-range sonar, like a backup warning
system.

What self-driving software Tesla is going to ship in the future is not
publicly known, but we do know the sensor suite they're currently using, and
it's far below Google or Volvo level for situational awareness.

[1] [https://electrek.co/2017/03/18/tesla-
autopilot-2-autosteer-t...](https://electrek.co/2017/03/18/tesla-
autopilot-2-autosteer-test-video/)

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username223
I found this bit the most interesting:

> Recode also obtained documents showing that Uber’s self-driving cars
> currently need to be handled by their human safety drivers roughly once
> every 0.8 miles.

That's _really_ far from autonomous.

EDIT: Here's the Recode article:

[https://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/14737438/uber-self-
driving-...](https://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/14737438/uber-self-driving-
turmoil-otto-travis-kalanick-civil-war)

and things just get worse. The cars only make it an average of 2 miles between
incorrect sudden movements, down from 4 in January. What a joke.

~~~
Animats
Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet.
They should be testing at GoMentum Station, which is the former Concord Naval
Weapons Station north of Oakland. That place was built to store battleship
ammo; if anything bad happens there, there's nobody close enough to get hurt.

Google/Waymo's California DMV disengagement report for 2016 reports 0.20
disengagements per 1000 miles, or one disengagement per 5000 miles.[1]
Google's cars drove 635,868 miles autonomously in 2016, so there's enough
driving behind this for that number to be meaningful. This is 4x better than
2015, incidentally. CA DMV accident and disengagement reports are worth
reading, since they're one of the few objective data sources available on
automatic driving. So far, nobody has been willing to turn a self-driving car
over to Top Gear or Road and Track.

Google/Waymo is thus three orders of magnitude better than Uber, and about two
orders of magnitude better than anybody else who tests in California.

[1]
[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b-b119-91319c27788f/GoogleAutoWaymo_disengage_report_2016.pdf?MOD=AJPERES)

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iiiggglll
> Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet.

No kidding! Yet somehow I'm not surprised, as it has always been pretty
obvious that these jackasses didn't know what they were doing. This just adds
to the many reasons why I am fully 100% behind getting them and other amateur-
hour efforts (like geohot's comma.ai) off the road right now, and keeping them
off until they can _prove_ they are safe enough to be out on the public
streets mixed with human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. I live and work
in San Francisco and walk pretty much everywhere I go. I don't need to be
watching out for some shitty "self driving" car that has to have a person take
over every 0.8 miles whenever I'm trying to cross the street. Fuck that. If
they keep this up, someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed.

~~~
scarmig
This just represents how much corporate DNA can affect outcomes down the road.

Uber grew up on saying fuck you to government regulations. And it worked for
them, because the only real losers were taxi cartels, and as much as I hate
Uber, taxis were ten thousand times worse (in SF), which is more or less
widely agreed on AFAICT. But it fails at dealing with the problem of
autonomous vehicles, which is an existential threat to Uber. This is why Uber
won't exist a decade from now.

Google grew up and succeeded through throwing lots of engineers at problems
and building close, incestuous alliances with the government and academia, to
avoid undue negative attention. This has plenty of downsides, but it's
definitely the only plausible winning approach for getting autonomous cars
actually on the road.

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seibelj
Is anyone interested in making a public bet with me about autonomous vehicles?
I'm thinking something like, we publicly state that within 5 years a self-
driving car will be able to take me from my apartment in Boston to my work in
Cambridge, regardless of weather, time of day, etc. If it can, I pay you
$1000, if it can't, you pay me $1000.

Basically I'm getting super annoyed at people claiming self driving cars are
right around the corner, which I've been reading for a decade, but it's always
"just 5 years away". I would love to counter arguments with, "If you are so
convinced why not bet me $1000?"

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stale2002
"regardless of weather, time of day, "

Thats difficult. People who talk about "self driving cars 5 years away" aren't
usually talking about mythical level 5 self driving that is actually 40 years
away. They are talking about level 3, which basically means, "end to end
travel, in 90% of situations".

Just like how 1/10 times you might not be able to flag down a taxi cab, today,
1/10 times you won't be able to get the self driving taxi to go EXACTLY where
you need to go.

But it will work for most situations, most of time, and thats good enough.
(IE, imagine if 90% of taxi drivers or truck drivers were made obsolete. That
is industry destroying)

~~~
mlonkibjuyhv
So on days conditions are bad, the city comes to a stand-still?

~~~
stale2002
No. On days where self driving cars don't work, price goes up, and the market
puts more humans on the road.

So 10% of the time you pay the normal taxi price that you pay now, and 90% of
the time you get the super cheap self driving price.

That's still awesome!

~~~
prolly_a_moron
> _No. On days where self driving cars don 't work, price goes up, and the
> market puts more humans on the road._

So all these humans are just hanging around waiting for it to snow so that
they have the pleasure of driving other people around? The market will react
instantaneously?

Or are they doing other gigs in the meantime, like delivering people's
lunches, laundry, groceries et al?

~~~
stale2002
I don't know. The market will decide.

Maybe they will have other jobs. Most uber drivers work part time anyway, so
that's not any different.

Maybe you have to pay people a premium to be an emergency driver.

Or maybe people will just drive less when it is snowing. Most of the time when
I am using transportation, I don't 100% NEED to go on the trip. Maybe Ill just
buy groceries tomorrow instead of today.

But even so, if 90% of the time, transportation prices are near 0 $, that is
still crazy distruptive.

The market can easily solve any of the problems you are bringing up, just with
behavioral/price chances.

And trucking isn't even affected by any of the issues you brought up. An x%
chance of being a day late is easily worth 90% shipping cost decreases.

------
sharkweek
>Local police say there were no injuries and Uber’s vehicle was not
responsible for the incident.

Seems odd that they'd make this move unless it was to avoid more negative
press for continuing the program.

~~~
brogrammernot
Easier to pull the cars from the markets and have less attention be paid to
the Waymo suit. Good, bad, meh reports will mention the lawsuit every time and
that's a larger PR nightmare than this right now.

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samcheng
Makes sense to me. Every bit of "Uber self-driving car" press is going to
mention that nasty Waymo lawsuit. At this point, Uber has got to be looking to
stop the bleeding.

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andy_ppp
It's weird that there is no way for regulators to know how good a self driving
car really is; there might be many hours of driving but it's not like an
aeroplane where you can have coverage of most conditions. New conditions could
happen all the while.

Add to the fact that Tesla have the richest dataset they have a huge advantage
in this area one that will reap rewards and crash less that the competition. I
think Uber and Volvo will be far behind.

~~~
konceptz
That's an interesting point.

What are the challenges behind creating a licensing test similar to the ones
we take as humans(could be virtual)? This would be before allowing the
software on the road.

~~~
andy_ppp
Actually this would be a great YC company; tests for self driving cars that
added certain unexpected events to proceedings that were internal to the
testing.

Such things could include push bikes, road crashes, collisions, crazy
Deathproof style driving, etc. How do self driving cars react to other drivers
using their horns or ambulances for that matter? How does a police car pull
over a self driving car?

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rdlecler1
Reading the comments below. Looks like a rush to judgement as I've seen other
articles suggesting that the Uber car was bit by another driver who failed to
yield. Should driverless cars be under scrutiny for every counterpartt human
error.

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CptJamesCook
I imagine this is a response to the awful press around the company the past
several months. The Uber of 2015 would not have taken these cars off the road.

~~~
brudgers
I think the odds that Uber would make money developing self driving cars was
approximately zero. Look where Tesla Motors is after fourteen years in terms
of producing and selling automobiles and without internal competition from
another primary line of business.

Self driving vehicles will have the same profile as the existing automotive
industry: high capital costs and commodity margins. The existing automotive
mega-corporations already have the capital investment and distribution
networks like ships and rail cars and lots and auto-carrier semi-trailers.
Tesla is building some of that and the jury is still out on whether Tesla will
make a meaningful dent.

Even the idea of Uber rolling out a self-driving fleet means a massive
infusion of capital that is at odds with its current cost structure. And the
existing automotive mega-corps can step into the ondemand business with a cost
advantage in regard to rolling out vehicle fleets.

~~~
Mtinie
What still isn't clear to me is why Uber is involved in the _development_ of
self-driving cars, vs. profiteering and duplicating once the first viable
examples have been released.

On the surface autonomous vehicles appear to be a long-term capital draining
exercise. Do they view the first mover advantage as that beneficial in this
case that they'd risk all their future growth to be first to market for
something that they could, conceivably, get a better ROI for being "second" to
market with a more durable option?

~~~
dbot
Uber reached its current success with a first mover advantage.

But I think the real reason is that everyone building self-driving cars today
- including the big car manufacturers - will have little interest in selling
to Uber. They will be running their own Uber-style Car-as-a-Service.

~~~
mrkgnao
IOW, Tesla will be to Uber as Uber wants to be to its drivers.

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4258HzG
As much as I dislike Uber, I hate the uniformly negative tone the media has
switched to now that it's the popular thing instead of singing Uber's praises
far more. The same with the possibilities with autonomous driving. Like
Theranos, it's not as if many of these issues weren't there for some time, but
we've magically transitioned from them being visionary and daring to evil.

~~~
forthefuture
Like Theranos, the mistake is ever having positive coverage, not only now
having negative coverage.

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awinter-py
it was probably trying to drift park a la stanford's 'Junior'.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY93kr8PaC4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY93kr8PaC4)

But that trademark Volvo understeer doesn't like to powerslide.

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ffjffsfr
I think at this point it is clear that main problem with self-driving cars is
not technology but social, psychological, political and legal challenges.
People often forget that having good tech is just one step that does not
guarantee any commercial success.

People dont change their habits just because new tech is available. People are
not going to start buying or using self-driving cars just because tech is
available. There is huge psychological and social environment around car
driving - e.g. think about all legal paperwork you have to go through to start
driving, learning how to drive, buying insurance, all traffic regulations. All
this cultural/human factors are based on specific definition of what car is
and they all rely there is human subject operating this car. If self-driving
cars are really going to succeed all this huge extremely social framework
would have to change. I don't think this will happen. I think there are simply
too many strong human emotions and purely financial interests around cars.

