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Comment by TheCapeGreek | Hacker News Reader

Everyone who saw the video has said it's the fault of camera for seeming so dark (since even the street lights have almost no effect anywhere), and regardless of that AVs work with lidar and such. Where is the telemetry and analysis? If it didn't see the pedestrian, then why?

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The lidar should have enough time to detect the pedestrian (who is crossing the road at a leisurely pace) and reduce speed, yet the car doesn't seem to slow down at all. The whole "dark road" narrative doesn't hold a candle, something is seriously wrong with the sensors and/or algorithm.

> The lidar should have enough time to detect the pedestrian (who is crossing the road at a leisurely pace)

And had already crossed an entire lane, they were struck on the right-hand lane of a two-lanes street.

> Everyone who saw the video has said it's the fault of camera for seeming so dark

Not by a long shot. The /r/video thread has a comment with 20k upvotes purporting to demonstrate that the hit was inevitable "doing some basic math": https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/86756p/police_relea...

The first two responses (sorted by "best") respectively blame the safety driver and provide their own anecdote of hitting something at night, you need response #3 (500 comments below if you don't fold subthreads) to see LIDAR mentioned and #4 and #5 to note that the dashcam footage is not representative of real visibility.

"When the pedestrians shoes first become visible in the video there is approximately 59' between the car and the pedestrian, in 1 second the car will have already covered 52.5' of that gap leaving 6.5' left to stop the car.

"In order for a human driver, or the driver in this car to have avoided this collision by merely hitting the brakes and traveling in a straight line, "as is the reaction when startled by something on the road" there would have needed to be at least another 127.5' of distance between the car and the pedestrian."

Wow, that comment is...bad.

(As an aside, the stopping distance of a car, including reaction time, traveling at 35MPH is about 100 feet.)

I think the chances of that data being released without a court order is fairly low. Ideally both the raw data, plus the product (actions based on the raw input, not the model/program) should be released, so that it can be included in everyone's dataset.

However, being that the sensors used are supposedly secret and innovative, along with the programs/models, I don't see the motivation for any AV company for releasing the data

Isn't NTSB usually releasing this kind of material after investigation? I do think it is reasonable that they do not release it before. The idea of NTSB looking at things is to analyse and find what to improve, not really to assign guilt (which appears to be the primary motivation just now).

Good question. I'm not based in the US, so I don't know the ins and outs of federal or state level investigations.

In the UK I think the data is released to the coroner (assuming a fatality) but I'd have to research that to be sure.

I'm not in the US either, and my knowledge of the matter is largely from Mayday or Air Crash Investigations which runs on the National Geographic terrestrial TV channel here. But I would expect that this Uber case will get a somewhat similar treatment as airline crash investigations.

(Assuming it's the same as aviation, with which I'm very familiar), NTSB factual reports are the only reports admissible into court. NTSB preliminary and final reports, which are the ones which contain findings or probable or contributing causes are statutorily barred from being admitted into evidence of other trials. (This is to encourage open participation from potential parties to future lawsuits.)

Hugely sensible policy, I think, that contributes to the amazing safety record of aviation. I wonder whether it's the same for other modes of transportation.

And it begs the question: did Uber alter the video?

Will it alter the telemetry, too?

If the Tempe police doesn't get forensics experts on this, they're doing their job wrong. Uber is already known as a company that tends to hide and destroy this sort of evidence.

It would be really hard to believe that Uber would do this. There is only downside, the probability of being caught is high (given they have to hand over a ton of data streams to the NTSB).

> There is only downside

Not true. There is a lot of upside if Uber is declared blameless and innocent in this accident. It could be the difference between Uber deploying self-driving taxis within a year or four. Uber hasn't shied away from this sort of "risky gambles" before. I mean, their entire business model was based on avoiding or breaking laws in multiple countries.

So don't tell me "it's very unlikely Uber did this". With Uber's track record, I'd rather believe the opposite until proven otherwise. You know the saying: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 7 times, and I'm the idiot". I don't like being an idiot.

There's upside if they don't get caught, and Uber has a history of not making good choices as far as legality and ethics are concerned.

There is definitely upside. You know, not getting caught with a crap system that shouldn't be on the road.

Uber, like many companies, is filled with people who may put their own interests or even the very-near-term corporate interests over the long term interests of the company.

Given other missteps by Uber's management (which led to a business impact), I think we should not count on them being purely rational actors.

Uber's history defends the position that they're willing to do things regardless of the chance of getting caught and being willing to deal with the fallout later. That's kind of their whole thing - drive in a city no matter the regulations of taxis and the like, and deal with the bureaucracy after. Why wouldn't they alter things if given the chance?

Why is this being down-voted? This was the first thought I had. Their history as a company does suggest that they would do exactly this and try to get away with it.

Exactly, especially considering that this is car by Volvo, manufacturer that quite often demoes it's new features in the are of detecting pedestrians or animals on the the road.

The self driving technology is totally Uber, Volvo only has a partnership for cars without any self-driving gadgetry.

Volvo's "city safety" features only work below 30 MPH.

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