Funny article, but as someone who has access to Waymo, Cruise, and Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta I have never seen any of the above have trouble differentiating between a green light and a green shirt. Again, very funny but from a technical perspective the challenges he's describing — rain, a dog running into the road, are things that I see many different companies already solving reliably.
So much discussion about whether Cruise slightly delayed the ambulance from leaving the scene. Hardly any discussion of the fact that it was a human driver that ran over the pedestrian, "critically injuring" (brutally crushing parts of their body, so they bled out after the driver fled I assume) them in the first place.
Was the driver charged? Did the street design contribute? Nobody cares, because apparently a few dozen San Franciscans' lives per year are a worthwhile sacrifice to save suburbanites a few minutes on their commute.
I have seen this exact sentiment way too many times. The details of the accident don’t matter. It could be the fire department needing to get by to rescue an old lady’s cat from a tree. Yes, there is irony a human hit someone with a car. No, it is not material to the actual issue at hand.
The real problem is that tech companies are moving faster than infrastructure and governance can keep up. This is a mark of hubris that, if unchecked, will ultimately result in self-inflicted knee jerk regulations that have the potential to all but cripple to the self-driving car industry.
I don’t agree that self-driving cars need to be regulated into the ground because of little mishaps like this. It doesn’t upset me much that there was a mistake. But what is significantly more distressing is the general impression that these companies don’t give a fuck about taking responsibility for this. I don’t think it is unreasonable at all to say “you fucked this up, your fleet is grounded until our investigation is over and you can prove safeguards have been put into place to prevent this from happening again”.
To the above point about treating this like plane crashes etc, the NTSB doesn’t skip out on analysis because of the actual impact, it considers what is the possible impacts of something going wrong. So if your jet engine blows up mid flight but you still manage to safely land, they treat that with the same due process as if it killed a plane full of people. The same applies to these self-driving car companies, and why it’s such s ridiculous distraction to even bring up what business the ambulance had to why. It doesn’t matter. These cars need to yield. And until they can they need to be immediately pulled from the roads.
The NYT, in this article, admits to seeing a video that proves that Cruise did not block that ambulance.
This is a garbage headline meant to garner clicks. The city has been complaining about these cars for a while. They've never had any data and now are trying to complain about "x incidents where an AV interfered with emergency vehicles." They're banking on the headlines, and then they'll bring up whatever number they could passably claim in the next letter/meeting they have with the DMV.
> The NYT, in this article, admits to seeing a video that proves that Cruise did not block that ambulance.
I can't find this admission in the article. The article includes a quote from a Cruise rep saying that the ambulance "was never impeded," but this appears to be in the context of the first responders having to move one of their own vehicles so that the ambulance could leave (second graf).
In other words: Cruise's argument appears to be "we didn't block you because you found another way out." That wouldn't be an acceptable argument from a human driver at an accident scene; it it's an acceptable on from a self-driving car company.
> "we didn't block you because you found another way out."
In other words: the ambulance was not blocked. They (SFFD) recently had a press release where they say Cruise did not block the ambulance. Why? Because they know there's a video now, and that Cruise is more than willing to share it.
