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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

> The vehicle had stopped at a T junction and was about to turn under manual control of the operator, who was using the vehicle's joystick control, when the vehicle hit the athlete going at around 1 or 2 kilometres an hour, Toyoda said

A driver ran over someone while turning. Not sure this has anything to do with self driving except for the click bait?

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If a remote human controlled car accident causes them to end development of self driving, then they were looking to do that anyway.

This is Japan and their culture. If this happened to Tesla, Elon would just tweet something

The headline is click bait. They only stopped use at the Olympic village.

They're planning to build an entire city/small town based around autonomous vehicles near Mt. Fuji.

https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/toyota-is-building-...

Maybe the manual controls have a problem, or the mix of self-driving/manual caused a problem? The article doesn't say much, but it may have to do with the design of the system (and not the self-driving itself)

> The article doesn't say much, but it may have to do with the design of the system

I'm thinking the same. Obviously I don't know nothing factual. Was looking at this video of how the shuttles look from the inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9DNV0zGC8

I observed these things:

- it looks like at least on this video the shuttles appear to be in manual operation.

- the A pillar is crazy thick. One could hide a whole circus with elephants behind it from the driver.

- maybe because of the above, the driver has video screens in front of them.

- there appears to be two on-board attendants (a hostess and a driver it seems)

Thanks for the video.

It also seems a crazy choice to use a joystick: no-one has experience driving a vehicle with this, how long did the operators have to train...

I can image that the joystick-operated mode should still have the safety overrides from a self-driven mode and they aren't sure why those safety systems didn't prevent the collision.

It’s ambiguous. “About to turn under manual control” could mean that the human intervention hadn’t started yet.

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