Did Uber doctor the camera video to make the road seem darker than it actually was?
If you recall, there was initially a doubt that Uber was at fault because the streets appeared extremely dark, but I think they were buying time to delay the outage at incompetent Uber.
The police initially didn't fault Uber based on this video.
You're only allowed to drive as fast as conditions permit. If it's dark enough that you can't avoid an obstacle by the time your headlights illuminate it, you need to slow down.
Do we therefore change all the speed limits at night?
No, but we shouldn't drive like idiots either. It's not just "a driving risk taken", it's reckless and negligent behaviour.
- Was this on 280, or near 280?
- If the car that hit the deer was 3-4 cars ahead and you could see the deer "run across an entire field", why was "there no way the driver could see what you saw"? I'm trying to imagine what sort of obstruction could block the drivers view but not yours.
- How fast was the car going?
- How long did it take the deer to "run across an entire field"?
- Normally deer are active around sunrise and sunset and bed down during the day (source: deer hunting). It seems odd to see a deer in running in "broad daylight".
My whole point is that it's not the driver's responsibility to account for every possible scenario. It can't be.
Nobody said anything about 100% safety in some provable way. But certainly it is very much the driver's responsibility to pick a safe speed. Driver's Ed (at least in most? EU countries) teaches that the posted speed limit is just that, the maximum legally allowed speed. As a driver you -- and nobody else -- are responsible for picking a safe speed depending on the environmental conditions.
In particular, the following are explicitly taught in Driver's Ed: 1) Don't overdrive your visibility (headlights, curve)... you must be able to look sufficiently far ahead such that you can stop in the event of an obstacle appearing. (In case of two-directional traffic in the same lane, you must be able to stop in half your visible distance.) 2) Reduce speed according to weather: Rain (aqua-planing), Snow/Ice (slippery), Fog (reduced visibility as in 1) 3) You must be aware of situational dangers and be ready to stop if necessary (e.g. parked cars on the side of the road between which children could emerge...)
Nobody else will tell you what the maximum safe speed at any given moment is. You're supposed to learn how to handle your vehicle during driver's ed, and then act accordingly.
Overdriving your visibility is just plain stupid -- you simply will not be able to avoid a collision with an object in time; you're basically driving blind and hoping for the best.
The reality is that driving at night isn't safe at all and that people often can't avoid collision from an obstacle suddenly appearing at night.
Maybe if they drove at 15MPH at all times, it would be possible in 99% of cases, but in practice we don't expect that.
Hence, we have collisions. Not because the drivers are always guilty of recklessness, but because driving at night has a risk to it. That's the point.
If you don't overdrive your headlamps than objects will not just "suddenly" appear in front of you unless they are doing something genuinely stupid (e.g. jumping in front of the car). In this case the policy or a judge will decide whether you were driving prudent or safe.
We have collisions (during day and night) mainly because people don't pay attention or don't follow some basic rules (visibility, distance to car in front,...). This isn't rocket science. Don't blame fate or "general risk" if you cause a collision.
Where did you learn that? Sources, please!
Because the reality as I know it disagrees with this claim.
> 1. Allow for enough distance to stop. We recommend that you gauge this distance using your headlights. Low beams should allow you to see up to 160 feet away, while high beams should illuminate about 500 feet in front of you. Make sure that, if and when you must brake hard, that you can brake within those distances.
In other words, people just need to always drive far slower than what everyone believes they can handle in a situation that they aren't trained for, and everything will be fine. Everyone who collides anyway is just reckless and stupid!
Now please excuse me, I have exhausted my sarcasm budget for today.
The page also lists drunk and drowsy driving as one of the major reasons why night driving is less safe. These are correlated risk factors, but neither has to do with the conditions being inherently unsafe.
The page doesn't talk about the extent to which drunk and drowsy drivers account for nights being dangerous.
It also doesn't say that it is safe. It lists all kind of risks that make it unsafe in one way or another. Whose definition of "safe" are we supposed to go by, anyway?
We can probably at least agree on what isn't safe: Crossing a road at night into incoming traffic, as a pedestrian.
Arizona has a Basic Speed Law, which says "A person must drive at a speed that is reasonable and prudent under the existing conditions."
If the speed limit is 55 MPH, but conditions (rain, darkness, etc.) would prevent you from being able to safely stop in time to avoid a collision, then you are not allowed to drive at 55 MPH until conditions change.
No, but we legally require drivers to modulate their speed to suit the conditions.
> It's a driving risk taken, just like any other.
So generous of drivers to take up that risk to others.
If a driver was driving too fast to react and stop without hitting that deer, then that driver was driving too quickly.
[1] http://www.icbc.com/driver-licensing/driving-guides/Pages/Le...
Yeah, the video looked different than what my eyes see because my eyes have better low light sensitivity than most cameras.
However (if this makes sense): the video released was an accurate representation of what you see driving on that road. A few weeks ago, I had somebody almost walk into my car out of the shadows (this person was paying attention though, and stopped in the empty lane next to me). It turns out it's REALLY difficult to see people in the streetlight shadows.
There have been many videos on that same road which were super clear. Only the Uber video was really dark. The other videos weren't. Further, darkness doesn't impact LIDAR.
Remember, Uber terminated its autonomous driving testing as a result of this preventable tragedy.
If by "from Uber", you mean they popped the SD card from the Uber-owner car's dashcam, sure.
> Uber could have easily altered it before handing it over
See my comment from the last time someone had suggested the idea of doctored videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644663
It's more likely that the police opened an investigation, and as part of the investigation, handed over dashcam footage. We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident.
> We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident.
From my own experience, the police will take dashcam video evidence the first chance they get because it's the best data they can get their hands on while on a scene. Source: I had interactions with the police on two separate occasions (once when my dashcam happened to record a car break-in taking place as I was driving into a parking lot, and once when some guy road raged me). On the second occasion, they were reviewing the video less than 15 minutes from the time of the incident and had the whole thing resolved within the hour.
Besides, as I said earlier, Uber itself is making a statement admitting it was at fault, and the NTSB investigation has way more forensic data than the crappy quality dashcam video police released, so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative.
Well, at the end of the day this is all involves a strong element of PR & perceptions, so regardless of the quality of other data, it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video be in the initial stories about this accident.
Why? As soon as the video came out, the first thing people (correctly) pointed out was that the dynamic range of the dashcam was crap. Besides, everyone knows that self-driving cars are essentially giant self-telemetry collection machines, so one would have to be either extremely short-sighted or incredibly stupid to think they would be able to get away with a "well it was too dark!" lie after the NTSB got on the case and the media caught wind of the shenanigans.
Also, as I said in my linked comment above, the logistics of actually attempting to tamper the video would be borderline comical.
It's much more plausible that the dashcam dynamic range was in fact crap and that the police officers at the scene were smart enough to figure out to just pop off the SD card off the dashcam.
..and Uber's lawyers figured that most people have no idea what "dynamic range" is and will eat up "it was dark" as a legitimate excuse for this manslaughter.
There likely was no need to manipulate that video. It was still quite dishonest to release it without clarifying that it was nothing like what either a human or Uber's sensors would see in BIG BOLD RED LETTERS. Most people don't really know better.
Well, if this thread is any indication, people seem to always be confusing the roles and actions of lawyers, PR and the police to fit some bizarre conspiracy theory. The fact is that the dashcam video was released by police, and Uber admitted to being at fault with this latest statement. I honestly don't get why you're talking about lawyers now.
The facts are that:
1. The dashcam video is highly misleading, as many people assumed that the accident would have been hard for a human to avoid based on the video. See threads like [1] - please read the top comment there.
2. The police released a misleading statement, echoing the same sentiment - that the accident was hard to avoid.
3. Uber sat silent for 50 days - long enough for people to stop caring - before admitting fault.
There is no conspiracy here. The actions of the police department have misled the public in Uber's favor (yes, we can assume incompetence as the reason), and Uber used this to their advantage by keeping silent for two months (as any company likely would). This is expected.
What I don't expect is the public cutting Uber any slack in this scenario.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/866xmv/video_f...
Damage control typically falls in the realm of public relations, not legal. Legal can help inform PR on what to say, but then again, so can any other relevant department, including engineering.
> Uber sat silent for 50 days
I was under the impression this was by request from NTSB. I mean, even your own criticism is that the dashcam video being released prematurely caused the public at large to reach inaccurate conclusions. Investigations take time. We can't have the cake and eat it too.
BTW, the comment you linked to seems pretty representative of the general response to the video: "yes it looks dark, but Lidar should've seen her"
That is correct.
>BTW, the comment you linked to seems pretty representative of the general response to the video: "yes it looks dark, but Lidar should've seen her"
LIDAR is the red herring here. The less crappy camera would have seen her. The naked eye would have seen her. Pretty much anything but that dashcam would. Even the dashcam, perhaps, if it was set to higher exposure.
And that was someone who knows about LIDAR talking - most of people don't know what a LIDAR is. And so a lot of people really accepted the "it was dark" line of reasoning, never stopping to think that it would simply imply that Uber was driving beyond its headlights.
>I was under the impression this was by request from NTSB... Investigations take time.
Right, that's where "cutting Uber some slack" comes in. It can't feasibly take 50 days to come to the following conclusion: "we screwed up here, the pedestrian clearly shows up on vehicle cameras/sensors the moment she steps into the roadway" - which seems to be the case here (again, even now, we can't say that for sure!).
I can't blame Uber for not admitting fault - it's in their interest to do so. I do blame the city and the general public for letting Uber get away with that, and creating an overall victim-blaming sentiment (which was there from day 1 - including searching the public records of the victim).
Here is the more likely order of events:
1. Driver calls supervisor
2. Supervisor redirects call to senior Uber lawyer
3. Uber lawyer says "Don't do anything until we get to the scene. Be polite to police but tell them to wait until our legal team arrives"
4. Legal team at scene, talks with uber CEO (and senior lawyers over phone) then after an hour or so tells NTSB they will hand over footage after engineer arrives and extracts the dashcam footage
5. Engineer hands dashcam footage to lawyers, who then hand it to NTSB
If anything, I'd imagine that the police would be blocking access to the accident area and the car, especially to an alleged Uber employee trying to muck around with evidence without a government-sanctioned body overseeing forensics.
If I were to make a guess, I'd imagine it would've gone like this:
- "omg, I just hit someone"
- driver sees victim on the ground, panics and calls 911
- police and paramedics arrive
- police interviews driver, gets the account of the story, checks paperwork, get driver's information
- driver tries calling supervisor to escalate the issue (potentially unsuccessfully)
- paramedics declare victim dead, driver gets upset, body eventually is taken away while police tries to calm the driver
- tow truck arrives, takes car into police custody
- next morning, local police investigators look at the car in the impound, find the dashcam and look at the video. Uber ATG wakes up to the bad news and scrambles to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. The engineering team is still nowhere near Arizona and probably too busy wading through TBs of sensor/AI data to even remember there was a cheap dashcam installed in the car.
- Police releases a statement (w/ the dashcam video)
- NTSB gets involved in the investigation and gets in contact with Uber to understand how to acquire forensic data out of the SDV's databases.
Gonna be honest, that sounds like something straight out of a hollywood movie. In reality, when suddenly presented with a unexpected event, real people simply aren't physically able to coordinate narrative-altering eloquence training so perfectly on a 30 minute notice close to midnight on some random day. That's kinda like saying that if a macdonalds night-shift employee witnessed a customer choking to death on a lye-contaminated drink, a super star legal team would be on the scene in 45 minutes to instruct the employee on how to avoid incriminating the company when talking to the police. That simply isn't how the world works.
That doesn't seem like a Hollywood movie to me, that just seems like the way competent people operate.
And if you ever do on-call, you need a rotation system. In my team, on-call rotates among 9 people, none of which is required to get their ass anywhere in the wee hours of the night even if the world is ending. Requiring such commitment on top of a regular workload is completely unrealistic, and the notion that it actually got carried out as efficiently as could be is borderline wishful thinking. The alternative is shiftwork, which is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the legal industry, and thus doesn't actually happen.
What's more, talking with the police is not a skill that is cultivated by corporate lawyers at all, or any lawyer for that matter, especially if we're talking about a 911 call.
Perhaps another obvious indication that uber would be unable to deploy SWAT-style legal teams is the number of outages they experience and their durations, despite having literally hundreds of highly paid engineers on call who are able to rollback bad deploys from their phones.
PR: mission accomplished.
Look how much time has passed to learn of the fact that it was Uber's sloppy programming at fault in this tragedy.
The good news for Uber is that this comes out far after the event when people are in general less likely to care, or even remember the details of the accident.
What's there to "sloppily" program here? Most likely, somebody set an arbitrary threshold constant 0.05 too low. The data that threshold was working with will still have been provided by the machine learning system, which is opaque to humans.
We'll have to face it that if we want self-driving cars, there isn't some magic procedure we can follow to not have accidents due to false classifications.
In other words, off-the-shelf dashcam equipment sucks in the dark and doesn't convey a realistic scene, no doctoring required. Here's a random piece of dashcam footage from elsewhere - watch for the pedestrians! https://youtu.be/typj1asf1EM The video is unaltered - just crappy, they were actually clearly visible.