Hacker News Reader

Comment by akamaka | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think that the opinion of the police is at all relevant here, since they have no tools for investigating how self-driving cars react in accidents.

The sensors and reaction time of a self-driving car are entirely different from a human, so it’s possible that a crash for which a human is not at fault could be averted by properly programmed self-driving car software.

View on HN

You don't think the opinion of the police is relevant in a homicide? The opinion of people who have investigated hundreds if not thousands of similar accidents?

Who meets your criteria for expertise on saying whether the car could have stopped or not? Uber?

If there is data to be reviewed, that’s your best bet against someone who was not even there.

There is data...in the form of a video taken by the car that hit her. You don't need a team of PhDs to watch it and make a judgment call.

What about the other sensor data? Did the police watch the LIDAR pointclouds and the RADAR maps too? Or are they basing their judgement on only one sense input? Seems to be the latter which means they're spouting off without knowing what they're talking about.

But you need access to that data first.

The police investigators have no way of knowing if a fault exists in the software. I hope the raw sensor data will be released to experts who can simulate how different versions of software would have handled the situation.

Can't the police fairly easily determine who had the right of way? Given how simple the rule is, it seems like one of the first things a police officer would have done.

Right of way doesn't absolve you of fault. If you have the right of way, but a pedestrian goes on the street anyway, you have the duty to stop/slow down to the best of what's possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com