It's reasonable to assume it's to keep Uber happy.
Because A.R.S says that pedestrians have a duty to yield outside of crosswalks and they normally make the police's accident report available shortly after any accident.
I know because I was over there not very long ago trying to get one for someone else. It's just off of Mill Ave., not very far south of where this accident happened.
Regardless, it is normal to wait until an investigation is complete before you start making statements. Making premature statements actually makes the results of any investigation look suspect. Pretty dumb move.
Oh, and even if the woman is at fault that does not mean it is open season on pedestrians that happen to end up on the road.
And I think a lot of people here don't have much experience driving these roads at night. More lights don't really help, there are too many lights on some level, you can see stoplights and such a good mile away, and pedestrians are moving shadows at night.
I had to train myself to notice them more after some weird experiences like the strange, uncoordinated bicyclist driving circles in the middle of a road for no reason in the middle of the night.
I'm sure there are things Uber and the safety driver could've done better, but I fully believe they really didn't notice them. That's right near an overpass and moving between lit and shadowed places also screws with your vision.
And FWIW, I've driven extensively here at night and I know that stretch of Mill Ave. rather well. I used to drive from Mill Ave to Van Buran, going through Papago park.
Note that as a part of the responsibility for a 2 ton piece of steel you get the expectation that you will do your best to keep the other traffic participants alive even when they break the rules, especially when they are more vulnerable than you are.
It was a horrific accident and there's pretty much always something someone could have done better, but as far as traffic laws go, it was her responsibility to make sure it was safe to cross. I get that you disagree with that and I can see where you're coming from, but the law says the duty was on her side.
Uber could, and should, do better than this. I believe the NTSB can (and should) demand that of them and everyone else, in fact. But the cops don't even enter into that. They're pretty much just going to figure out which traffic laws were broken and who had right of way.
There's a fair point that maybe they should be able to, I don't know, inspect the LIDAR sensors or something, but I don't think anything like that will be practical for at least a decade or two. To my knowledge, that should be up to the NTSB for now.
In lots of places a sobriety/drug test is mandatory after an accident with severe injuries or fatalities.
And if the driver were to be found not to have braked at all - or even to accelerate - the driver could very well lose their license. Even when you have the right of way you still have to behave like a responsible driver would.
If inspecting the full digital record by the police is not feasible then I would argue self driving cars have no business being on the road at all. After all, we require normal drivers to be witnesses to accidents as well, and we expect them to cooperate in tests to determine whether or not they were able to control their vehicle, especially in fatal accidents.
In this case one of the participants is dead and the other one is silicon so the only evidence taken is the same as if all participants had died and that's not true, at least one of them had a lot of evidence to give, and given the novel nature of the incident there was a very good reason to actually evaluate that evidence.
Being 'automated' should not be an automatic get-out-of-jail card with respect to your liability and your proven ability to control a vehicle, at least the same standards that apply to regular drivers should apply to automation.
I think the problem people have here is that this was treated exactly like a normal accident and maybe they shouldn't have. But we have the NTSB to examine the engineering of the car, that's not something the cops are equipped to do.
The police did their check and released their report once it was done, which is a very standard practice. It can't have taken them that long--the police station where you get accident reports is on the other side of the Mill Ave. bridge from the accident.
Then there is the question of whether the Uber-supplied video accurately represents the lighting conditions at the time... This may seem unduly conspiratorial, but I gave both Uber and the Tempe administration the benefit of the doubt until it became clear that the initial reports were innaccurate and less complete than they could have been.
Why would that matter? The issue here is that the LIDAR system failed to detect the pedestrian.
If the average observer watching the published video arrives at a conclusion of "well I would have hit that person too, she appeared out of nowhere in front of the car", it obviously matters.
The difference between the Uber dash cam [1] and the one posted to youtube is stark [2]. It's certainly darker where she comes from but no where near impossible. Source the ArsTechnica article [3]
[0] https://youtu.be/CRW0q8i3u6E?t=32
[1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Scree...
[2] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/kaufm...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
edit: can someone explain what’s so wrong with this comment please?
If the car was able to know what’s the right thing to do, it would not only put it into the logs but it would have prevented the crash by doing it(unless of course, Musk is a contract killer and the cars ar crashing intentionnaly with correctly pre-doctored logs).
That’s why I suggested to use a blockchain - to ensure that the logs are not modified post-mortem.
Why can't they apply that to digital signatures with timestamps? This is a solved problem for years. You could use the NSTB as a timestamping authority.
You're just an internet person triggered by a question, really unpleasant attitude btw. Very closed even to considering an exotic solution and angry as if I'm implementing the blockchain at this very moment, are you in your 50s by any chance? Or maybe personal problems or no sex for a prolonged period or something like that? Why Are you acting like such an unpleasant and rude person?
If there is a concern that the original data collected might be doctored... then this is valid, but also should be the focus of tests and legislation.
Ie,
- Currently, speedometers are legally required to be within a certain tolerance and calibrated.
- VW Diesel scandal, was discovered and hurt the manufacturer badly.
(That said, I think this is pre-optimising and using blockchain for this today is overkill... but long term, I could very much see this being a valid use-case)