Hacker News Reader

Comment by zizee | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily. Having sirens and lights flashing doesn't mean that the emergency vehicle can do whatever they like. They need to navigate red lights safely.

So the cruise vehicle could have failed to handle the situation as well as a human driver, but it's also possible that the emergency vehicle wasn't driving carefully enough.

View on HN

> So the cruise vehicle could have failed to handle the situation as well as a human driver

Why did you say "could have" instead of "did"? Are there circumstances in which it is acceptable (and/or legal in the USA) for a car, autonomous or manned, to drive directly into the path of an emergency vehicle giving warning?

> Are there circumstances in which it is acceptable (and/or legal in the USA) for a car, autonomous or manned, to drive directly into the path of an emergency vehicle giving warning?

Did the autonomous vehicle move into the path of the emergency vehicle? Did it simply stop and fail to clear the intersection? I can't find any video or explanation of the incident so I think "could have" is the correct grammer.

If the emergency vehicle driver drove into the car on purpose or was driving drunk or something, I'd think we probably would have heard about it by now? It's hard to imagine that they'd just drive into a car they had plenty of time to react to, and no witnesses would come forward, and Cruise wouldn't publicly release their car's footage of the incident, the driver in the emergency vehicle wouldn't be fired, etc.

I wrote in this way because I do not know which was the case. I was not there, and have not seen any footage. The article is also fairly vague about what happened.

What information do you have that makes you so sure of how the situation played out?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com