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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

somebody literally walked in front of their car..

The analysis I've seen suggested that the self-driving system in the Uber vehicle had 4 or 5 seconds to detect the pedestrian crossing the road in front of them. Driving into a pedestrian on the road in that circumstance is /not/ acceptable for any driver, be they human or automated.

Don't be fooled by the video footage Uber released from the in-car camera - the quality is appalling. Compare it with the dashcam footage taken by people driving the same road at the same time & you'll see that visibility should have been perfect & a human driver would easily have avoided the pedestrian who was doing something that all of do every day - crossing the road.

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It is acceptable though, most people wouldn't even get involuntary manslaughter which still requires criminal negligence. People are really spouting off here and project in their own superiority onto the situation. It's a situation similar to when a child gets left in a car or jumps a zoo fence, "I never take my eye off my kids even for one second even when I'm sleeping. I would never allow that to happen to my kids. Worst parent/person who has ever walked the earth".

Not only did the pedestrian instigate that, the failsafe(which are supposed to be very simple to back up complex and more fallable systems) to not getting hit and killed by a car was entirely in the pedestrians area of responsibility; don't walk into traffic.

I disagree with your implied belief that cars should have priority on the roads & that in every collision with a pedestrian it's implicitly the pedestrian who is at fault unless it can be proven otherwise.

We all owe each other a duty of care. Excuses about 'she just walked out in front of me' are just that: excuses. The driver in this case had plenty of time to slow down and avoid a collision & simply chose not to do so. That's inexcusable.

The fact that the driver was a pile of self-driving code doesn't change that one iota.

> It is acceptable though [to drive into a pedestrian]

No. Children wander into roads. Drivers have a responsibility to keep an eye out for the unexpected. They are faultless only if they were driving responsibly and had no opportunity to react — neither of which were the case with the Uber.

At least here, the driver of the vehicle hitting anything (another car, especially a person) is /always/ responsible, because you're supposed to be attentive for unexpected events. And that's how it should be. Why do you think otherwise? If you don't see clearly in front of you because of scarce illumination, you should go slower.

Unless assisted driving is close to near perfection (that is, it becomes a true auto-pilot without the need of assistance), we're going to see much worse numbers of accidents on the streets for assisted-driving cars.

Assisted-driving requires the same, if not more attention, as it essentially becomes like supervising an inexperienced driver that is prone to make stupid mistakes in otherwise normal circumstances. If you ever had a kid, you should be pretty familiar with how stressful this is.

But thanks to the PR spin, the driver is led to think that he can keep less attention, until he pays none at all. Assisted driving is even more boring than regular driving, lowering the attention span.

What could possibly go wrong?

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