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Comment by jmharvey | Hacker News Reader

As presented, this looks like a pretty classic "overdriving your headlights" situation.

Even though they're made of retroreflective material, only two lane divider dashes at a time can be seen in the video, indicating something like 50 feet of visibility. Stopping from 38 mph takes 70+ feet from the time the brakes are applied (and human reaction time adds quite a bit more). Things (people, animals, stopped cars, road hazards) appear in the road fairly routinely. If you can't stop inside the area you can see, you're operating your vehicle recklessly.

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I think you are missing a key point here. Have you ever been on a street with streetlights and had difficulty seeing past two lane divider dashes? The point is that the camera footage is vastly under-indicating the amount of distance a human eye would have been able to see.

Furthermore, if there are street lights, and you go through an unlit area, you should be able to detect the presence of an obstacle because it will be obscuring the view of the road ahead.

Uber's technology clearly sucks, to the extent that I doubt they are even using Lidar. However, the woman driving the vehicle should be arrested for not being aware. If she had been looking at the road for more than a small fraction of the time she surely would have seen the person on the road.

The car didn't slow down even after it hit her, I think there was a different problem.

Well... after the car hit her there's no obstacle anymore. If there is no provision to detect an accident and then cancel the route to drive it's natural that the car doesn't stop, since the obstacle is now behind it. It's a computer with wheels.

Just add a cowcatcher to the front, right? No biggie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_(locomotive)

(closed captions: that was sarcasm. When colliding with anything, the correct response is not "just keep on driving"; and especially not when you've just hit a person)

If it were a human driver, human eye, etc., then maybe this would be the case. But Lidar isn't limited in this way, and reaction time shouldn't have been an issue.

I agree. I regular drive in the country (unlit, forested, deer country) and believe that I have more visibility than this driver and car. And I'm typically going 45-50mph and have Xenon headlights from 2004.

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