Cruise refutes SFFD claim that AVs blocked ambulance, led to victim’s death | Hacker News Reader

Cruise refutes SFFD claim that AVs blocked ambulance, led to victim’s death

kron4.com

25 pointsmikhael7 comments

This is bad for both SF Fire Department, and Cruise.

Cruise's business is in an area where human life can easily be impacted. This incident, regardless of fault, reminds us of that. It suggests the need for over cautiousness, and American business is not known for that. So Cruise will face enthusiastic critique for its entire existence.

SFFD sounds like it's made a mistake, and it too is in the life or death "business". So it will receive an unpleasant audit for this incident.

Overall the public is losing, it seems, as this is too chaotic and unsafe a system to be allowed. So we must now step in and regulate.

Remember, the pedestrian was originally struck by a human driver. No matter how much statistically safer Cruise is than human drivers, there will always be an unfair press scrutiny on individual incidents amid Luddite backlash. We already see this with EV battery fires, despite how much safer and less frequent they are than fires with combustible petrol vehicles.

This is a bad headline and it implies more than is actually documented by the journalist. Let's take a look at the true meaning of the word "refute":

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/refute

"Refute" means "To prove something to be false or incorrect."

This headline is abusing a proscribed meaning of "refute": "To deny the truth or correctness of something."

Cruise has offered no evidence but only a press release in which they make counterclaims. To be fair, SFFD didn't really provide any evidence in their claims, either. So this is simply "he said, she said" until there is concrete sensor evidence to the contrary.

Cruise did provide video evidence, mentioned in this article, though the contents were not described. A NY Times article on the same subject described the content of the video here (gift link):https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/technology/driverless-car...

“Cruise showed KRON4 footage from the night of the incident to explain its side of the story. Due to Cruise company policy, the footage was not released for public consumption.”

Overall, it is shoddy writing. A pet peeve of mine is on display:

"The victim suffered critical injuries but died after reaching the hospital."

The use of "but" here is confusing. It's the wrong conjunction. The author meant "and," as if to say "there were critical injuries and the outcome you expected was what happened," rather than "there were critical injuries, and contrary to what you would expect to have happened, what you expected to have happened did indeed happen."

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