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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

The test driver failed to intervene, that's all. This is a non-issue, obviously Uber's autonomous vehicles are a work in progress.

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Yeah don't beta test your BETA on real drivers, even after the DMV has asked you to stop.

Screw Uber. I hope the CA government comes down hard on them. But we all know Uber will find yet another slimy way to keep going.

For the record, I'm the biggest proponent of autonomous cars and can't wait for that day. But companies that just put people in danger like this are not going to get us there faster. They're going to slow everything down by their carelessness and greed.

> But we all know Uber will find yet another slimy way to keep going.

Like moving the program to Arizona...

And Nevada, with stolen Google engineer!

I don't like Uber either, and I don't know what they were thinking testing in California without a permit, but they were otherwise doing the same thing all of the 23 companies with testing permits in California are doing. (Any fly-by-night operation can get an av testing permit in California so long as they meet some basic requirements. It costs $140 and the approval process takes 3 business days).

The AI is expected to fail occasionally, so a human driver is onboard ready to intervene the instant that happens. The test driver wasn't paying attention, and the car ran a red light. It was a human error. Uber did not lie, they didn't mince words or twist the definition of things, the human driver just didn't do his job.

Irrespective of all the other bullshit going on with Uber, this is a mistake that any test driver with any other company testing autonomous prototypes on public roads could have made.

Just like with Tesla's Autopilot, any autonomous test vehicle is technically a level 2 vehicle, meaning the human driver is legally responsible for any traffic violation the vehicle makes.

Irrespective of all the other bullshit going on with Uber, this is a mistake that any test driver with any other company testing autonomous prototypes on public roads could have made.

They could have done, but they haven't. At best that means Uber are just unlucky; at worst it means that Uber are far behind every other self-driving car company and Uber's software just doesn't work for really simple, basic traffic laws. That should be very worrying for any investors.

Seriously. A red light? That is the most basic and most dangerous thing to ignore.

Except that this car is out there driving alongside people. Running red lights could get somebody killed. That's why google took forever to actually take their prototype to the streets.

What? Google was on California's roads in 2009 before anybody, least of all the DMV, knew what they were doing.

No, Google had a permit from the DMV when they started testing. Can't find the reference now, but I remember how they'd had to take DMV people in the car to convince them that they were serious.

'The Google researchers said they had carefully examined California’s motor vehicle regulations and determined that because a human driver can override any error, the experimental cars are legal' [1]

That's from a 2010 NYT article by John Markoff. They ultimately hired Ron Medford, former NHTSA director to lead a big Johnny Appleseed awareness raising campaign with regulators, but initially they just went and started testing.

[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?...

If it's a non-issue, why'd they lie about it?

It's Uber. It's in their DNA.

It's fine that the car is a work in progress and it's also fine that they'll be tested on the streets before being fully baked.

What's not fine is insisting you don't need a permit (the primary purpose of which appears to be transparency regarding safety), having a safety incident, and then implying in a public statement that it wasn't related to a software failure when it was.

I don't think the issue is whether it stopped or not, but the possible discrepancy in how it was communicated.

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