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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>I can't believe that radar and LIDAR were completely unable to see this woman until the visual cameras picked her up.

The worst part is, that the car didn't react at all - if it started breaking when the cameras saw her, it would still be better than what happened. But there was no reaction. Nothing from LIDAR, nothing from Radar, nothing from visual recognition - which to me, suggests only one thing: she was picked up by all three sensors, and then Uber's algorithm decided she wasn't an actual obstacle and could be safely ignored. Like a leaflet in the wind, or an immobile traffic sign next to the road. That's far worse than a straight up hardware malfunction.

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That seems like a correct read of this. They didn't react at all. If the data shows that all three systems picked her up just fine and no reaction was made, that's really damning about the quality of the software that Uber has.

Not just that, it seems to imply that Uber either aren't maintaining the vehicles correctly, or that their modifications are rendering them unsafe on the road.

The Volvo XC90 is an exceedingly safe car already. With the LED lighting, it shouldn't be possible for the headlamps to illuminate that poorly - it's as if the auto-levelling circuitry thinks the car is riding nose-up.

The XC90 also comes with a factory auto-brake that is supposed to prevent the vehicle from having this type of accident - their stated goal is zero fatalities. Did Uber not buy models with this included, or did they de-activate this feature? You'd think an independent system like that would actually be seen as a positive feature...

Or did they put a couple hundred kilos of computing and sensing equipment and batteries into the car and change the weight distribution such that the headlights now point up?

Or did they darken the video?

> Or did they darken the video?

Does anyone trust Uber to provide all the evidence they have, and not just selectively release bits that support them?

Does anyone trust Uber not to alter the video, say by increasing the contrast to make darker objects invisible?

Three people in the back seat is a couple hundred kilos.

Modern cars, including the XC90 have a tilt sensor to adjust the headlights automatically for this.

three people in the back seat are in front of the rear wheels/basically over the rear suspension. Its a different moment arm to have it in the trunk or on the roof.

Source: I teach statics

If you taught Dynamics you would know that the compression of the rear springs caused by most of the weight being over the back wheels would make the lights point higher.

Isn't the auto brake only active at lower speeds? (<50 km/h is a figure that rings a bell). The car was driving 61 km/h which is higher than normal "city speeds".

I don't know about that specific model of Volvo, but the emergency brake works up to much higher speeds in other cars/brands - it's just that above 50km/h it's not guaranteed to slow down to zero or prevent impact, just reduce the speed. I suspect that system was disabled as it would interfere with whatever driving tech tech have though.

In Volvos case the system is called City Safety and is only active up to 50 km/h (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_safety)

However there might be other systems which break automatically for cars, in the case of a sudden traffic jam for instance.

This reminds me about the Tesla incident with the stoped firetruck, the software was programmed to ignore static o objects as an optimization, so we could have the software ignoring the hardware detection, I hope we can find soon what the sensors detected.

They didn't expect a problem, ignoring static objects in the road?

Something like that, https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

From what I remember reading it there are many static objects so they are having a hard time deciding what is safe to ignore,AFAIK Tesla is extra problematic since they want to use only cameras and not other sensors

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