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Hardware is not faultless.

The analogy doesn't stand up - there's a non-trivial chance that a memory module or your hard drive in your laptop will fail over the lifetime of the device.

Furthermore, a LIDAR unit is complex and has firmware and lower-level software embedded that may be at fault.

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Yes, I've even seen this first hand where it was, in fact, the laptop as the issue source. Not that I'm taking Uber's side at all, just saying it is a possibility and we should wait for official evidence of the fault before jumping to conclusions.

If the software is well written, any of those types of failures should raise an alarm to alert the safety driver to take over, and then shut down the self-driving system.

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