And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop, this post-collision routine? Afaik, the overall program/system guiding a self-driving is some combination of trained neural-network routines and more standard robotic feedback loops. But "what to do after a collision" seems like one of those corner cases that neither programming approach would or could deal with so what development created this routine? It would have to be pure ad-hoc-ery and that suggests that in Cruise's approach to the last-mile/endless-corner-cases problem of self-driving cars is just that, a series of ad-hoc fixed. And this approach can neither be safe nor can it scale.
And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations. Why didn't the "you've just had a collision" signal not pull a human? (maybe it did and not saying that is their problem but otherwise..) The main explanation I can think of is ... the car's routines are already calling pilots a lot and the team is working feverishly to reduce this. An ad-hoc pull-over routine is intended to reduce those calls back to the pilots. Admittedly this is speculation but if true it reinforces my conclusion above.
And then there's a momentary thought of this, and then I think how bad/hard it would be. Sitting there in a "call center", "Ding!" and you're suddenly thrown in to a car mid-collision, needing to take instant surveying of the situation (like "there's someone partly trapped under the vehicle", "am I in the middle of an intersection/interstate", etc., et al.
Even getting past that I think such a job would play absolute hell on epi, norepi, dopamine, etc., response and those people would burn out, quickly (and I say that as someone who spends a lot of time waking up to alarm tones going off before jumping in an ambulance or fire engine...).
The remote operator cannot manually operate the car under these circumstances and that is by design.
I’m just going to assume it’s a liability thing:
* Cruise gets in an accident and stays in the road, passenger gets out and gets hit. * Cruise gets in an accident and pulls to the curb, passenger can get out on the curb (and if they don’t, and get hit, Cruise can claim it pulled over).
I could see this decision being made (or reviewed by) legal. Which sounds like a truly awful way to build a product.
I agree with you on the adhockery as well. Sounds like it.
Waymo handles this by notifying riders when vehicles or cyclists are incoming near passenger exits.
So the city and DMV focussing their efforts on this corner case driving systems seems like dereliction of duty on the City attorney's and DoT's part.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/07/01/ask-the-standard-san-franc...
And the hit and run driver did just drive off
But the big issue is hiding / eliding the data.
With respect this part is not clear. Only that the woman moved 20feet.
The DMV has not made clear whether she moved 20feet from the location of original Collision (ie with the human driver) or she was dragged 20feet as the cruise car kept driving. They’ve let the audience fill in the blanks and we’ve collectively come to the more exciting conclusion.
The city elected to do the easy useless thing first and is patting themselves in the back (people are still gonna be flying due to shitty human drivers tomorrow). This is a problem.
I dont think you can definitively say a person would have stopped and helped.
> Firefighters obstructed the sensors of the driverless car to alert the Cruise control center. He said representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters and “immediately disabled the car remotely.”
- Not be forthcoming with authorities on releasing information/video
- Be misrepresenting the performance of their vehicles to the authorities
This is just not acceptable for a company to be doing. This is not how we disrupt industries. You cannot "fake it till you make it" with road safety when building vehicles that traverse roads safely is your business' entire raison d'etre! That's just unacceptable, full stop.
And, add to it, Cruise has been given a direct and clear path to resuming operations, which essentially boils down to doing the thing they should've been doing already. Like come on! How much more benevolent can we ask a regulator to be in this scenario? One could argue, frankly, that they're being too kid gloves about a company lying to an organization who's primary goal is ensuring safety about safety!
The DMV was not aware of that until notified by another government agency that was investigating the incident.
During the certification process for these self-driving cars, incidents of the cars “misbehaving” (for lack of a better term) were supposed to be reported. However, if a human driver intervened, then it didn’t count as the car itself making a poor choice.
Example: self-driving car approaches an intersection clipping a reasonable speed and the light turns yellow. While a human driver would understand that it’s better to go through than to slam their brakes, the self-driving cat goes “yellow means red soon, stop now”. The human driver overrides and floors it through the intersection. Had the car stopped, that would’ve been a mark against the autonomous system. But since a human intervened, it doesn’t “count”.
This is a good watch on the state of self-driving cars and how policy makers have largely just said “eh, fuck it” in places like SF. https://youtu.be/pmGOjHi-7MM