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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

The promise of self-driving cars is (was) that they’re much better than humans at predicting he behavior of other moving entities. A pedestrian doesn’t suddenly materialize on the road in front of the car. It comes from somewhere and the radar could have detected it (even « in the shadows »), and slowed down in anticipation of an uncertainty.

Or maybe it couldn’t, but then the whole « narrative « of the experiment is in serious jeopardy.

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> whole « narrative « of the experiment is in serious jeopardy.

Not really. Self driving cars are supposed to be better than average human driver. That does not imply that they NEVER make mistakes.

I do not know specifics of this case, but a general comment: If somebody is hiding behind a bush, and (deliberately or by mistake) run in front of the car, there is no way the car can anticipate that. There is no way to avoid accidents in 100% of the cases.

We have some corners where old houses are even intruding a bit on the road. When passing these corners you will have to slow down so you can stop in case a child runs out behind the corner. You can't just blame the victim if you are in control of your own speed.

I can think of many situations where I have avoided hitting pedestrians because of my avareness of the situation. Eg: Pedestrian with earphones looking at phone crossing against red light just because the left-turning wehicle in the left lane stopped for a red arrow while I had green going straight. Pedestrian mostly behind the car, just seen thru the window of the car.

Pedestrian behind high snow-walls going towards normal pedestrian crossing, no lights. Almost completely covered by the high snow-walls and a buss parked at a buss station 50 m away from the crossing. 50 km/h road. Since I had seen the pedestrian far away already I knew someone would show up there at the time I arrived there. On the other hand I would never pass a buss like that in high speed, pedestrians like to just run across in front of the buss. And high snow-walls next to a crossing is a big red flag too.

I live in Sweden though, where pedestrians are supposed to be first class citizens that has no armor.

When you are driving you should be prepared to stop. If you're turning into a street you cannot see and you're going faster than you can stop, you're not prepared to stop - you're just hoping that no one is there. This should, and is too in Denmark, fully expected and enforced. This is not the same as as driving along the street and someone is jumping out in front of you.

I have now actually seen the movie of the crash and I can agree that it most likely was hard to avoid for a human. What surprices me is that the LiDAR completely missed her because she didn't run, she didn't jump, she was slowly walking across the road. I can't say if the light was too bad, a camera often looks much darker than what you see with the naked eye, not blinded by other lights. The driver was looking down on the instrument panel at the time of the crash, does he have some view of what the car sees there?

This looks like the exact situation the selfdriving cars are supposed to be able to avoid. A big object in the middle of the street. I expect the car to try to avoid this even though the bike didn't seem to have any reflexes. If the LiDAR doesn't catch this, I don't think they should be out in traffic at all.

> We have some corners where old houses are even intruding a bit on the road. When passing these corners you will have to slow down so you can stop in case a child runs out behind the corner. You can't just blame the victim if you are in control of your own speed.

Yes, but this is a 4-lane roadway. I can totally imagine driving cautiously and slowing down near residential areas where houses are close to the road. However, this seems like a different case.

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